I'm not a pheasant plucker...

...I'm the pheasant plucker's son. I'm only plucking pheasants 'til the pheasant plucker comes.

For the rest of the tongue-twisting song, go here. I can't even think it without stumbling. Nor can I get it out of my head whenever I'm dealing with said birds. Or as Neil Young might say, "Why do I keep plucking up?"

I am not the hunting, shooting and fishing type. I, personally, don't see the attraction in spending a day out to kill an animal for "pleasure". However, many of my family and the boyfriend's family do enjoy that sort of thing. It is mildly hypocritical, because I am very much a carnivore, and feel that as such I should be willing to kill my own meat - and I am prepared to do that, if the situation demanded it, but I wouldn't do it for fun. That and the fact that I'm such a crap shot, I doubt I'd hit anything, or if I did, it wouldn't be clean and I would hate to cause suffering.

On the other hand, I very much approve of pheasant shooting as a means to an end. Given I am going to eat meat (and I am, many people have tried and failed to convince me otherwise) I want the animal in question to have had a happy life and a swift and painless death. To me, a pheasant, bred and cosseted to a certain age by the likes of my great-uncle, then released into the guardianship and feeding of a gamekeeper for an untroubled, free-range life of pottering about in the English undergrowth, until a brief moment of being startled by a person with a stick crashing around the woods (and that's me doing the beating, on occasion), flying up and getting shot by any of the marksmen in-laws and dying instantly - well, that's a million times better than being a battery hen, surely? It has also been hypothesised that the only reason that so many tracts of deciduous woodland still exist here is that they are managed as pheasant territory and therefore worth more intact than razed for farmland or buildings. That provides valuable habitat for native bird species.

Finally, there's the whole ethos of being closer to one's food. I like to know where things have come from, and how they've been reared. I like to be told exactly when my food has been killed, and who by. When we visit the families, it's therefore not uncommon for me to be presented with a brace of pheasants for my own plucking enjoyment.

Oh, and my great-grandmother would turn in her grave if she thought I couldn't do this, so I have to keep my hand in.

I was going to fully document the plucking activities undertaken last weekend in my garden, and photographed it all as a kind of tutorial, but then when I sat down to edit them I realised that perhaps they were a bit too gory and I might run the risk of upsetting people, so I have only posted my close-ups of the stunning feathers of Mr Pheasant. Mrs Pheasant was lovely too, though not so striking in patterning, and this shot shows her soft grey-brown plumage next to his iridescence.

Instead, I'll tell you about an entirely un-natural food experience during the week. This follows on quite nicely from our Vanilla trip. On Wednesday night, Anna of the cakes took me and the boyfriend to the Dana Centre, an offshoot of the Science Museum in South Kensington, which hosts various interactive/popular science events for adults in the evenings. This one was on taste, and in particular how other senses can manipulate what we think we are tasting. There were some fascinating experiments. The first was to find out whether or not one is a "supertaster", someone with an intense perception of bitterness. This was done by each of us placing a small piece of filter paper impregnated with a chemical, PROP, on our tongues. Anna reacted with violent disgust, indicating that she is a supertaster. Me? I'm a "non-taster" - I could barely detect the mere hint of bitterness. Maybe this is why I like bitter drinks like campari - I simply don't taste the full hit. On the other hand, I don't like things like chili, coffee and grapefruit juice, which supertasters are supposed to dislike. Go figure.

We then dyed our tongues blue with food dye and counted the papillae to be found within the area of a ring reinforcer. Witness possibly the most unflattering picture I will ever post on here:

Then there were a set of vials of coloured, scented liquid - will the perceived aroma be altered by the visual cues? Yes - it was hard to recognise the green one as orange-scented or the red one as lemon.

Water scented with banana odour, or not, and/or with added sugar. Sugar + banana scent = intense banana flavour because we are trained to think of banana as sweet. Just banana scent doesn't taste like banana, but sugar-water alone does if you've had the banana-sugar first.

Blue, ground up mush, very difficult to recognise as rice if you also wear a nose clip to remove taste, texture and colour cues.

The inevitable molecular gastronomy table: textural experiments of Thai chicken soup and a coffee/chili/orange combo mixed with agar and extruded into spaghetti. Ick.

