I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE! AND I BRING YOU...

...an organic chemistry video that got slightly out of hand:

An introduction to organic chemistry and organic compounds - WITH FIRE!!!!

In nature on this planet, there seem to be two types of matter, which vary according to how they respond to heating.  One lot, such as sugar, alcohol, urea, vinegar and olive oil, changed

irreversibly when heated, and the other changed reversibly.  The Swedish chemist Berzelius noted

that whereas the reversible substances were from things which had never been alive - inorganic -

the irreversible ones always seemed to be from things which were either alive then or had

recently been alive - organic compounds.  Another oddity was that organic compounds could appear

to consist of exactly the same elements in the same proportions without being the same substance.

 For instance, diethyl ether and ethanol (known commonly as alcohol) have exactly the same

formula, but diethyl ether is an anaesthetic gas and ethanol is a liquid used as a recreational

drug.

All of these compounds contain carbon (although not all carbon chemistry is organic).  Carbon is

special because it can form into chains and rings, and also form double bonds.  Whereas silicon,

which is immediately below carbon in the periodic table, can also do some of this, its compounds

tend to be more unstable.

Natural philosophers (scientists) used to think that organic and inorganic chemistry were

governed by entirely different rules and had nothing to do with each other, a philosophy known as

"vitalism".  That is, life and non-life are entirely different.  However, in 1828, Friedrich

Wohler (missing umlaut) managed to synthesise urea from entirely non-living substances.  Up until

that time, it was thought that only a kidney could produce urine, so the boundaries between

inorganic and organic chemistry began to blur.  In 1845, Adolph Kolbe managed to make acetic

acid, the acid in vinegar, in a similar way, and it became clear that organic compounds, although

special, could be understood using the same principles as inorganic ones.

As can be seen from the structural formulae in this video, the explanation for the differences

between such substances as diethyl ether and ethanol is that although their molecules contain the

same atoms, the atoms are in different arrangements.

Organic compounds are organised into homologous series, which are named systematically.  The

prefixes, such as meth-, eth-, prop-, but- and then the various Greek number words, describe how

many carbons are in the molecular "skeleton", and the suffixes, such as -ane, -ene, -ol and so

forth, indicate what class of compound they are - organic acid, alcohol, various types of

hydrocarbon and so on.

The second video will cover more basic organic chemistry, including fractional distillation and

fossil fuels, as well as some more of the nomenclature.

Unfortunately, that nasty double-spacing is in the doobly-do - i blame Notepad.  I hate double-spacing.

Anyway, the purpose of this particular blog entry is to provide materials for the video, so here are the structural formulae for them:

 

(That last one is straight from Wikipedia, which is why it looks different).

Thankfully, that seems to be done now.  Tomorrow's video, which is on the Doomsday Argument, follows.  I might as well start on it now.

It Was A Slow/Snow Day...

...but the Sun's not beating on the soldiers by the side of the road, although on the other hand today seems to be a day of miracle and wonder and there's a short-distance call coming up.

Today's vid:

Dooblydoo (must learn how to spell that!):

Snow days for families whose children go to school are fun for the children and a problem for the parents.  This emphasises the childcare function of schools.  Many parents are simply unable to spend the time they want to with their children because they have jobs outside the home to which their children can't go and can't find other childcare.

We take this for granted, but think for a moment about how bleak and negative that might be.  It means you can't control your own time, where you go, when you go there, it means your workplace is not child-friendly - i'm not talking about creches - and it means you haven't got friends, family or neighbours who can have your children.

Meanwhile, for children who go to school, a snow day is fun as it means time off from the daily grind of lessons and the like.  That also means lessons and learning are a chore for them.  This should not be so.

As home edders whose children didn't go to school, unlike the majority of home edders whose children do, we didn't have these problems.  This video was made in my workplace, i.e. my consulting room, and the children are welcome to use it whenever i'm not seeing a patient.

