International Bright Young Thing

I think this is probably OK:

(Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/85U78 ).  Here is a group of women.  By no stretch of the imagination could the gender of any of these people be described as anything other than female, based solely on the evidence before your eyes.  However, without wishing to cast aspersions on any of them, i want to present you with a counter-intuitive scenario.

Suppose one of these women cut her hand on some broken glass when she broke into a house.  Forensic scientists take the blood and do DNA fingerprinting on it and based on that evidence, they look for a male burglar.  Why has that happened?  Well, it's because all of these women are chromosomally male.  They all have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome in each of their body cells.  The difference is that their bodies do not respond to male hormones.  They have total androgen insensitivity syndrome.  Note the words "total" and "syndrome".  There are degrees of this and someone with the least pronounced form is indistinguishable from a man to the eye.  However, internally, these people have male gonads, no womb and so forth. So far as i know, i don't know anyone who does not respond at all to male hormones, including women.

Here's another woman.  Clearly also female.  These are photos taken before and after the cosmetic surgery she had on her neck.  This woman has a life, does various things, i dunno maybe she enjoys chess and works in a fish-gutting factory, and so on.  I don't want to reduce her to a syndrome.  However, once again, if you were to look at her chromosomes, it would turn out to be possible to label her as having Turner syndrome.  This is where there is only one X chromosome per cell.  As a result, she may have various health problems and it's difficult to see a situation right now where some of the problems associated with being a Turner individual would not be problematic, unlike total androgen insensitivity syndrome.  Nonetheless, she is obviously female.  Again, i don't know anyone personally with this, but i do see them occasionally.

Left to themselves, something both of these groups of people have in common is that they cannot get pregnant by having sex, something they have in common with me.  Another thing that makes it harder to get pregnant by having sex is this.  This is a situation where instead of the outside looking different from the inside, the inside is different.  Nonetheless, people who have this condition can get pregnant if they know they've got it.  It's called uterus didelphys bicollis.

Some people have unusual looking kidneys.  Their appendices go in various different directions and so on.  But we don't have special pronouns to refer to these people, or to the people with didelphys bicollis, just because of that.  This is partly because we don't consider it significant in that way that these people are different.  If the genitals are different on the inside, it doesn't make us call a "she" a "he".  If they're different on the outside, all of a sudden we do start to hesitate about what pronoun to use.  And in a sense, so we should.

What these people help illustrate, though, is that everyone starts off female, and that female is the default form of the human species.  In a way, we're all female inside, but some of us are also male.  Those of us who are male are less likely to be aborted early because of our gender, less likely to worry about sexual assault, more likely to lead certain world religions and more likely to be paid more, even if we hate being male.

Today is International Women's Day.  As a man, i can look at that and think, yes, right, they've got a point, but i'm doing that thoroughly as an outside, and that's fine.  But suppose i look at it this way.  Rather than women being the Other, you are in a sense us, and the reason i think this is a helpful perspective is this.  Were it not for the fact that a certain sperm took a wrong turn many years ago, it could be you who was being paid less, feels the need to take major precautions against sexual assault and could never be Pope.  That could be you but for a tiny quirk of fate.  So it's not about helping them in a patronising way so much as recognising that they are THE people and since we are also people, with certain malignant growths between our legs, we understand that we could be them.  So, Happy International Women's Day to all of you, including the men.

Images licenced as follows:  First and second images licenced under Creative Commons with appropriate attribution text included on images - see Wikipedia.  Image of appendix from early twentieth century edition of Gray's Anatomy - public domain due to age.  All other images my own work.

This is one of those videos which took a lot longer than it looks, mainly due to the stills at the start and trying to suss out the intellectual property issues.  It was also difficult to word tactfully, which might be why it isn't, if it isn't.  In fact, most of my stuff probably looks a bit poor because of the short time frame, although i could deal with this by having more meticulously organised videos at the same time as the daily ones, which come to fruition once a week maybe.

