Many people think of us as "brown bottle herbalists". We interview people about their health problems, then proceed to hand them a brown bottle full of brown gloop. This is a fair description of how we tend to proceed in some situations. There are even stories of herbalists who hand clients a bottle of the same herb at the end of each consultation. I don't do this.
One good description of the stuff herbalists give people is "liquid salad". I think Hyde probably came up with that one, and i like it. It makes me want to come up with a mixture consisting entirely of salad plants. Apium graveolens and Lactuca virosa come to mind. It really seems quite strange to me that taking salad as medicine is not seen as a good idea, although the description tends to call to mind weak, watery vegetables whereas the plants I am thinking of are the likes of capers, garlic, chicory and Cayenne pepper rather than forced celery or lettuce, whereof the above are not examples - wild lettuce looks more like ragwort and celery is of course related to hemlock, a plant not noted for its lack of action on the human body.
At some point, i will upload a video on how to make a tincture. The barrier is the cost of vodka. I am not in possession of an absolute alcohol licence, so to make an alcohol tincture, that's what i'd probably use. Other options than alcohol exist but they alter the properties of the remedy or have drawbacks, and of course alcohol has its own drawbacks. Vinegar is quite an easily available choice and can easily be made at home, so i will probably opt for that.
Right, here's the video:
(as of the time of writing it's not ready).
Just to go through the plants used in the clip:
Cimicifuga racemosa - black cohosh, largely a gynaecological remedy. Like many other such remedies, it's native to North America although there is a European species too. Eleutherococcus senticosus - adaptogen, Asian herb, more effective and safer than Panax ginsengs. Prunus serotina - cherry. Antitussive and not particularly useful, interestingly one of the many plants which relies partly for its action on cyanide. Mainly used for whooping cough. Aesculus hippocastanum - horse chestnut. Yes, i know it's poisonous. Often used topically in creams for varicose ulcers. Salvia officinalis - not to be confused with Salvia divinorum although it happens to be mildly psychoactive for different reasons. Another oestrogenic herb which is also good at reducing excess sweating. Potentilla tormentilla - tormentil. The strongest widely used astringent herb, although many trees are far more astringent. Useful for toothache and various other things, although it's illegal for a herbalist to treat dental complaints. Apium graveolens - celery. Used for arthritis among other things.
Yesterday and today have both been a bit hectic, with yesterday's regular visit to Loughborough and today's impromptu sally to Sapcote, which in fact i found quite picturesque, or as Liz would say, "pictureskew". As a result i produced two videos rather fast, one of which didn't even get uploaded yesterday due to running out of time. Here's the first:
I got YouTube to reframe this but i'm not sure i can tell the difference. I was very self-conscious when i made this in case i did anything "wrong". I feel confident that dispensing this way is fine but there are little finicky details about my dispensing which are not good to emulate and others which are not 100% perfect. The camera also made me less accurate than usual.
Specific mistakes in this video include the fact that the measuring cylinder is not a regulation one (i.e. it lacks the Crown stamp) and i put the caps down unhygienically. The measurements were also way out, although none of the doses were crucial for that prescription.
Here's the other, made today partly as a demo to Liz about how to do videos (though i'm very inexpert myself):
This one is OK but revealed that the actual plants we grow are exotic and unusual compared to the average weeds or even garden plants which most people grow. The herbs in the front yard are mainly like others' but not many people grow black horehound or bistort.
As of tomorrow, Liz is going to start vlogging. I think it may be wise to split the channels at this point. I'm also thinking of putting links to this channel from videos on the other one.
Also, my new glasses may turn up tomorrow, which'd be good.
Two videos again today, the second one being take two of yesterday's Yoga and flatulence vid failure. Here's the second, better framed than the first so you can see how slapdash my asanas are nowadays:
Vid
Of course, describing asanas as slapdash is end-gaining and ayogic. What i'm doing here, i think, is attempting to capitalise on my previous Yoga video on uddiyana bandha and nauli for constipation and flatulence, which at the time of writing has almost eight thousand views, presumably because it got linked to from somewhere.
One of the problems of relentless video production is the difficulty with editing and learning how to make good videos. The punishing schedule of one a day gives results about as slapdash as the Yoga, and maybe this is the answer - don't end-gain with videos any more than i do with Yoga. What would that mean though? An entire channel filled up with my crud? You probably know the answer to that better than i.