Moreover, schools find it hard to accommodate these kinds of opportunity into their working routine.  There was an annular solar eclipse when i was at primary school and everyone ignored it, even the pupils, except for me.  It was like they didn't even care it was happening.

Snow is an opportunity for learning.  I have something of a science bias so in this video i mention Archimedes principle, the oddity of water being denser than ice and the mathematical formulae for calculating the volume and surface area of a sphere, but there are many other chances for learning and enjoyment with it, such as sculpture or other arts and crafts projects.  For me, it's also a good source of particularly pure water.

I realise there are rewarding and worthwhile careers which cannot be child friendly, but there are also a whole load of things which could be done another way, and what kind of message are we giving children if a break from school is actually a happy occasion for them rather than a disappointment?

We need to do things differently and some of us already do.

For once, this is almost a transcription of what i'm saying because i read it.  There's some ad libbing around the point where i throw the snowball into the water.

To be honest, maybe i should just give up trying to monetise, but we'll see.  This time, there's no proper intro or outro because i'm testing if those are the problem.  However, i've also muddied the waters by including a public domain image of a snowflake, taken in the nineteenth century, in the thumbnail:

Incidentally, this thumbnail, unlike the previous ones which are screenshots from the video itself, is an actual frame from the video extracted using Avidemux, which is admittedly slow on this PC but much more precise than Windows Live Movie Maker.  I'm planning to make a video on video making in a bit.

Another interesting thing about this video is that it faces outward and i turned the light on to do it, so it's closer to having three-point lighting than usual and it's also gratifying that i'm not a silhouette in this image.  This position was achieved by moving the thankfully upright piano against the mantelpiece, so the front room is currently in a bit of a peculiar configuration but is at least quite a bit lighter.

Another camera-related event:  having tested the webcam avec les enfants dans le Bosvorth de l'Homme, i'll be holding a session on chemistry revision this aften on electrolysis and equation balancing.

Not masculine but very male

I've not made "Oi Thou!" listed yet because i'm not particularly happy with the quality, which in a way is what it's about.  Anyway, here's today's:

This is another thing that really bothers me:  Why aren't more men involved in home ed?  When Liz and i planned our parenting, we decided to do it equally, and i can't believe it's just us, so i can only assume that it's to do with practical difficulties in managing to do it 50/50, because, for example, of the need to earn some money, or as a result of commitments which arose before having children.  However, to be honest i'm just puzzled by it and want to know why.

This also forms part of a pattern in my life where for some reason i often do the stereotypically girly thing without consciously choosing to, which is particularly weird because i see myself not as traditionally masculine but definitely as very male.  For instance, transsexualism is much more common in men, so my gender dysphoria fits in there, and i am rather too into high-tech gadgets.  However, on the other side of things, i did girls' A-levels (RE, Biology and English), became a herbalist (90% female) and have only rarely worked outside the home, have never had a full-time job and am very fixated on clothes, which again get perceived as feminine.

However, this shouldn't be about me, so i return to the original point:  where are all the fathers?  Why is it all women involved in home ed?  Is it a good or bad thing?  Why?  Should something be done about it and if so what?

Why it's neither "homeschooling" nor "home education"

There are a couple of vids here, one of which will not have been released into the wild yet.  The first is a response to yesterday's upload by the lad's ma:

(Thanks again YouTube for that wonderful example of framing).  This is Ceri talking to me about her approach to home ed with her family.  It speaks for itself of course, so WATCH IT NOW!  I sprang the Welsh thing on her but she did well with it, and yes, please remember what Welsh home edders are going through right now and do something about it because it's seriously not on.

The other video comes out of rightful criticism of the titles and vocabulary in my home ed videos, and isn't there yet.  When it is, it'll be here (i hope):

Basically, there's nothing wrong with American English, as it says in the bit under the video, but the actual word "homeschooling" is bad.  Some people seem to be aware of this and have changed it to "unschooling" when they refer to autonomous education with children, which is a whole lot better.  Again, i go into this in the video so i won't here.