Something interesting which has come up in the last couple of days - i have discovered what seems to be a very small YouTube community in Leicester consisting of DMU students.  These are Peter Hutchinson, Demon TV (which really should've been obvious), Rhys Davies (another one, which is odd) and Holly Holdsworth.  The last in particular is only two degrees of separation from me via Facebook and Theintrostealer recognises her "from the Clocktower", unless that's a strange brainfart.  So that was interesting.  It also made me think about Leicester University Student Television, and they indeed have a channel.  It's odd seeing videos of this area of Leicester which are not made either by me or members of my family.

Hyperborea

I will actually talk about Hyperborea itself in a bit.  Before that though, here are yestern's and today's videos.  Actually, no.  Before that, this:

got picked up by a Terry Pratchett discussion forum, presumably via a friend, so that's good.

Anyway, sorry about that.  I've been approaching a hundred, also known as 84, subs, so i made a commitment in this video, which is yesterday's:

to do a shout out to anyone who wanted it in the next three subs.  One person turned me down, one had no videos, then there was Tim Downs, whose channel is here.  He also made this a response to my Patrick Moore video:

Therefore, he definitely should get a call-out, so that's what i'm doing, and that's what the upcoming video (which has yet to render) will be about.

What made things a bit more complicated was that just as i hit the century, for whatever reason (and i probably should try to work out what it was if i can but refrain from speculation before i gather evidence), i also lost a subscriber.  I don't yet know who.  This has, however, somehow given me an idea (can't see the connection but it's there somewhere):  do a showcase every twelve subscribers, though not the whole video.  This means the next one will be once i get nine dozen subs.  There are a couple of problems:  not everyone has any videos at all and even if they have they might not want a shoutout, and also, what happened today could happen again - subs drop below the target number and i either have to do it again with another subscriber or drop it.  Even so, that is the general plan.

The video is now ready:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/ETj8Q .

This is, as undertaken, a callout to the subscriber who got me to a hundred subs, the musician Tim Downs.  Check out his channel, which is here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Tinytim3013 .  Thanks for subbing Tim.

However, this process was complicated by the fact that i lost a subscriber just after i hit 100.  For some reason i don't understand, this gave me the idea that instead of waiting for a single, large landmark, i should callout and showcase a channel which has videos on it, with the YouTuber's permission, every dozen subs.  This could turn this channel into a purely showcasing channel, which is too introspective, but i will insert something every twelve if i get enough subscribers who produce their own videos.  The next one will therefore be triggered when i get to nine dozen, also known as 108.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

So then, Hyperborea, about which i have almost certainly blogged here before.  Hyperborea is the lost continent beyond the North Wind, one of several corresponding to the points of the compass.  It's also seen as the mythical homeland of the German people, i.e. us, though not necessarily by the kind of people you'd invite to a dinner party.  The weird thing about Hyperborea from a contemporary Western perspective is that it's supposed to be warm and sunny, and without night.  This is very difficult to achieve.  I was confronted with this problem when i wrote 'Here Be Dragons', because griffins are from Hyperborea.  My solution was to decide that "north", or rather "boreas", meant something different in sense to the Greeks than it means to us, such as "the direction of Scythia", partly because many of them saw the world as flat, at least during the Bronze Age.  This is what originally gave me the idea of placing the axis of Ancient World through the East and West Indies, which would make both Terra Australis and Hyperborea close to the Equator (though not actually on it - they're tropical but not equatorial.).  Here's a map of Hyperborea:

...and here's a map of Pluto, for obvious reasons:

On the other channel, i have decided to do a web series, probably for the first time ever on that subject.  It will have about five or six episodes.  I have decided that my loyal viewership deserves new material.  Obviously you will never see it.

Little Lies

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/uefg3 .  Terry Pratchett uses the phrase "Lies to children", a concept which also crops up in Wittgenstein, Plato and Zen Buddhism - the ladder of falsehood you have to climb to reach the ultimate truth.  I reject this strategy completely.

