It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Right, before i get going, i just wanted to show you this playlist .  I think you can guess what it is yet.

Anyway, there i was getting going on my Valentine vids when all of a sudden i realised that the Pope had resigned.  Since this hasn't happened since 1415, i decided to vlog about it, thus:

A Pope has just resigned for the first time in nearly six centuries.  The Prophecy of the Popes, allegedly written by St Malachy, an Irish saint of the 12th century, predicts that the next pope, Petrus Romanus, will be the last.

The Catholic Church itself rejects the Prophecy of the Popes as a forgery and also as a form of divination, and in fact there is no reference available for it before 1595 when it appeared in Lignum Vitae.  However, it has been claimed that the list, which consists of a series of "nicknames" such as "De Labore Solis", "Gloria Olivae" (which seems to refer to Benedict XIV) and "Petrus Romanus", was compiled by the Neo-Platonist Nostradamus.  Whether or not it's valid, it is quite reminiscent of his style, so this could be correct.

Interestingly, Gloria Olivae, supposedly the current Pope, is also the penultimate pope before Petrus Romanus, after which it seems to be implied that Judgement Day will come and Rome will be destroyed.  In fact, this is less far-fetched than it might seem because of the Doomsday Argument, which holds that because of exponentially increasing human population, the chances of being alive just before human extinction are actually higher than at any other time simply because there are more people then, and therefore that the chances of the "end of the world", at least for us, are higher now than ever before.  This is one reason i always go on about the world ending.  A similar argument means that we are actually quite likely to be alive during the resignation of Benedict XIV (or Ratzinger) simply because, again, there are more people than ever before.

The Catholic Church is currently in trouble, and secularisation is also on the rise.  However, it has weathered storms in the past and there's no particular reason to suppose that it will end now.  On the other hand, the extinction of the human race would probably also put paid to the Church.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that i was alive when it happened - makes me wonder if i'll see Betelgeuse go supernova now.  However, this may not be as remarkable as it seems, looked at from one perspective, though it's still improbable looked at in the opposite way.

There have allegedly been popes for a total of (11B9+4)-29 years, which is 11B5-29; 11A6-20; 1186 years.  If i live to be six dozen, which is unusually low for today but high for a man in the past, this period is 118.6/6 lifetimes long, or 11.86+11.86=23.5 lifetimes.  Since this has only happened five times, the probability of me being alive when it happens, assuming we're talking about the Christian era, is therefore 23.5/5, which is one in five.  That's not that improbable as it happens.

However, this whole thing can be turned round thus:  suppose we take the pope's resignation this year as one given and compare it to world population on the other four occasions.  These were roughly as follows (in decimal, population figures rounded up to next date available, high estimates):

Pontian (235):   450 million
Marcellinus (304):  450 million
Benedict IX (1046):  450 million
Gregory VI (1046):  450 million
Celestine (1294):  500 million
 Gregory XII (1415):  500 million
Benedict XIV (2013):  7.2 billion.

It's therefore at least fourteen times more likely that i would be alive during this papal resignation than each of the others, and in fact two and a half times as likely than all of the others put together.

Is this starting to look familiar?

Petrus Romanus is supposedly the next pope (who, incidentally, might not be European - the last non-European pope was in the seventh century).  The prophecies attributed to Malachy (which might actually be from Nostradamus, but that's another story) say the next pope will be the last and in fact, each pope, except maybe for Clement VI and Innocent VI, has stood a greater chance of being the last pope than his predecessor from the viewpoint of Christendom rather than their own.

Now imagine that instead of a papal resignation we're talking about some kind of doomsday scenario, and instead of it occurring on five possible occasions, it could have occurred at any time between the time attributed to Jesus's lifetime and the present day.  The chances of being alive at the end are greater now than ever before for the same reasons.

Therefore, in a sense "Malachy's" final prophecy stands a good chance of being accurate!

I Could Lose Myself In Dishonesty

First of all, this:

Our Humanist Wedding ceremony.

To contact the British Humanist Association, which helped us have our wedding, go here:

http://humanism.org.uk/ceremonies/

As mentioned in the video, they also help with other rites of passage such as funerals and naming ceremonies and in fact our children were also named in humanist ceremonies, although one of them was presided over by a vicar!