However, something i don't cover in it is the issue of American and Commonwealth English.  One problem with the second term, which i use to avoid "British English" because it includes Austral, South African and Indian English, among others, is that the Commonwealth includes Canada, and Canadian English is something of a quandary, being both its own thing and between two stools.  Leaving that aside though, and taking posh London English as one standard and high-class Chicago English as the other, which is fairly close to some kind of reality, there is no particular reason to choose one over the other.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  Even so, when a weakness in one dialect starts to leak into the other in either direction, it should probably be resisted, and the word "homeschool" is just such a weakness.  There's also another one which it's far too late to stop:  the "short scale".

Languages which use classical Mediterranean-derived terms to refer to large numbers have two ways of doing it:  the short scale and the long scale.  Many languages, for instance German, simply opt for one and never use the other.  English has historically used both, but the short scale won out in the past couple of decades.  I should explain.  Each step in the series of terms "billion", "trillion", "quadrillion" and so forth represents a multiplication of a thousand in the American scale and of a million in the British.  Hence for a Brit the word quadrillion used to mean 1000000000000000000000000, but to an American it seems always to have meant 1000000000000000.  The discrepancy gets steadily more gigantic as we work up the scale, and as a result American English runs out of words for integers at a much earlier point than British English.  It's far too late to do much about it now, but i have always felt this was a backwards step.  Then again, i don't like the decimal system anyway and there's always Standard Form.

Which reminds me, i'm supposed to be setting astronomy homework, so i'll do that.

Bilingualism

Shortly after our daughter was conceived, i decided to experiment with bilingualism.  Since at the time i was using both German and English every day, it made a lot of sense to me at the time to raise her speaking both.  At first, things went fine and in fact her first word was Tuer - "door".  However, it was soon to founder on the fact that so far as the offspring was concerned, German was just this weird noise her dad made and Castilian, English, French and so on were real languages which other people also spoke.  Consequently, her German-speaking abilities stayed embryonic, and to some extent the experiment was a failure.  Here's an interview between us on the issue:

However, in a sense no experiment is a failure - it's just that some of them yield negative results.  Some interesting positives to have come out of this for this formidable example of Homo sapiens before us here is that she is utterly unintimidated by the idea of acquiring a second language and is perfectly willing so to do when she perceives a need and is motivated. Moreover, she is fine with the more opaque vocabulary of the intellectual elite - to her, it is not an anti-language.  Finally, like myself, she talks German in her sleep!  I have no idea what significance, if any, this has, but find it intriguing.

Another interesting aspect of this is the fact that she really does seem to find the sound of German harsher and more intimidating than the Romance languages she prefers (though Arabic with its plethora of pharyngeal consonants is apparently OK with her).  This is from her position as a non-language user, since she was introduced to German, Castilian and English more or less simultaneously.  Therefore, that impression seems not to be pure prejudice and it seems probable that German really is a harsher-sounding language.  It's not to do with prejudice.

I'm not serious about saying nobody should try bilingualism as an experiment, but i do think it's only likely to succeed if you have access to a linguistic community in both languages.  Otherwise, there will be advantages, which our daughter clearly has, but you won't get to easy code-switching between the two languages.  That needn't matter, but if your aim is to ensure they are open to two cultures, you have to go the whole hog and involve yourself fully in both, which is not always possible.

Alternate timelines as a way of learning history

When i was a youngling, i found history utterly boring.  That has now completely changed, possibly because i've lived through a lot more of it, but of course i'm not so much a history man as a philosophy man (and also a bit of an art poseur, though that's not immediately obvious).  One thing i'm not is the science guy, which really surprises people, but i'm really not.