There are situations where someone would not understand the full complexity of a concept, certainly.  However, there is a difference between presenting or wording something in such a way that it is simple and putting it in such a way that it creates a misleading impression and is effectively false.  For example, nobody nowadays should ever be confronted with the belief that electrons are like billiard balls travelling round an atomic nucleus or that atoms themselves are like solar systems as if it's actually true.  This needn't mean something can't be presented simply, but it should not be presented as true when it's false.  I can think of three reasons why this should not happen.

Firstly, lying is obviously wrong.  White lies might be more justifiable, but these are not white lies.  They're outright falsehoods told repeatedly to students, pupils, children - whoever receives this information.  This creates an atmosphere of distrust between the participants, and i would expect it to be a good thing to be able to feel confidence in the truth of what someone is saying, particularly if one is reliant upon that person to help one learn.

Secondly, lying is inefficient.  It means that there is a kind of "sawtooth" learning curve, involving the need to unlearn the falsehoods wherewith one has been burdened - atoms are like solar systems, acids make hydrogen ions which then float about freely in water, people in mediaeval times thought the Earth was flat.  If you see knowledge (and i realise this is incorrect but haven't got time to deal with that right now) as a set of facts to be learnt by people, that means you have to spend a lot of your time "unlearning", which is inefficient.

Finally, it creates distrust in education and the information one currently has.  Whereas "facts" may be true or false and it's even conceivable that everything one thinks one knows is true, what one actually believes is even more open to doubt than it would be otherwise.  This leads to a lack of confidence in one's beliefs.

So we shouldn't lie to children.  Although it may not be a good idea to overload people with information, that's not the same thing as the constant and witting stream of falsehoods which make up many curricula and syllabi.  What we need to do is present things in such a way that people are not misled into thinking that something other than what we believe ourselves in good faith is true.  That can be done without lying.

Another thing:  "you don't need to know that at O-level".  I don't care whether i "need to know", i'm just interested, which is why i'm doing the bloody course in the first place!  But that's another story.

More graphs for you.  Here's a comparison of "Groundhog Poop" and the antepenultimate (to overuse a word) video on the Other Channel.  The two are not to scale:

This was of course sketched hastily in a conversation i had earlier.  The reason it's not to scale, of course, is that the scale would have to be logarithmic to fit both graphs in.  The second graph is three times longer on the X-axis, which is a resolvable problem, but also ten dozen times higher on the Y-axis.  However, one thing which is clear is that the first graph reaches a plateau after a few days and the second just keeps climbing, presumably due to the re-watch value of the latter.  However, as i ranted this morning:

Other Channel - 8 second vid, no work done at all, uploaded on a whim - 51 views in 12 hours. Nineteenthly - 2 days spent making a video, meticulously planned, carefully SEOed, link posted everywhere, introed and outroed - 50 views a month, then gone without trace. HUH? Facepalm!

(I'm sad now.  I was expecting a massive great pair of inverted commas.  Could make some i suppose.)

People are just fickle.  Another point about this is that although the first video has "poop" in the title and therefore attracted the scat crowd, few stayed to watch, which is not terribly surprising considering it's just a loop of me saying "Groundhog Day" over and over again.  So sex doesn't always sell, or at least the tease of titillation (titivation?  Not sure).

I'm quite happy with the thumbnail, although i considered putting rimfall round the flat Earth.  However, as it stands it might as well have been me balancing an astrolabe on my head:

In other news, this has provoked an adverse reaction, which was as i feared and is why i didn't post it to FB:

Then again, i did ask for criticism and i'm trying to find out what people find offensive.  Apparently, this is.  Maybe it belongs somewhere else or needs context.

I'm also now close to a hundred subs and although i realise people have an unhealthy obsession with the number of fingertips they have, i suppose i could make some kind of concession, so that's what i've done.  The next two people to subscribe with channels containing videos will have a showcase and a shout-out.  It would've been three but the last person didn't even have a channel.