We are of course Christian ourselves, but the baggage organised religion carried for us at the time, and to some extent still does, led to us deciding to have a humanist wedding.  This was also inclusive, as without it, many people would have had to deal with their disquiet at religion.  It was at Leicester Friends' Meeting House on 12th June, 1993, and was presided over by our friend Alice, who has some acting and public speaking appearance.  Much of the wording was written by us and we also included 'Sentinel' by Mike Oldfield and the John Donne poem 'The Good Morrow' as well as the silence, which Liz's dad (who was a vicar) used to pray for blessing our wedding.

This generally indicates the remarkable intermediate position we hold with respect to religion in our lives, where we generally feel sympathy on both sides of the approach - with secularism and humanism on one side as well as with Christianity on the other.  It's a difficult position to maintain, but the only one which makes sense to us.

Yes, absurd though it may seem, we are both Christian and had a humanist wedding ceremony.  This is partly due to our history, and in fact one of the things which brought us together was our negative experiences of fundamentalist religion.  I can't really comment too much on Liz's.  Mine was associated with various groups, notably the Navigators.  I should point out that several groups share that name and that they've undergone something of a transformation since the mid-'eighties, apparently in a positive direction.  At the time, some people held that they were cult-like.  The trouble is that their members were associated with my conversion to Christianity, and that has stuck.

Big Friendly Sciant is apparently not happening today but i'm still making an "accompanying" video, this time on the transition metals.  I'll probably point people in this direction, so here are some diagrams:

There you go.  Now for the actual video, which will have a low-bandwidth version:

The transition metals, or transition series, are in the middle of the periodic table and have the following characteristics with some exceptions.  They are hard, malleable or ductile, have high melting points (with the exception of mercury), produce coloured compounds, conduct electricity and heat well, corrode only slowly and react slowly with acids.  I show a few examples of transition metals around the neighbourhood and house, and also, on a whim, demonstrate rather sloppily the Archimedes Principle to determine the density of brass.

Low-bandwidth/quota version here:  http://youtu.be/2eSsAxCkT6M

Almost Gothic

Another title from the Fagen stable.  Anyway:

The "Love Triangle" theory, in which different kinds of love are seen as combinations of passion, intimacy and commitment.  These are:

Non-love - none of those features.  Pragma - pragmatic love with commitment and nothing else.  Ludus - playful love without commitment.  Storge - intimate and committed love without erotic passion as between family members or friends.  Infatuation - passion and commitment without intimacy - not a good one that.  Mania - obsessive love with passion and intimacy, prone to jealousy - not a fan of that either.  Eros - conventional romantic love without commitment but with kisses, hugs, sex and strong feelings.  Finally, agape - the jackpot, seen in a religious conception of God's love for human beings and the ideal relationship between committed couples, but perhaps non-existent.

This is the first in a daily series of videos around the theme of Valentine's Day.

This has yet to be published.  Yesterday's is doing OK, unsurprisingly, although had the previous video done OK instead of fairly badly, i wouldn't've been surprised, so i don't know what to make of that.

This is of course based on the triangular theory of love, for which i adapted this graphic from Wikipedia:

This model, which is of course utterly inadequate (what wouldn't be?), is a three-bit binary code based on intimacy, commitment and passion in no particular order.  It has something of a bias towards romantic love, i think.  Thought of that way, it can be summarised thus:

This should be the first in a series of seven, which i may cut off before the end.  The others will probably be on humanist wedding ceremonies, stalking, marriage, love in a broader sense, the consequences of a heart-shaped heart and i can't remember anything else right now.  I could've started earlier, and in fact never thought of it, but since the Chinese New Year intervened, which is entirely predictable, it couldn't be anyway.

The Chinese Way

Here's today's:

The Chinese New Year 2013 will be the Year of the Snake, more specifically the water snake, as the Chinese calendar is organised according to the Chinese zodiac, which does not really correspond to the Western zodiac except for one thing:  Jupiter takes almost twelve years to orbit the sun and therefore shifts by approximately one sign of the zodiac each year.  There is a second system superimposed on this one, which is based on the Chinese "element" system, somewhat like the "paper rock scissors" game in that it's a non-transitive hierarchy.  Yin and Yang are also involved, in that each year corresponds to an element and they occur in pairs, so for example there is a Yin water animal year followed by a Yang water year of the next animal.