Anyway, here's today's vid:

This is about one of my alternate histories, the so-called "Caroline Timeline", which is here:

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Caroline_Era

The basic idea behind this is that most people feel things are just chugging along nicely until they reach a certain age, after which they gradually, or maybe suddenly, become an affront to the natural order of things and must be stopped.  For Gen-Xers such as myself, this happened with hindsight in about 1979.  The possibly illusory Post-War Consensus suddenly lurched out of kilter and history went in a completely different direction than most of us were expecting.  Keynesianism died, the Berlin Wall fell down, fundamentalism became more important and a horrible plague started killing homosexual men.  On the plus side, we didn't all get wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, a fact which surprises me even today.  Looking back on history and examining this more closely, it's clear that the seeds of this swerve are buried back in the mists of history and have maybe always been there but not necessarily apparent until recently.  Hence the Caroline Timeline.

The Caroline Timeline is my attempt to imagine where we'd be today if the trends apparent from 1945-79 had continued.  Some of the events are actually close calls in real time.  For instance, the "Curse of Tippecanoe" is the tendency for US presidents to die in office every twenty years.  Ronald Reagan was the first president not to die, although an assassination attempt was made against him.  Similarly, Pope John Paul II was almost assassinated but survived.  On the other hand, both Lord Louis Mountbatten and John Lennon were killed violently.  These events are "hair triggers" which had major consequences and the world today would've been different had they gone the other way.  Moreover, the real events are all improbable.  In the Caroline Timeline, they did go the other way.

Another aspect of the Caroline Timeline is that the "bonding energy" between spouses is slightly stronger.  To be less flippant and obscurantist, two divorces which happened in real history didn't happen over there, and as a result Punk Rock and Labour's Militant Tendency didn't happen.

Another major difference, and quite a contentious one, is that Moore's Law does not operate in the Caroline Timeline.  In 1820, in the real world, Augustus de Morgan was discovered at the age of fourteen in 1820 copying diagrams from Euclid's Geometry and went on to become a mathematician and logician, making innovations which eventually led to the machine i'm typing this on, the one you might be reading it on and the pipes connecting them.  Without the discoveries he made, these might not be impossible but they would be bloody massive and prohibitively expensive.  The reason this is contentious is that it stretches credulity to suppose that someone wouldn't have stumbled across them sooner or later.  It also depends on the idea that Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As it happens, i have another althist here:

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Forward_and_Backward

In this one, technology is more advanced and politics closer to feudalism because James II of England had only one child and James Watt went to school at the age of six.  It's a nasty place and you wouldn't want to go there.

Both of these have stories based on them too.

However, the point i want to make is that this is a way of learning history which captivates the imagination and leads to debate.  As such, i would strongly recommend it as an approach to history