White Lines; Acid Queen

This is going to be serious and focussed, because it's supposed to provide educational materials.

Here are today's two videos:

Introduction to the chemistry of acids, bases and salts. Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/e3Xab .

Acids are, according to some definitions, substances which produce hydrogen ions in solution.  Bases, or rather alkalis, are substances which produce hydroxyl ions in the same circumstances.  This is an inaccurate and sketchy definition, but it's the one used at GCSE and IGCSE so for the sake of that i'll stick to it for now.  Some compounds do both.  These are referred to as amphoteric.

Acidity and alkalinity are measured on the pH scale.  This indicates how many hydrogen ions are present in solution on a scale which changes tenfold with each step - a logarithmic scale (multiplies rather than adds).  Acids are low - below 7 - whereas bases are high - above 7.  Neutral is at 7 itself.

When an acid and a base react together, the process is referred to as neutralisation and the compound which results is called a salt.  Although table salt is a salt (for instance of hydrochloric acid and caustic soda), any such compound is also a salt.  The salt i make in this video, which is inaccurately measured for reasons which will be explained in Part II, is citric acid combined with sodium hydrogen carbonate, or sodium citrate.  This combination also indicates the test for carbonates, which tend to release carbon dioxide when combined with acids.

Please watch part II as well, which is here:

Acids And Bases Part II of II.  Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/03fFk .

Please watch this in conjunction with Part I as it follows on from that.  This is how to make indicator solution using red cabbage water, which works because of the anthocyanins.  I also go through some of the properties of acids and bases.  Bases are bitter and have a soapy feel to them because of saponification of the oil in your hands when you handle them, which brings up a whole philosophical issue but let's leave that for now.  Acids are sour, release hydrogen with metals and form metal salts from metal oxides.  The indicator i made goes red with acid, green with alkali.

Then i go on and on about how rubbish GCSEs are, which is probably not very helpful.  Sorry about that.

I've missed out a few things, which i'll cover here.  

Firstly, though i might've said this already, metals in stronger acids liberate hydrogen and replace the hydrogen itself in the acid, so for example sulphuric acid and copper form anhydrous copper sulphate and liberate hydrogen.  However, this doesn't happen in weaker acids.

Secondly, anthocyanin is not the only indicator and some respond better than it does at other pH levels.  One example is methyl orange:

which looks like this:

and is yellow in alkali and red in acid.  Another one is litmus, which is mainly 7-hydroxyphenoxazone, from the lichen Roccella tinctoria (note the species name), and some others.  Lichen is also used to dye tartans, such as ours:

and:

Clearly i'm not that keen on litmus because lichen grows quite slowly.  Litmus turns blue with alkalis and red with acid.  There are a number of others, including phenolphthalein, a laxative which turns fuchsia with bases and orange or colourless (depending on the type) in acid.

Thirdly, here's something i've not emphasised enough, probably:  acids are acids, but bases are not necessarily alkalis.  In order to be an alkali, bases must dissolve in water.  Copper oxide is a base but not alkaline, for example.

Fourthly, i've said "hydroxyl" all the way through these videos when i should've said "hydroxide".  Sorry about that.

Fifthly, salts can be considered to be related to each other in families connected to their acids.  Sulphates are connected to sulphuric acid, nitrates to nitric acid and chlorides to hydrochloric acid.

That's it for the GCSE subject matter, but it's now got to the stage where this is really bugging me, so i'm going to scratch that itch now!

The problems with this:

• The definition of an acid.
• The assumption that all this is happening in water.
• The idea that there are "hydrogen ions", i.e. actual free protons wandering about in water.

Let's start with the last thing first.  What actually happens is that "hydronium ions" form with acids in water, not hydrogen ions.  These are H3O (best i can do on here i think) ions - that's also inaccurate because protons associate with several water molecules at once.