White wine dyed red, and sniffers initially identify "berry" and "chocolate" scents usually associated with red, which magically disappear when you tell them it's really white. Actually, I got that it was white straight away, hooray for my supersmell if not supertaste.

We did get some normal food too whilst we were listening to the talks (I just liked the primary colours here).

On the way out, we passed the beautiful, gothic Natural History Museum in the dark. One day I'll go back and photograph it properly, like this man was doing in the arched doorway.

Back to the bog standard food for a bit now, I think.

Oh, and whilst we were off playing with taste, Gail and Lotta were off playing with crafts at the Make Lounge's pre-Valentine's craft evening. I then had this sweet little Valentine's present in the post from Miss L. Thank you lovely!

Putting that education to use

So what crafty hobby should someone with a Masters degree in chemistry have? I mean, knitting's all well and good, but doesn't really cut it on the science front (although Cassie has written recently about knitting scientists and other mathematical types - also, please go and do her questionnaire on knitblogging) and I felt I needed something with the ability to write an equation and a bit more potential for dangerous chemical burns. Cold process soap making seemed to fit the bill, so hell, why not? You all know what you're getting for Christmas now, and indeed birthdays, forever.

I armed myself with two books before I started, it always being helpful to be informed, and besides, I had no idea what ingredients to order. The one recommended by this website was The Soapmaker's Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch. This is a very comprehensive book, from first steps through to the actual science (with bonding diagrams and everything). I read it cover to cover, but don't find it terribly well laid out. I think I need to apply some judicious sticky labels down the side. The other book, The Handmade Soap Book by Melinda Coss, is far simpler, and easier to follow, but not as informative. They work very well together though. That and a spreadsheet I just had to make myself for the saponification values, being the uber-nerd that I am.

Soap making is rather dangerous, as it involves NaOH, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide, caustic soda or lye. This stuff can burn through flesh, disfigure and blind. You know, I don't recall being particularly scared of it at university, where we threw noxious stuff around the lab with impunity. Perhaps that was the general feeling of immortality that every late-teen has, or perhaps the comforting presence of the lab techs who I'm sure would have known what to do in the event of severe injury (and I only ever saw one bad chemical injury during my studies, although many more cuts on broken glassware). I used to come home with my clothes full of little holes, but miraculously not my flesh. These days, I have far more fear, and therefore approached the lye with caution. In all seriousness, this is bad shit, people.

Because of my course and habit of never throwing anything away, I was already kitted out for protection when I embarked upon the practical session this weekend! This is how you would have found me in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon:

And with a little knowledge of acids and bases, I got out my bottle of vinegar (normally used as fabric softener in this house) to splash in case of alkali burns. Mortal enemies:

The process for making soap, or "saponification", involves the sodium hydroxide turning the fatty acids found in a variety of fats and oils (and, oh, skin, hence those burns) into glycerin and a sodium salt which we normally know as "soap". If you look on your proprietary soap and see something like "sodium tallowate", "palmitate" or "stearate", that's your salt. Indulge me for a second:

C3H5(COOR)3 + 3NaOH --> C3H5(OH)3 + 3NaCOOR

OK, OK, no more of that, I promise. The actual process is relatively simple, assuming you get the amounts right. The amount of lye needed depends on the exact types of fatty acids (those COOR chains) and every kind of fat and oil out there has many different types in different proportions, leading to different lathering/cleansing/conditioning properties. So you can either follow a recipe for the amount of lye, or use some nice numerical charts from the books. I followed a recipe for batch 1 but have now made that spreadsheet I mentioned to work it out for my own proportions of oils.

The fat is by far the most innocuous step. My first batch was to be made of coconut oil, palm oil and olive oil. The first two are solid at room temperature so have to be melted. Here was my pan of fat before melting:

Heh, no I promise I didn't go all Fight Club and source bloodied human fat from the local liposuction clinic. The red colour is because I had steeped the olive oil in chopped alkanet root first. This is a natural dye, acting a bit like litmus paper. It's red in acid, but turns a pretty blue-purple in alkaline conditions such as soap. Seeing as I was scenting this first batch with lavender (being a nice cheap essential oil if this went wrong), it seemed appropriate.