The Chinese New Year starts on the first new moon after the winter solstice, allegedly, but i can't make that work since it's clearly quite some time after the winter solstice now.  Maybe.

This is also about the duodecimal system and the chronemics of traditional Chinese culture, which resembles that of the Mesoamerican civilisations such as the Maya and the Aztecs.  Clearly China seems to have been polychronic rather than monochronic, at least in this respect.

Well, i say "2013" but i mean something else, clearly the year which begins tomorrow and ends next year.

Shameless tentpoling of course, which i hope means it'll pick up views in a bit.  I got lazy i'm afraid.  There were going to be animations on the Chinese element images but it was taking a long time and i needed to get it out for the Chinese New Year itself, which started at 4 pm GMT in China and 3 pm in Japan.  This is a reverse sweep compared to the usual approach because whereas i've normally tried to pick up views in North America, the east is ahead of me rather than behind.  However, i haven't anticipated picking views up in 漢-influenced parts of the world - apart from anything else, the video's in English and made by an Anglo-Saxon.  I also have the impression that weekends are not good times for views, although the apparently arbitrary fluctuation of views over the week suggests otherwise.

Here are some of the graphics from the vid:

五行.

 

五行 vanquishing relationships.

五行 generative relationships.

 

I'm not particularly oikophobic, and whereas Chinese cosmology is interesting i wouldn't prefer it over our own humoural system.  The general background of the scheme is remarkably similar, leading me to wonder if it's part of human nature.  Another parallel between the 漢 and ourselves is shown in the following diagram:

 

 

There seem to be similarities between the Western zodiac and the 漢 circle of animals, and of course on Jupiter the distinction vanishes.

Another theme which emerges here is the cybernetic status of herbalism, something which i really need to re-visit in depth soon.

The outro screen announces my plan for the coming week, something i came up with this morning:

Yes:  "Nineteenthly's Valentine week of luurve".  This is going to have to run concurrently with the three other themes, namely the Sunday videos, Webcam Wednesdays and Big Science Goes Global, meaning that i'll either have to do two uploads on those days or make the ones i'll do anyway relevant.  The Sunday one is quite straightforward, and in fact i have two ideas already for it.  Monday is more challenging as it involves shoehorning a Valentine theme into a GCSE chemistry syllabus although i have a few thoughts about manganese.  Wednesday?  Well, i have no idea what i'll be doing that day except that it'll probably be relevant - shouldn't be too hard.

The most successful video in December was the one about mistletoe, so it's fairly clear how to get views - do something topical, tie it in with something which elicits an emotional response and involve either romantic love or sex.  My hope is that Valentine's can be a bit like Christmas.

Incidentally, should you happen to be reading this and expecting something slushy and lame, you will be surprised.  This is Valentine's my way.
 

 

Hey Nineteen

Put it this way:  if there's a song which refers to the subject of today's video, which incidentally has yet to be uploaded, i don't want to know about it.  In the meantime, this:

which is yesterday's video of course, seems to have done spectangularly badly.  It has had seven views, five of which were acquired before i even published it and therefore don't really count, and has already acquired a thumbs-down, from one of the two views i got after publishing.  It's rather fraudulently a response to a Nerimon vid, so maybe it's just not worth the effort responding to his videos.  However, i am particularly disappointed by this because unlike many other videos, it's a direct attempt to engage with other YouTubers as YouTubers, and the fact that it's so poorly received is entirely mysterious to me, unless it's something to do with the mysterious "trying too hard" thing.  I have now changed its name because "Why did you choose your username?" got it nowhere, and unless it's a slow burner, i might as well make it about what it's about.  I suppose i could call it Giordano Bruno.

To be frank, i'm absolutely gutted that this didn't fare better.  Speaking of which...