Penultimately, water is not the only solvent.  Another example, oft-quoted, is ammonia, and since ammonia is itself a base, neutral pH in it is in a different place, which means that all acids are strong acids in it and there are relatively few alkalis with respect to it.  This may have consequences for the probability of extraterrestrial life, because it means that the nucleic and amino acids so important for life on this planet would all be strong acids in liquid ammonia.

Antepenultimately, and related to the previous point, acids can be defined in various ways.  The Bronsted-Lowry theory defines acids as proton donors and bases as proton acceptors.  This makes no difference to water but also enables the idea of acids and bases to be extended to other solvents than water, such as ammonia, sulphuric acid and glacial acetic acid (which is pure acetic acid - nasty stuff).  However, for that very reason, the Bronsted-Lowry theory fails to allow a more absolute definition of acid or base - they all depend on the solvent they're in.

One answer to this is the rather extreme version of the definition in which acids accept electron pairs and bases donate them.  This makes almost all chemical reactions acid-base reactions, which is weird and makes the whole notion meaningless.  This is known as the Lewis Acid theory.  An even broader definition is that and acid is anything which reacts with bases, gives up cations or accepts anions or electrons, which includes redox reactions.

Then there is Lux-Flood, which i can't understand right now as it says acids are oxides which accept oxygen and bases are oxides which donate oxygen, and i can't see how this applies to hydrochloric acid, except that hydrochloric acid is actually a gas called hydrogen chloride which dissolves in water to become acid, so maybe that's it.

There's also something called the solvent system.  It's probably the best but i haven't a clue what it is.

Phew!  That's better.

I'm now torn between doing something about urinalysis or something about how much GCSEs bug me because of the dumbing down.

Ethics Is The Aesthetics Of The Future

Sometimes the best is the enemy of the good.  Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/d5AyW .

Back in the '90s, during my training, i bought a number of medical textbooks.  The largest was on general medicine and is 1200 pages long.  However, at the same time i was attempting to word process my essays and got a library book about the word processor to help me.  It was actually bigger than the medical textbook.

Software suffers from a phenomenon known as "software bloat", also known as "creeping featurism", which involves the introduction of endless new features which hardly anyone ever uses.  Unfortunately, although most people only use a small fraction of the features on a piece of software, that small fraction is usually different.  Everyone will do certain things with a word processor, but each of us also uses a few other functions, which are unfortunately usually different, so you can't get away with trimming an application down.

Ethics can be like this too.  In Robocop II, there's a scene where lots of conditions have been added to what Robocop should do, such as "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all".  As a result, he becomes totally paralysed and cannot manage to "uphold the law" or whatever it is he's supposed to be doing.

I have a bad habit of letting the best be the enemy of the good.  I tend to look for the ethical downside of a situation before i engage with it, and usually just don't bother as a result.  In other words, i practice ethical "analysis paralysis".  The result of this is that bad stuff happens and good stuff doesn't.

A practical example is with shoes, something a friend brought up recently when she said "I can't wear theory on my feet".  I found myself in a quandary where i couldn't decide if leather footwear was really worse than canvas because there were so many other factors involved.  If i had come to some decision about it, it may well have been a bad one, but overall, if i just fail to do stuff because i can't reconcile it with my conscience, the result of all that taken together is bad.

This indecision isn't confined to veganism and vegetarianism but applies more widely.  I'm no utilitarian, but it reminds me of the conflict between rule and act utilitarianism.

As a result, you have to tolerate, compromise and generally get your hands dirty.  In my case, this involves getting involved in organisations with which i may be far from happy, but that does mean achieving something positive.  However, i still regard it as a problem and don't know what the answer is.

The word you are possibly looking for is "hmmm", and you may also note that this video has not been shared on FB and contemplate the reason for that, if you don't already know it, but please don't.