Whilst the oil is cooling back down to around 40C/100F, you prepare your lye by dissolving this very innocent-looking stuff in water. Do not confuse it with sugar.

The mixing with water is highly exothermic (heat generating) so that also has to cool. Mine peaked at about 70C when first mixed, with noxious white fumes given off, and took a little while to cool. Here's where the chemistry training came in useful, with it having been drummed into us for years that you add most reactive to least reactive, never the other way, ie base to water not water to base. That's because if the first drops of water hit that base, there'd be a huge exothermic reaction which is dangerous, whereas the other way round the excess water will quench it. Similarly you add the lye to the fat, not vice versa, later.  The books mentioned doing it this way round, but not why.  Given I like ignoring instructions, I might have done it the other way, had I not known better.

So here were the two liquids, pre-mixing:

The rest all went pretty quickly so no photos. Lye gets added to the oils, and the mixture is then stirred vigorously. I used an electric whisk. This did cause a bit of splashback and I have some tiny red marks on my face from it, and man, they stung - I soon learned to use a pan lid as a splashguard. After 15-20 minutes, when you drip the liquid back into itself, you can see a faint mark on the liquid surface. That's called "trace" and means it's time to add other stuff, such as scent, then pour it into the molds. Note that if you rush this bit, the soap can separate back out into caustic soda and fat, leading to a rather nasty chemical peel instead of nice, fluffy bubbles. I used silicone bakeware (love this stuff) which is non-reactive (teflon or aluminium being bad choices here) and easy to unmold again. I layered dried lavender flowers into the bottom then poured in the soap. Here it is, poured into two loaf tins and some overflow yoghurt pots, as it made more than I thought it would, then wrapped in clingfilm against contamination:

Look how purple the alkanet root had gone! They are then wrapped in towels for insulation, and left for a day to happily react away, generating lots more heat as they go. I kept peeking, of course. Who wouldn't?

This evening I got to free them from their molds, which is important to do whilst the the soap is still soft enough to cut into bars. It then gets to sit and cure further for another four weeks, until it's mild enough to use. Here's the cut soap, which by this time was a pale lilac:

Pretty! So that seems to have worked. I started another two batches tonight, one floral, one rather more manly at my darling's request - he is ever so forbearing of my whims, although did suggest that I could do with a shed.

Fingers crossed it is fully cured in time for present-mas!

Scanning Tunneling Telectroscopy

My "scene" (that is, you lot and half a dozen other people) has been buzzing recently about a new installation down at London Bridge. I therefore made a special trip this evening to view the wonder of the modern age that is... the Telectroscope!

If one were to believe the backstory, the Telectroscope is a vast tunnel running under the Atlantic Ocean, housing an optical viewing device by which residents of London and New York can commune with each other. The project was commenced around the 1890's, but was abandoned, forgotten, and only recently resurrected and completed. The full, tragic story is here. To add weight to the veracity of their claims, a couple of weeks ago a large piece of tunnel-boring equipment was found breaching the ground near City Hall. Finally, the Telectroscope itself was installed and finished.

Really it's all done by a broadband internet connection (hence its sponsorship by Tiscali, about whom I shall say nothing but that I'll never ever use them for telephonic services again, regardless of any goodwill generated by this), but stylistically it's very cool. Check out the details of the brasswork:

And even the ticket is in keeping:

What's not to like about steampunk? I'm sure it's already apparent that I love Victoriana in clothing - as I've said before I adore corsets, crinolines and hats, although sadly I don't get to wear them half as much as I'd like. I also passionately love science. The combination of Victorian dress-up, engineering and outrageous inventors and inventions... well, it could have been made for me, couldn't it?

That and the fact that you do genuinely get to wave and gurn like a loony at similarly over-excited participants over by the Brooklyn Bridge. This is what you look into at the business end:

My fellow Londoners and I were bouncing up and down, pointing and exclaiming, "Oh my god!" Our American co-Telectroscopers were evidently doing exactly the same (there's no sound but I could lipread and only the accents differed). Here are some of the people way down the other end of the tube. I'm in their photos so I'm sure they don't mind being in mine!