Today's video was going to be about the Chinese New Year, which is on Sunday, but i've decided it's more than a one-day job so it'll now be tomorrow's.  Instead, it's about IBS:

I have had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) since i was a child although it changed during my late teens.  It initially manifested itself as flatulence combined with constipation - i used to go about once every five days.  Then, soon after i left home, the farting continued but was accompanied by constant diarrhoea - i ended up going twenty times a day, which was inconvenient as it meant i had to stay near a toilet most of the time.  I eventually dealt with it using a combination of lifestyle changes and agrimony, one of a number of herbs which can be useful for it.

However, this video is also partly about the phenomenology of IBS.  My bowels are usually at their worst when i am in a situation i would expect to be stressful but am not consciously experiencing emotional stress.  I see the situation as symbolising pushing the emotional stuff you want to eliminate down into the bowel so it can be voided, and in fact i wonder whether that's close to literally true.

One of the answers to me was to chew my food slowly and a lot - around fifty times a mouthful.  Some of the problem is aerophagy - you swallow air when you eat and it ends up causing bloating and flatulence.  Drinking also helps to lubricate the bowel.  Cramping can be helped with relaxants.

One of the most interesting things i think IBS illustrates is that even if you are physicalist, it's narrow-minded to see the brain alone as the seat of consciousness.  I believe that the enteric nervous system, with its many millions of nerve cells, is likely to play some role in the existence of consciousness.  I intend to expand upon this in a future video.

By the way - situs inversus!

 The last comment refers to the fact that the thumbnail is backwards.  The caecum seems to be on the left hand side.  This is because the gap into which i've plonked the text looked wrong when it was on the right hand side, so i flipped the image and pasted the text onto the left.

To be honest, i'm feeling pretty despondent about the whole thing right now.  I'm not sure why though, since the views have been above a gross a day since the end of January.  I think what it is, is that i've specifically tried to elicit a response and not got one.  Various things are pissing me off about this project right now.  One is that i can't see what's distinctive about popular videos.  I've generally done the same things with all the videos for quite some time now:  eye-catching thumbnail, noteable title, published at peak viewing time, and they also tend to be topical.  However, this seems not to correlate at all with success.  I should take a longer look at all this.

The most successful video of all on the channel is of course Liz on TV drinking her wee, and it's clear why.  It's the oldest surviving video (with the exception of the one taken by Holly before the advent of the site), it was up for longest, it has the best production values, it has potentially erotic and Yoga-related content and everything is on its side.

The second most popular video is this:

 This is a low-quality video from the olden days of the channel.  It's there because a patient was using it and complained about me deleting it, so i remade it, reuploaded it and it's therefore in the old style i used to use for this channel.  Again, the Yoga connection helps, and both this and the other video pre-date YouTube's reorganisation.  However, this one was also adopted by a site in India, and i've linked various other videos to it in an attempt to get them to work better.

Both of these are partly the most watched because they pre-date the reorganisation of view counts and are old.  They may reflect the kind of view counts i would've ended up with if i'd left my older videos up, although to be honest they were rather lacklustre and hampered by poor image quality.  These two videos are probably not very helpful due to their age.

Here's the third most popular:

This has the advantage of capturing the Zeitgeist and being right in the centre of my image.  It appeals to people who get off on leggings or find it funny.  I am in fact trying to learn from this video by doing others in the same vein.  Oddly, the first leggings video didn't do anything like as well.  Of the vids in this genre, it would probably be a good idea to analyse them quite closely, so here goes.  This one:

peaked on its first day at fifty-five, unlike the one above it here, which rose to a peak of 177 after three days.

Once it's been up for as long as the other one, it can probably be expected to have been viewed about 550 times.  However, as Mickeleh said:

 

(the bit about Heraclitus).  You never have the same YouTube channel twice.  Every time you make and upload a video, it changes you and the channel.

I think my current problem is that i'm somehow not meshing with YouTube but am using the hinterland.  However, these two videos are successful for another reason:

 

 

and:

 

 

are both posted elsewhere.  They have performed pretty well - the first currently has 136 views, the second 622.  This reflects my ability to be aware of where they would appeal, of course - i'm particularly adept at targetting those.

In fact, i've just posted a link to the first on IMDB.