I think the video probably says it all - it's roughly about "analysis paralysis" in the area of ethics, where fear of doing wrong leads to bad stuff happening by default.  Straining at a gnat to swallow a camel, as it were, or maybe having a dream you're eating a giant marshmallow and when you wake up the pillow's gone - maybe that's a false awakening.  Now that was a flight of ideas.

The reason i posted it now is that i was thinking about my attitude to veganism, and the conflict i feel when i work with an organisation.  Examples of the organisations i have in mind are of course the Conservative Party and the Church Of England.  Yes, i've worked with them and yes, i know that the first in particular is almost equated with the devil, but i stand by my decision and am not ashamed of it, even though i believe they will probably screw us royally in the next couple of months and their policies harm and kill the weakest members of this society.  Yes, i know all that, and i knew all that at the start, but there was an overriding issue which had to be addressed, and that seemed the only way to address it.

Anyway, got to cook dinner now.  Bye-bye, non-existent reader!

Laid

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/f29jc . I went vegetarian 27 years ago and progressed to veganism a year and a half later.  I did absolutely fine for about two years and made sure i had enough vitamin B12 from yeast extract and the like, along with addressing the other problems such as essential fatty acids and so forth.  I am still convinced that veganism is a healthier and viable option for the vast majority of people.  However, i am no longer vegan.

After about two years, i began to experience various symptoms which i attribute to vitamin B12 deficiency.  Vegans usually have more folic acid in their diet than vegetarians, which masks the pernicious anaemia associated with classic B12 deficiency but are at least equally susceptible to the neurological side, and i was no exception although i also got the symptoms of anaemia.  Specifically, i lost my sense of smell, started to hallucinate (particularly the smell of peppermint) and acquired a particularly boring psychosis which was basically just poor memory and concentration along with a sense of depersonalisation a bit like the one associated with alcoholism.  I accidentally set fire to my bed due to not being able to smell, although to be fair i do tend to set fire to things by mistake quite a lot.  As a result, i went back to eating dairy, although only in small quantities and i have now more or less recovered (my memory is still poor though).

The reason i think it affected me in that way is probably either to do with my stomach lining not secreting enough intrinsic factor or malabsorption via the terminal ileum of my intestines.  Most people would not only do absolutely fine on a vegan diet, but thrive better than on others.

I am not going to pretend it's better not to be vegan as far as ethics are concerned.  As far as i'm concerned, lacto-vegetarianism is only justifiable as a transitional state towards veganism and it's probably the worst of both worlds if you eat a lot of dairy, which is impossible to justify in almost any terms.  However, i would also say that some diets which include meat are ethically better than some diets which exclude it, for example eating roadkill compared to a vegan diet consisting largely of processed food with a lot of food miles on it, and various other factors involved mean that the issue is not clear cut.  Nor have i got anything personal against meat eaters.  It isn't even cheaper to eat dairy compared to being vegan, although i do use dairy as a source of free nutrition.

Just wanted to say that really - sorry everyone.

Sometimes beds really are on fire, but not with passion and love.  I wanna tell you a story.

Back in the day, i underwent a certain kernoodle (which i can't spell) with a certain Westphalian.  Since it was rather cold, i turned on the gas fire in my room, which was rather close to the mattress.  I had lost my sense of smell.  After a few minutes of - well, smoking a ciggie to be honest, but not me - this particular heterochromat noticed the smell of a different kind of smoke and i proceeded to empty the contents of a glass of water over it, which successfully quenched the fire.  However, i persisted with my veganism for quite some time after that.

Another experience i underwent as a result of my veganism was becoming mildly psychotic, and the thing about that was - it was really boring.  No unusual beliefs, no conviction that i was being followed, no threatening visions of demons.  Just poor memory, reduced attention span and depersonalisation, oh, and the occasional transparently obvious hallucination of the odour of peppermint.  I don't know if that's what B12 deficiency is normally like for vegans, but i should also point out that my brain can't do psychosis properly.  I once took many times the apparently effective dose of Psilocybe with no discernible consequences, and have taken six times the maximum recommended dose of Hypericum perforatum without any anti-depressant effect.  The reason i mention the latter is that since depression often involves a realistic assessment of one's world or life, anti-depressants probably work by loosening one's grip on reality.  It's not that simple of course, but it explains the problem quite well.