Time for some physics geekery: the meaning of the title! Scanning tunneling microscopy, whilst not something I've actually ever done, although I did get examined on it during my Masters year, is a fiendishly clever technique, for which the Nobel Prize was won in 1986. It allows viewing of surfaces at the atomic level. It's amazing. Tunneling itself, by which the microscope works, is one of my favourite concepts in science (do you want a list?) and one of the coolest things in quantum physics. Think of it as the ability to walk through walls, or for water to flow uphill. Electrons are marvellous little beasties and can do these things by means of their wave-like nature. Why does this matter to us? Well, it's the reason why food in a freezer still has a shelf-life, for a start. Those electrons will keep on moving, albeit very slowly, no matter how cold you get them, even down to absolute zero (where by definition there's no vibration). So very slowly, chemical bonds shift and reactions happen, and very very slowly, food still spoils. The concept is also part of the basis of such things as flash memory, which makes our little hard drives, iPods and digital cameras possible. Words cannot express how much I love quantum mechanics.

In other news, and sort of tying in with me hardly ever getting the chance to dress up, today I have been mostly bemoaning the fact that I do not have enough hours in the day to do all the cool stuff that there is to do in this wonderful life. More specifically, these are the things that I do not have time to do over the next couple of weeks, in no particular order:

• Woolfest in Cumbria at the end of June, even though I had planned to go. Next year for sure.
  
• IKnit's knit-themed treasure hunt around London, for Worldwide Knit in Public Day on Saturday (and indeed IKnit Day itself in September, featuring the Yarn Harlot).
  
• The Swarovski Runway Rocks show tomorrow night, or indeed any of the exhibition in the Crystallized Lounge that's on all this week. Or any of their courses.  Sparkly!  
  
• Tony Conrad: Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective, a music/art performance in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall this Saturday evening.
  
• In the Loop: Knitting Past, Present & Future, a three-day knitting conference in July in Winchester. Can't get the time off work.
  
• Any of the upcoming baking, cake decorating or sugarcraft courses at Squires Kitchen School. They're all fully booked anyway.
  
• Pretty much anything at the Islington Make Lounge.
  
• The next Last Tuesday Society Ball, which is the only one of these where corsets would actually have been appropriate, nay, de riguer.
  

So hopefully that will give some inspiration to anyone looking for something to do, although I will be practically chartreuse with envy.

If only I could say I was cash-rich, time-poor, but sadly the first part of that isn't actually true... I shall console myself with the fact that it's all because I'm doing other stuff instead. Unless, electron-like, I can walk through the walls of bank vaults, and then be in two places at once?

We like lichens

Still battling with the cold, and it's a good job it doesn't affect my typing. In reality, I'm only uttering pitiful squeaks. I felt reasonably human for most of the day, but I always seem to sink between about 6pm and 10am the next day. Not good.

However, I got quite a lot done today during the "good" hours. Firstly, a brief-ish stint staring out the French windows for the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. Nothing too exciting but all the data is important. The boyfriend did his count yesterday in the park, which is allowed, but I'm not sure they were envisaging the type of park we're near, with a large lake. A little grebe is hardly a garden bird. But never mind.

Then we headed down south for some wildlife tuition at Sydenham Hill nature reserve. As you may be aware, there's a strong north-south divide in London, with closely held loyalties to one and deep mistrust of the other, generally based on where one first lives on moving here. I got a place in halls of residence in Hampstead when I came up to uni, and so have been a north London girl ever since and only go south of the river with a distinct sense of trepidation. We survived though, and even found some interesting statues at Brixton overground station - a life size bronze commuter on each platform. This woman was patiently waiting for a train on the southbound side:

Whilst this bloke lounged against the wall opposite, headed back up to London:

The purpose of our trip: a field session on lichens, courtesy of the London Wildlife Trust. Lichens are symbiotic organisms, effectively the bastard offspring of algae and fungi, an unholy inter-kingdom alliance that produces a vast range of bizarre scaly, warty, powdery or feathery growths on trees, rocks etc, eaten by very little apart from reindeer (and there aren't many of those in south London). Out of the UK's roughly 1,600 species, we were taught to recognise 10 or so. There are at least three of them on this stick:

It was a very interesting yomp through the forests, and I love learning about the more obscure flora and fauna out there - in future I'll notice them so much more. But, whilst the boyfriend was diligently making notes (it's his job), I was rather distracted by some startling knitwear at large amongst the decidedly nerdy lichen-spotting fraternity. I therefore missed some crucial details of lichen reproduction to surreptitiously take photos for your amusement. Firstly, a very bright pair of rainbow fingerless gloves, in some kind of reverse stocking stitch/stocking stitch horizontal rib, not handmade as I could see a maker's label:

(Glad I didn't get busted taking photos, essentially, of her crotch.)