The other thing to do, possibly, is personal site promotion via Y!A R&S.  All of these seem cheap and dirty, but to be honest i can't see another way of doing this.

I'm not posting this to FB.  Bye!

There Is Nothing Like A Dame

There is nothing you can name that is anything like a dame.  That song along with the rest of 'South Pacific' strikes me as a potential work of logical theory.

Speaking of names:

People choose their own usernames and they reflect their personalities, unlike given names, which are not normally chosen by the people concerned.  YouTube and Google clearly want people to use their real names rather than usernames on here.  My real name is no secret:  it's Mark Ure, as is recorded on my Wikipedia page since 2005.  However, usernames interest me and in any case a lot of people online know me as Nineteenthly.

I chose Nineteenthly due to a probably apocryphal story i once heard about a philosophy student who was reading 'On The Plurality Of Worlds' by Giordano Bruno, also known as "The Nolan".  The book opens with a series of paragraphs starting "Firstly", "Secondly", "Thirdly" and continuing in that vein.  The story goes that on reading the word "Nineteenthly", the student decided it wasn't worth it, he was wasting his life and packed in philosophy to do something more worthwhile.  The actual paragraph reads, in translation, "Nineteenthly, more is added to that which has been said under the second heading".

The reason i chose that user name is that it reminds me not to be verbose, not to waffle and to balance thought and action.  For that reason also, when i'm using it on the Halfbakery i never write numbers in figures but always spell them out.

I'll come back to Giordano Bruno in a minute.  In the meantime, the external reason i chose that username was that the moderator of the ideas bank website disapproved of me sharing my account with my wife, so i changed it to a personal account, Nineteenthly.  The old user name (incidentally, i'm alternating "username" and "user name" for tag purposes) was "Grayure" one i still share with my wife.  People have rightly said it sounds like a cheese.  Before that, it was "Uregray", which of course sounds like a South American country, and way, way before that, in 1986, it was PLL1_25, which means "the twenty-fifth user of the Philosophical Logic account on the Vax at Uni - another era!  Another one was Zerothly, which is more imaginative but didn't last for various reasons.  I am probably now the only person who still sees it - it's my user name on here but i show up as Nineteenthly, which is to do with various merges which Google did.

Back to Bruno.  Giordano Bruno was a sixteenth century philosopher who is a hero of rationalism and secularism.  He was one of the first people to see the Universe as infinite and eternal, and crucially, saw each star in it as the centre of a solar system of planets.  For this belief and a number of others i mention in the video, he was burnt at the stake for heresy by the Catholic Church in 1600.  The starship NCC-1320 in the Star Trek universe is named after him.  (Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise are all registered trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. No copyright infringement is intended)

However, although he is hailed as a hero of rationalism for those reasons, he shares a number of beliefs with me which are not generally held by scientists today.  He was a hylozoist or panpsychist - believed that the Universe was alive or that consciousness was an inevitable property of matter - and, as i've said, that the Universe is both infinite and eternal.  Unlike me, he believed in reincarnation and was a Neo-Platonist like Nostradamus and Iamblichus.  However, he is still a kind of hero of humanism and so forth in my book.

Anyway, please let me know why you chose your user name, screen name, handle, moniker or whatever you want to call it.

This is aimed solidly at regular YouTubers rather than anyone on my social networks.  I very much value how much all you people on FB, G+ and Twitter, among other places, are helping this project to succeed.  The problem is that i need to break out and make connections with strangers more, and as it happens, i've long thought that a video on my username, and usernames in general, would make a good companion to one about my hair.  "Nineteenthly" is my cyberhairdo.  Just as people in "real life" probably think of me as that bloke with the leggings and the hair, people online think of me as "This guy Nineteenthly" as one particularly bummed-out denizen once described me shortly before complaining about how much my stories disturbed him, and not in a good way.

"Nineteenthly" is of course a persona, but one which is getting more like the person behind the mask, if there is one.  In particular, it links the hidden and open sides of me because i make a point of using the same username everywhere.  Yes, that means that all that weird stuff that pops up when you Google me really is me as well, but i'm not so egocentric that i imagine people do that much.  Again, that would be the delusion that leads people to worry about online privacy (as adults, that is).  In any case, it's who i am and i do it with not only a clear conscience but use it as a deliberate strategy as something positive.  I won't go into that now but would be happy to dilate for anyone who would lend an ear, i.e. no-one at all.