I am of course mainly blogging and making YouTube videos as a form of procrastination upon procrastination. For some reason i am continuing not to understand, i can upload any old rubbish to my other channel and get masses of views very quickly, but take care and thought over what i stick on the main one and get very few. I really wish i knew why this happened.
Anyway, here's today's video:
It's called "Steampunk for Womanhood and the Empire!" and needs a bit of context. When you watch a YouTube video, you get the option to read captions, which are generated by computer from the audio. These captions are very bad indeed, and seem to have an accuracy below 1%, though i presume they're working on improving it. When this happens, i will be rather sad because this kind of thing will be impossible. This is nostalgia waiting to be born. It reminds me of when i put the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales through Microsoft Word 5's spellcheck and it claimed to be about something it referred to as the "yoga zone".
Speech recognition is an AI-hard problem. Back in the day, it was thought that thinking machines (a term once in vogue describing computers) would be difficult to program to do things which humans find difficult. This turned out not to be so. Instead, many problems thought to be hard to solve were in fact relatively easy and things which humans find so easy they don't even notice they're doing them are still impossible in spite of the Moore-corrected hundreds of millions of years which have passed since the first electronic brains were built. Into the former category falls chess and arguably psychotherapy. For years now, computers have been better than any human will ever be at chess, although it took a while for that to happen and the solution is rather boringly that rather than thinking about it, they just try a huge number of possible moves before making the best. However, they've only recently been able to walk, they can't really see the way we can and, as the above video demonstrates, they don't understand spoken human languages and can't transcribe it. This is particularly surprising because computers have been able to "understand" FORTRAN and other programming languages, which resemble English, since the mid-1950s.
To some extent machines are able to transcribe human speech. In the 1960s there was a speech typewriter which could produce type in response to someone speaking Morse code to it - the human would go "dit dah dit" and it would type an R, for example. The IBM Shoebox was another example (from 1961!):
This system worked by exploiting the fact that every English spoken digit had its own combination of high- and low-pitched sounds in a particular pattern. The IBM Shoebox example inspired my mechanical speech recognition calculator in 'You Could've Thought Of That'. So machines can recognise certain forms of speech provided they're quite narrowly restricted, and in fact given a less software-based approach they can be better than computers at the same level of technology.
This raises the question of what kind of object a human being is. It's tempting to see a human as a robot controlled by a computer, but the fact that what we find easy, computers find hard and vice versa suggests that although human beings are sort of robots, they are not robots controlled by computers but, if they are machines at all, and as lumps of matter we are in a sense machines, the intelligent things we do are not the result of computer programs at all, and we probably aren't computers either. This suggests to me that there is something out there in technology phase space which is in fact an Artificial Intelligence device, but it's nothing like a computer, though like a human being it could simulate one - but then a computer can also simulate a rain storm, but nobody gets wet if it does.
The actual story
This is an award-winning steampunk short-short i wrote which parodies Victorian melodrama in an alternate nineteenth century. I've deliberately obscured the content but as it happens, hiding somewhere on YouTube is a video of me reading the real story. It will be in the ebook, but the ebook is of course written by a different version of me than the version you see here because i want it to succeed alone, without anyone who reads it actually knowing me. The use of the knife in the middle of the story makes no sense in this video but does in context.
Just to fill in the background: this is similar to my "Backward and Forward" alternate history on the Althist Wiki on Wikia. Technology is more advanced than here because James Watt was sent to school (in reality he was home educated and ended up improving Newcomen-style steam engines) and James II's son, James Stuart, Duke of Cambridge, survived to become James II's heir, with the result that there was no Act of Settlement. Ultimately, this results in the European empires staying in power into the twenty-first century and colonising the Solar System at the same time as retaining a pre-Enlightenment political system with no real parliamentary democracy and the death penalty for shoplifting. It's a nasty place, Backward and Forward - the Third Reich and Hitler would just be another power there and would probably be perceived as rather too liberal. The story i read in "For Womanhood and the Empire!" is from a somewhat similar world, but one in which the future Queen Victoria was assassinated in a coup and a republic was established in the British Isles.