Better still, a woman wearing a vast amount of crazy knitwear - she must be a knitter, right? From the top, a cream chunky knit hat with a pom-pom, an eye-watering intarsia jumper in neon colours, and, if you look very closely, red and white striped angora fingerless gloves. Whoa.

At a static point in the proceedings, I snuck a close-up of that jumper over the boyfriend's shoulder. My eyes!

Lichens, incidentally, are, according to Wikipedia, a source of natural dyes for yarn and fabric, so we should all love and respect them. And isn't "ethnolichenology" a great name for a scientific discipline?

After the lichen hunting had finished, I headed off to Ting's to celebrate her new arrival, the gorgeous Ewan, and coo over him as all good godmothers should do. I'm sure she'll be waxing lyrical about her bundle of joy on her blog soon enough, so I won't write too much, but maybe one day soon I'll be able to give him a little brother or sister?

But indisputably the most bizarre sighting of the day? This abandoned wig on the Victoria line:

Is there someone out there who got off the train and suddenly realised they were bald? If so, it's probably in lost property with the other weird stuff. Give them a call before I claim it and try to spin it...

To infinity, and beyond!

As requested, I have now added some FO pics to the previous entry and to Ravelry. No pics of the yarn until the weekend though, it's just too dark to take decent photos in the evenings, and I don't have enough high-powered light sources in this flat. Damn those energy saving bulbs.

Last night's entertainment was all in the realm of space-time. We started off with another lecture at the Royal Society, which purported to be on the role of infinity in physics. Right up my street. When the talk was introduced it was explained that it was in fact going to be about reductionism versus holism in the philosophy of science, again concepts with which I am familiar. But my god, I couldn't understand a word the (undeniably very clever) speaker was on about. I have never heard such an interesting topic made so unfathomably dull. To give some flavour of this, his slides (and he said he'd never used slides before - quite how that's possible in this age of powerpoint is beyond me) were just projected pages from a textbook, all solid paragraphs of text and equations. And there were handouts! Dear me, these lectures are meant to be entertaining and informative, not boring and unintelligible. Certainly they should not require handouts of pure mathematical formulae to understand.

Slightly piqued at having sat through that, we agreed to meet people to go to the cinema, without much idea of what we were going to see or why. It was Stardust, and I was dubious about going to see something that I only knew of as a fairy story. I was wrong, it was brilliant! Genuinely funny, intelligent and not for children. It didn't divert from the standard romantic formula, but it was all so clever and the cast were wonderful (especially Mark Williams and Robert de Niro). I came out, well, glowing like a star. This was all explained by the credits which revealed it to be a Neil Gaiman story - why I wasn't aware of this before I don't know, as I love his work. Definitely go see.

Tonight I am in making a lemon cake (the Nigella loaf cake again) for the lovely Lotta to see her through her weekend of horrible revision - good luck hun!  I am greatly contented when watching the Brownian motion of icing sugar particles suspended in hot lemon juice, stood in a cloud of citrus smell.

Incidentally I think I am obsessed with the craft thing, someone on the radio just mentioned "having a crafty cigarette" and my immediate thought was to wonder how they made that...

We're all doomed

As a complete contrast to the weekend, tonight we went to a talk by James Lovelock at the Royal Society. Free science, I love it! These are government funded and highly egalitarian in that you can't even book tickets but just have to turn up and queue. That's great except for the time when we came to see David Attenborough (he is my god) speak and didn't get in after queueing for an hour in a snowstorm. I got chilblains that night that have never really gone away.