786A

Science Faction and Education

Back in the ‘70s, when i was an impressionable child, there was a vogue for what a school friend of mine called “Science Faction”, or, as he put it, “science fiction written as if it was true”.  An example of this might be a mock-up of a newspaper front page covering current affairs in the Galactic Empire.  There were various books written in this form, varying from the mushy soft (implausible) to the fairly hard (scientifically plausible), without a strong narrative element.  The most well-known survivors of this genre from that time include the Terran Trade Federation series.  Similar books are still sometimes published today, such as the Haynes Manual for the Millenium Falcon (though of course Star Wars is not SF).
One of my favourite books of this time is the ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers’ by L. Stephen Wolfe and Roy L Wysack, published in 1978.  This is a description of the eight planets colonised by humans in the year 2376, going into considerable detail about their statistics, life forms and, most interestingly for the purposes of this blog entry, the societies on these planets, notably for the purposes of this blog, education.  Other content of this book has been reviewed unwittingly elsewhere on the web, but is hard to find.
The book was written at a time when the post-war consensus had yet to break down, though being American it is more committed to the principles of free enterprise than the UK economy was at the time.  Nevertheless, it implies clear assumptions about how the education of children would develop which is reflected in other science fiction, for instance to some extent Asimov’s ‘The Fun They Had’, which can be found here:
http://www.kunaschools.org/staff/KunaMiddleSchool/Fahrner_Terri/Documents/TheFunTheyHad0001.pdf
(I may refer to this in a future blog).
Anyway, the eight planets, discovered and colonised in order, are as follows:
Wyzdom:  in the Alpha Centauri system and considered a lucky find, by the date the book is set it has been inhabited for about three centuries and is a mature society whose standards of living are like Earth’s in the 24th century.  The model of education on Wyzdom is therefore not influenced by material necessity such as the lack of resources or poor communications and transport:  remoteness or inaccessibility are, for example, not factors.
Education on Wyzdom is lifelong and referred to as “common”.  There is no state education and children learn by a combination of non-profit cooperatives, private tuition and computer-aided learning.  Autonomous education begins at below what we would think of as school age and continues throughout life.
Poseidous:  A planet whose land surface consists entirely of small islands and consequently has a wide variety of political systems and independent states.  Two contrasting islands are Troon, a hedonistic society basically inhabited by hippies who have few material needs due to the good climate and abundant resources, and who pass on their culture efficiently nevertheless without any formal education system at all.  This is contrasted with Moamba, a totalitarian state where government policy is to minimise family life.  Childbearing on Moamba is seen as a grim duty to the state, everyone wears overalls and children are raised in publically-funded childcare centres and then compulsory state boarding schools.  A small minority of parents look after their own children.  The general depiction of Moamban society is negative and the reader is clearly expected to disapprove of this system.
Brobdingnag:  This is the newest of the older colonies, and there was a gap between the arrival of humans on this planet and the following due to First Contact taking place.  Hence it is, like Wyzdom and unlike Poseidous, neither underdeveloped nor geographically fragmented.  The continent which is most densely populated and on which the planetary capital is situated, i.e. the most developed one, where like Wyzdom there is basically an Earth-like level of technology, has a law requiring parents to purchase education for their children up to the age of nineteen.  However, there and elsewhere, education is not state-funded and local schools are organised and funded by the community as opposed to local or planetary government.
Genesis:  This planet lacks any complex life and is therefore considered to be a predictable and controllable environment which can be easily developed to human needs, even lacking infectious diseases.  This gives the planet a level of predictability which means that a command economy is appropriate for the colony.  Little is said about children’s education here, but since it is a state socialist, though democratic, society, it can probably be presumed that schooling is both state-funded and compulsory on Genesis, though this is not explicit.
Mammon:  High in rare earths and on the lower edge of habitability, a corporation led the colonisation of this planet but it has now become a fully-fledged society.  The autobiographical section describes the education of the writer as a child, which is materially under-resourced and led by ordinary people volunteering as teachers and maximising their use of physical materials such as drawing on the ground with sticks.  There is also computer-aided education.
Yom:  Children’s education is not mentioned on this planet but it may be too primitive and new for it to have become an issue.  However, the autobiographical section describes the foundation of the planet’s first university.
Romulus:  Since this planet, which is double and settled under special conditions because the other planet contains a technologically primitive but intelligent humanoid species, is governed under socialist principles, it may have compulsory schooling.  Laissez-faire activity is inappropriate here due to the non-interference policy.
Athena:  So far unsettled.

What interests me about all this is that, in spite of the fact that this book is in no way focussed on education, the assumption was that children’s education in the future would be substantially autonomous, not funded by the state and substantially aided by ICT, whether or not the society in which it existed was technologically advanced.  The point is that this is an assumption:  the idea that schools as they then stood would still exist in the future was completely rejected almost without conscious thought.  Moreover, this assumption is typical of science fiction of the time:  it was assumed that because of communications and information technology, state schooling would either vanish or become more autonomous. 
Which leads us to ask the question:  Why is the developed world not in fact like this today?  Why have we gone in the opposite direction with education policy?  These works generally underestimate the rate of progress in IT, and yet for some reason we still have schools.  So what’s that about?