Yesterday evening's video was very different:
This is "Going The Extra Chamomile For You", the second of my herbal videos and also the first of a series based on terrible puns. This video is entirely candlelit in an attempt to create the calm, restful atmosphere which chamomile generates. Chamomile was our friend when Holly was a baby. It kept us all calm, kept her botty smooth and helped with her conjunctivitis. Chamomile is brilliant stuff. If you haven't already become a fan, try it now!
Just to give away the ending, i didn't do the cinnamon challenge, partly because i'm not a teenage boy any more, partly because it's no longer as popular and i'd look really out of date, and partly because, as i explain in the video, it's a fourfold overdose of cinnamon. Anyway, here's today's video (whose framing is better than the thumbnail suggests!):
The point of this is basically that the cinnamon challenge acknowledges that herbs can have a profound effect on the body. There's also a bit of a panic associated with it. It is true that it's a risky thing to do, but that's because of the physical effect of any powder - it will irritate the throat, it can be harmful if inhaled and so forth, but the same is true of flour. In larger doses, cinnamon may have direct adverse toxicological actions and the cinnamon challenge is something like a fourfold overdose compared to the maximum recommended dose of 1.2 grammes of the powder. From this very fact though, it can be seen how safe herbalism often is: you wouldn't want to take four times the maximum recommended dose of quite a few over-the-counter drugs for a start.
Cinnamon is also relevant to 'Here Be Dragons'. In ancient and mediaeval Europe, there was an idea that spices, including cinnamon, came from a vaguely defined area called Arabia Felix, which in contradiction to current climatological beliefs was thought to be a warm, humid place with tropical rainforests. In this environment lived, among many other species, the cinnamon tree with its cinnamon fruits and in its branches nested the Cinnamologus:
This was a bird whose nest was made from cinnamon and therefore could be fetched by throwing stuff at it. The cinnamon tree itself was too difficult to climb due to fragile branches.
Clearly i need to insert the Cinnamologus into 'Here Be Dragons'. As it happens, there's a happy coincidence (Coincidencia Felix?) in 'Here Be Dragons' regarding Arabia Felix. Here's a map of Eurasia in the 'Here Be Dragons' "Ancient World":
In order to accommodate the legend of Hyperborea as a warm continent in the Arctic regions, i decided to flip the planet round so that the land concerned was still "north" but largely tropical, while mainly preserving the climate of western Europe. It so happened that doing this makes Arabia a tropical rainforest. Therefore, a serendipitous coincidence enables Arabia Felix to exist as well as Hyperborea in Ancient World.
A few technical comments on the video. The framing is somewhat off because i needed to include the plate of cinnamon in the picture. I am still umming too much but am working on this. Finally, although i am now using a tripod, i have yet to take the plunge and do much proper video editing. I now have a version of Linux called AVLinux, which is specialised for multimedia applications, and am trying to pluck up the courage to use it properly. This will somewhat improve the quality of my videos but i don't want to do the excessive thing which i know i'd be tempted to do and add loads of flashy effects which do too much. Sadly, AVLinux seems to have been discontinued and this version, which was released last month, will probably be the last.
Herbalism - the maintenance and improvement of health through the use of plants. Some things are covered by this which shouldn't be, for instance you might improve health by using plants to clear the atmosphere of formaldehyde, benzene and ammonia, by creating a landscape garden or using a park as a city's "green lung", but this is specifically to do with herbalism as a narrowly medically defined approach to health.
Incidentally, this is the first video i've done using a tripod and i had endless trouble with it. Whereas the tripod itself was very useful, the batteries ran out towards the end and on editing it, Avidemux and Windows Movie Maker both screwed it up several times. Therefore, there are rather more um's and er's in this than i would ideally like, but i'm working to a tight schedule and ended up posting it as is.
My points are threefold really. One is that research has shown that most of the general public do not know that herbalists exist or what we do, in spite of strenuous efforts to remedy this, so i thought it would be helpful to do a video which went through this in detail. Another is the major discrepancy between the scepticism shown towards herbalism along with the research apparently showing that it doesn't work and my own measurable findings which occur after people consult me and i give them herbs. That's an ethical red herring and in fact there's even an argument for herbalism being a good thing if it doesn't work. Finally, there are two real ethical problems associated with herbalism which are rarely mentioned. One is that seeing someone who hoards information about health doesn't ultimately help the client, and the other is that given the fact, widely known among herbalists, that it is nearly always impossible to make a living as a herbalist, the tacit pretence that it is cannot be justified. Candidates of herbal medicine courses need to be told, before they start the course, that the chances of them being able to use their degrees professionally rather than as general degrees like English or History, are practically zero. a
One of the brilliant things you can do at home, which is also really colourful, is make your own pH indicator from red cabbage water. Here's a particular use for it which occurred to me the other day:
Making naturally blue soda bread.