Listening to Lovelock speak you'd think there'll never be snowstorms again. He is one of our most eminent environmental scientists and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis. This says that the planet and its living inhabitants (its biota) should be viewed on a holistic basis as, effectively, a single living organism which can regulate itself. Just as the human body when exposed to heat sweats, leading to evaporation which cools the skin and blood supply, so when the planet heats up water evaporates (using up heat energy) and forms clouds (reflecting radiation back into space) and raining, cooling the surface. To bring the biota in, just as the human body can sense too much CO2 in the blood via chemoreceptors in the circulatory system and automatically increases the breathing rate to remove it, so when CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere, plants which "breathe" CO2 flourish and multiply, thus using up more and more CO2, and levels in the atmosphere fall. The earth therefore regulates itself and stays relatively constant for atmosphere, temperature etc: "homeostasis".  It is much like Le Chatelier's Principle in chemistry: give one variable in an equilibrium a shove and the system, after swinging a little like a pendulum, will eventually find a steady state to rest in again. Of course this is on a much more geological/evolutionary timescale.

Gaia was initially rejected and is still misunderstood as some kind of mystical, pagan belief system. Blame William Golding who suggested to Lovelock that he name it after the Greek goddess of the earth. There is no conciousness involved in Gaia, or "Earth System Science" as it has come to be known in an attempt to escape the spiritual connotations. The system merely reacts and recalibrates as necessary, whether the outcome be good or bad. Animals and plants on the planet will evolve to best suit their new environment, and they will in turn alter their environment by their behaviour, creating the need to evolve again in a feedback loop.

Unfortunately the subject of Lovelock's talk tonight was that climate change represents an alteration to the ecosystem which is going too fast for the environment to equilibrate fast enough to prevent catastrophe for civilisation. The rate of additional CO2 emissions is such that plants have no chance of growing fast enough to use it all up in time, especially since we have constrained the vegetation's potential to help through extensive farming (because crops just aren't as good at metabolising CO2 as rainforests). Worse still, our nice, balanced negative feedback loop may now have become a rather more terrifying positive feedback loop, where changes become amplified rather than corrected. For example, polar ice caps are melting due to global warming, and where we previously had white areas of ice to reflect back sunlight like a mirror (the earth's "albido"), now we have dark seas which absorb those photons and accelerate the heating process.

He didn't use the word "catastrophe" but he did use "apocalypse". He also referred to us being in a blitzkreig-like war with our planet, which is moving too fast for the current methods (reduction of carbon emissions, sustainable living) to make any difference whatsoever. He says it is just too late and that the IPCC's latest report on climate change is vastly optimistic. His models show polar ice disappearing totally in the next five years, and he estimates that realistically the earth can support only one billion people. The rest of us will die of drought and starvation (heat will cause desertification of vast tracts of Europe and the Americas and so where will we grow our food?) unless drastic action is taken. His suggestions were the stuff of science fiction: mirrors in space to reflect back the heat, ways of turning CO2 and nitrates into food, an as-yet-untested theory of churning up the oceans to absorb more CO2. But who knows if we can do those in time or whether they will work?

Lovelock did say that he doesn't know for sure if this will all happen, because he is a scientist and knows that we can rarely be 100% certain of anything. But his talk and his data were pretty compelling and, as you would imagine, all rather depressing. So where does this leave us? Tempting to just give up on all our green credentials to which society is only just warming (no pun intended), as we are about 200 years late in starting? I think not, because doing something is better than doing nothing, and Lovelock did agree that we need to work on living sustainably in addition to the drastic action needed. But we mustn't be complacent that cutting down on fossil fuel use and recycling a few plastic cups will be enough long-term. And we have to insist that governments take this seriously - granted the UK seems to at least be meeting its Kyoto obligations (again, not enough, but a start) but the USA and Australia are just not taking this anything like seriously enough.

The point being, I suppose, that a large-scale natural disaster because of global warming is highly likely to happen in our own lifetimes, even in the next decade, not just in some wishy-washy future time in the lives of our children and grandchildren. Something needs to be done and what we are doing is just not enough.

A press release on his talk can be found here which explains things in a little more depth.

Also, I am horribly upset that the world's oldest animal, a 400+ year old ocean quahog clam that has been named Ming (after the dynasty not after the ex-leader of the Lib Dems), appears to have been killed in the attempt by scientists in Wales to age it, given the past tense of the article and the dissected shell in the photo.

Sleep well.