I'm not saying i can't go mad or that i'm in some macho way able to "take double anything you could".  I'm just saying my brain doesn't bend that way.  Speaking of which:

So there you go, you grey whistling void, another day in the outer darkness.

Engage!

By which i mean, i waffle a lot on here and tend to engage in omphaloscopy.  Well, maybe i should stop, or rather, attempt to engage in some way.  Oh, incidentally there's also this:

Anyway, what i'm saying is this:  i posted loads of stuff on a home ed FB group yesterday including a link to this blog, so i should probably reward people for reading it, even though they won't and it's all delusion.  Now, this blog is called Minus2909 for other than obvious (except to me) reasons, but yer actual vanity URL is http://homeedandherbs.blogspot.co.uk/ , meaning that at some point lost in the mists of antiquity, it may actually have had a point to it.  It would be polite, if futile, to give it some point again i suppose.

In the meantime, here's today's actual video:

Click To Tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/iEmG5 . AdSense is good and you should monetize your videos, but not because they will make you any money directly.  Here's why.

YouTube and Google need to be able to afford the bandwidth, infrastructure and storage space required to run a site which, compared to most other sites, is huge and very demanding.  In order to do this, they have decided to use advertising.  In fact, i find it hard to imagine any other way they could've done this given that the global economy is capitalist - otherwise it would be a case of something like pay per view or a regular membership fee, and people would not be watching our videos.  We need them to make money to pay for our platform.  Therefore, we should all monetize our videos.  At the same time, Adsense may be a mirage, though this needn't matter.

I have three channels (one defunct).  This channel has 38 000 hidden views and currently around 30 000 views on the public counter, so clearly it's a tiny channel for which Adsense will never pay out.  The other one, however, currently has 476 470 views, has been monetized for ages, is in good standing, verified - all of that - and has never paid me a penny.  However, this is not a problem.

The main reason for doing anything shouldn't be money because if something's worth doing, it's worth doing for free, but if you want to make money from YouTube, Adsense is not the way to do it.  YouTube can act as a shop window, an audition space, a way of creating a good impression, a video CV or resume, or it can be used directly to sell merchandise.  All of these things have helped me and even though i don't constantly push things on here, i've already managed to make money even on my pittance of less than 100 000 views.

Advertising is questionable because unless you are really dedicated as a viewer to clicking on ads to support the YouTuber, chances are that if you click on a text ad it's because you find it more interesting than the video, and video ads use up attention and lose audience, so neither are ideal.

Nonetheless, you should use AdSense because YouTube are providing you with a platform, and the advertisers themselves are often also worth supporting.  As a small business owner, i believe in what i'm doing and so, i hope, do the advertisers you see on here, and they deserve your support.

Yes i know this is a bit 3216-licking but i actually believe some of that stuff and i think the bigger the omelette, the more eggs you'll have to break, and as a result you feed more people with it.  This relates to my planned 'Ethics Bloat' video but that's something for another time.

So yes, AdSense is for some reason a mirage to me for an unknown reason which may be soluble and um Gottes willen we need the money but to be honest there are other ways of making money, and a tenth of a penny per click-through isn't going to get me anywhere at this rate, particularly when one bears in mind that a click-through probably means my video has failed to engage.  

However, i can't currently shake the feeling that i would be going down a blind alley of self-deception by attempting to make this blog more popular, which would achieve nothing.  If i do decide to aim for it, though, i will stick materials in the same sort of vein as i put on Scribd.com on here too.  Once again, it won't derive an income, and to that extent is not worthwhile.  Then again, the inaction of others gets on my nerves and i don't want to be like that.

No tags again though.  No posting elsewhere either.