Back to the question of usernames though.  A few months ago, YouTube decided to encourage people to use their real names, possibly to reduce cyberbullying.  This is all well and good, but i am known as Nineteenthly to a lot of people and have felt rather hampered by having an unspellable, unpronounceable (to the English) surname which begins with an unusual letter and is near the end of the alphabet for my entire life.  When i was at university, my pigeonhole used to fill up with crap because people bunged whatever they didn't want into it, assuming that nobody's name began with a U or a V.  Yes, "U" didn't even have it's own hole!

To be honest, i remember those pigeonholes with a bit of an embarrassed shudder, but - NOPE, NOT GOING THERE!

Hair

They ask me why I'm just a hairy guy...

Actually they don't.  It's probably one of those things people think is either typical or are too polite to ask about.  It's also within the range of what men normally do.  Anyway, i've planned to make a video about it for a long time and finally went for it today, partly as a response to Benia Zouras's video about Locks of Love.  Here's hers:

And here's mine:

I last had my hair cut in 1991, so in a way my hair is older than Charlie McDonnell.  In another way, it's very young because individual hairs only last about three years before being replaced by other hairs.

The reason i have long hair is threefold:  I have unsightly sticking-out ears which i want to hide, i am gender dysphoric and i think it's natural to have long hair and there must be a reason for it.  I last had my haircut just before my Masters graduation at Warwick and then let it grow out.  I am a little concerned about going bald.  If i did, i would probably shave my head, which would make me look like Kryten from Red Dwarf because of the shape of my scalp.  If i went grey, i would probably dye it a bright colour like Ninebrassmonkeys (who is presumably not naturally grey), although i'm not sure about red.

I feel a little guilty about never visiting hairdressing salons or barbers, because if everyone followed my example, they'd go out of business.  Conversely, i've saved a lot of money over the past two decades by never having my hair cut.

My attitude towards my hair also reflects my general attitude towards things because i really believe the choices are between never cutting your hair and shaving it off, though i wouldn't apply that to other people.  I'm not one for moderation in a way, and the state of my hair reflects that.

I sometimes feel that i should shave my head or have my hair cut for charity, as it would be a dramatic gesture.  Some people do that for Locks Of Love, a charity to give bald children hair, and even if you disagree with them, you could always have it shaved as a sponsored thing, but i don't do that.  I am perhaps too attached to my hair, which ironically is a form of vanity - odd in someone so ugly, i know.

Here's a link to Locks Of Love:

http://www.locksoflove.org/

See you tomorrow.

I am probably too attached to my hair, and there's a weird dynamic which means that that very attachment is an excellent reason to have it cut, because as a sacrifice it would be all the more valuable, but i have a suspicion, or perhaps a superstition, that if i cut it, it would never be the same because it would somehow coincide with the moment i began to go substantially bald. 

Hair loss is associated with heart disease because both can arise from occlusion of capillaries.  As a result, recent changes in my diet are probably not good for my hair.  It's also the case that i rarely use the shampoo i make to prevent hair loss on my own scalp because the cobbler's children are always the worst shod - i'm not going to leave a bottle of hair loss prevention shampoo languishing in the bathroom when it can be sold.  The same applies to the ingredients.  Ergo, my hair is not completely intact, i suspect, though detached assessment is hard.

More anomalies on view counts, Although the "headline" view count is now apparently incrementing daily, some other total view count, can't remember which, is still lagging a couple of zagier behind.  I am going to look into the whole view count thing because all i know about right now is that 211 (AKA 301) business.  Clearly there's more to it than that.  Also, i assume the two-day lag in the analytics is connected to YT's need to verify views.  This has now assumed an interest for me beyond concern about my own view count.

Anyway, i should probably resolve to keep my hair.  Even if i am a reluctant herbalist, touting anti-baldness shampoo with a pate is not something one should undertake unless it's unavoidable!