The way this works is that so-called "red" cabbage (which i think of as purple) is very high in an anthocyanin. The word "anthocyanin" is from the Greek words anthos - flower, and kyanos - blue. Anthocyanins are in fact not necessarily blue but all sorts of colours. They are also useful in herbal medicine. For instance, the skins of Sambucus nigra (elder) berries are high in anthocyanins which soothe the throat and are useful in coughs and sore throats. They are almost entirely tasteless and occur in a wide range of flowering plants with the exception of the Caryophyllales, a large order containing such plants as beetroot and cacti, which instead contain betalains. These two types of compound are never found in the same species.
Anthocyanins are derived from other compounds called anthocyanidins, whose molecular structure can be drawn like this:
The red numbers show where variations occur in the structure.
The substances occur in petals, leaves and some other parts of the plant, in vacuoles, which are "bubbles" of unorganised liquid surrounded by membrane inside the cells. The acidity or alkalinity of the liquid determines the colour. They are also responsible for the colour of some fruit, such as the redness of ripe apples. They may also stop animals which are attracted to green plant parts, which they then eat, from consuming flower petals, and they also attract pollinating insects to flowers. Their precise shade of purple is complementary to the green of leaves, so they don't block any light which the plant could use for photosynthesis. This also means that the older photosynthetic organisms with which the plants had to complete billions of years ago would have been exactly that shade of purple too, so if we ever get to another planet where that quirk in the history of life didn't happen, we'd be quite likely to find that the plants were all the colour of anthocyanins, though only if the star the planet orbited was the same colour as the Sun.
Elderberries
Another aspect of anthocyanins is that they form the purple dye colour which is the easiest rich colour to use on cloth in natural dyeing. Cotton, for example, dyed with elderberries is initially such a strong colour that it looks completely artificial. Unfortunately, it also fades much faster in sunlight, probably for that reason. They are sadly quite unstable.
As you can see from the video, anthocyanins are also excellent indicators. They turn red in acid and blue-green in alkali. In a strong caustic soda solution, about which i will soon make a video, they become orange. The reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and lime juice, incidentally, produces a sodium citrate, of which there are three different types, and releases carbon dioxide, which occurs when any alkaline carbonate is combined with an acid. Disodium citrate can be used to reduce the discomfort of cystitis and urethritis, and is one of the approximately twenty compounds which can easily be made at home from common organic acids and alkali and alkali earth metal compounds. Compounds which are combinations of acids and bases are known as salts, so the sodium citrates are good examples of organic salts.
The other thing about all this is that the soda bread, which to be honest i perceive as pale turquoise rather than green or blue, is an example of a blue food. Genuinely strong blue foods have long been an obsession of mine because there are so few of them, and the ones which are claimed to be blue or called blue usually aren't, such as blueberries, pasta coloured with squid ink or "blue corn". However, there are a few foods which are genuinely blue, and this is one of them, though being soda bread it's probably partly antinutritional. Another food which would be blue for the same reasons if it existed would be the Finnish salmiakki, which is high in sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride, mixed with liquorice:
Besides that, there are rather few, but they would include cornflower or borage petals and raw bruised Boletus fungi:
Cornflower
Borage - Borago officinalis - i actually use this quite a lot, partly for its fatty acids. There are pyrrolizidine alkaloids in it though, so i'm not incredibly keen, and it tends to go off very quickly which is also annoying.
Boletus - don't know which species, but they turn distinctively blue on cutting. Not all are edible though, either
Anyway, i don't seem to share the general aversion to blue food and was only fearful of the blue soda bread because i was expecting it to taste like a combination of cabbage and bicarbonate of soda, but surprisingly it turned out to taste absolutely fine and was really nice. I think i just got lucky with the quantity of soda though.
Unfortunately, this is the second time i've made something non-vegan for a YouTube video in a week, so i need to make amends in some way.
