Comparison of three different watering regimes for Parsley

On 25th February, in an on-line forum I read (one of several for owners where I have my home in Spain) I saw a link to a rather alarmist (and potentially alarming) story about the alleged dangers inherent in using a micro-wave for heating or cooking food and this prompted me to write three tweets as follows:

First tweet here Is cooking in a #microwave safe? I always thought so, but since reading about it, now I'm not so sure. Just search internet for the dangers.

- in response I got a couple of responses from Twitter acquaintances, prompting a further two tweets:

Second tweet here @seafrontbloke @SeanLXIV May be all nonsense but take a look at this usahitman.com/microwave-test/

and:

Third tweet here @seafrontbloke @SeanLXIV I'm going to do my own experiment with 3 tubs of cress -1 tap water, 2 cooled m'wave water, 3 cooled boiled water

- after writing that third tweet I went out to visit my local main supermarket, with the intention of buying three tubs of growing cress, having often bought it there before - I like to sprinkle cut cress over salads and certain cooked fish - with the intention of running my own experiment. In the event, the supermarket that day had only two tubs of cress left, so I drove to a nearby town and in one supermarket there bought three quite large pots of healthy-looking growing flat-leaf parsley, very similar in growth and general vigour to my eye and thought, well, I'll try it with these instead.

When I got home a little later I thought the plants looked pretty healthy and although the soil wasn't 'dry' I thought they probably needed some water fairly soon, but that it would do them no harm to wait several hours until I had prepared the different 'types' of water.

Methodology:
- For the 'micro-waved' water, I boiled tap water as hot as I could get it in the micro-wave in a ceramic mug and transferred the resultant boiled water to another ceramic mug, covered it with a saucer and let it rest about 6 hours so that it reached room temperature;
- For the 'boiled' water, I boiled tap water in my electric kettle (made of stainless steel with a concealed element), filled a ceramic mug with the boiled water, covered it with a saucer and let it rest about 6 hours so that it reached room temperature;
- For the 'tap water', I filled a ceramic mug with tap water, covered it with a saucer and let it rest about 6 hours so that it reached room temperature.

I watered each plant with exactly the same quantity of water on each occasion, using for the purpose either a stainless steel 1/4 cup measure, or a stainless steel 1 tablespoon measuring spoon (I have a set of American-style measuring cups and a set of measuring spoons, both made of stainless steel) and I dried/cleaned each utensil before and after watering each plant. On the first evening, each plant was given 2x 1/4 cups of water, because as I wrote earlier I thought they probably needed it. After that I watered each plant mostly once a day in the morning, or occasionally a second watering took place late in the afternoon - usually one 1/4 cup each or 1 or 2 tablespoons each, depending on what I thought they needed. In all cases each plant was given exactly the same quantity of water.

For the first 4 days, the plants were kept in a place (a corner of my kitchen) where although they had plenty of light it was mainly from vertically above (a skylight) and rotated twice a day to try and ensure they received similar levels of light. However, by day 4 I began to think they were becoming somewhat etiolated, so I moved them to another room, a spare bedroom, where they had a much larger window which receives much more of whatever light and sun is available in these northern latitudes and it so happens that for the past several days we have had bright and sunny days and although pretty cold out of doors, my apartment is very effectively centrally-heated, again each plant was rotated twice a day to try and ensure very similar light levels for each plant.

You will perhaps notice that in the photographs on days 5 and 7, the 'micro-wave' plant is looking rather bedraggled, with the 'kettle' plant only a little better, but with the 'tap water' plant looking somewhat better. However by day 9 all three plants seemed to be healthier-looking and much more similar in growth and by day 11 (today) all three were to my eyes very similar. It was also very noticeable that all plants were using more water - that is to say, excess water was not quickly draining through onto the plate on which each plant-pot rested and the increased levels of light now available to them made them after a few days all look rather healthier and much more equal in growth and general health than on days 5 and 7.

My general conclusion is that the experiment linked to in my second tweet above is a load of alarmist baloney. Interestingly enough, one of the comments in the second tweet above links to another experiment which draws much the same conclusions as my own experiment.

I mentioned in a fourth tweet the following:

See it here @SeanLXIV @seafrontbloke LOL - but I'll post results with photos in 10 or 11 days. Meantime I won't be using my microwave. No hardship.

- so this article is the result of my experiment, as promised, into this supposed phenomenon. Suffice to say I will, from tomorrow, be using my micro-wave oven again to cook certain foods when I feel like it - I have micro-wave steamers which I have often used to cook/steam vegetables and fish and even occasionally chicken. I have tried it on one occasion with steak - rib-eye, my favourite cut - but that was NOT a success. Below are the photographs taken during my experiment with, in each photograph, the plants being the 'micro-wave' at left, the 'kettle' in the middle and the 'tap water' at the right. Larger images are available to view by clicking on the links below. Judge for yourself. You will notice that in the later photographs all three plants look somewhat 'yellower' and less intensely green - my conclusion is that when I bought the plants in the supermarket, they will have been grown under ideal commercial conditions, using most probably artificial light of a wavelength closely duplicating optimum sunlight, whereas after a few days in my dubious 'care' the poor plants had to content themselves with the natural light available at a latitude/longitude (57° 35' 0" N / 3° 52' 0" W) of the northern Scottish town of Nairn in late-winter. The photographs below were all taken in exactly the same position in another corner of my kitchen under as similar lighting conditions as I could manage to achieve:

Comparison of three different watering regimes for Parsley (25 February - 6 March 2012) Click here to see enlargements of all these photographs. Day 1 - 25 February 2012 - start of experiment Day 3 - 27 February 2012 Day 5 - 29 February 2012 Day 7 - 2 March 2012 Day 9 - 4 March 2012 Day 11 - 6 March 2012 - end of experiment Click here to see enlargements of all these photographs.

Juggling act for Nairn chicken producer

I have often noticed the mobile chicken sheds in a farm field near the main road from Nairn to Inverness - my observations have been that the sheds remain in one position for a few months at a time before being moved to other parts of the farm, some visible from the road, some not. I've also noticed the lengthy mounds of chicken manure that seems to rotate in one part of a large field. It is very interesting to learn more of this agri-business in an article in Farmers Weekly (not of course a publication I read regularly, it must be said).

Farmer Willie Lean also owns one of the best and most popular restaurants in Nairn, The Classroom Bistro, and much of the produce used and served there is locally-sourced, including of course chickens from his own farm, but also pork and beef from other local farms. Prices in that restaurant are not cheap, of course, but then quality and named-sourcing from local producers costs money, specially when supermarkets tend to force down the gate-price for their large contract purchases.

Bright youngster from Nairn wins prestigious sail-design award

Nine year old budding sailor Mariah Weller from Nairn has won a nationwide sail-design competition, open to young designers under the age of 16, at the RYA Volvo Dinghy Show 2012 in London and is now the proud owner of a new RS Tera dinghy. Mariah and her family were on hand to receive her prize as the family had flown to London on learning that she had been short-listed amongst the 6 best entries.



The competition was to design a sail for an RS Tera dinghy and among the finalists from the entrance list of about 80 was four-year-old Martha Oakley from Huntingdon. The other finalists were 11-year-old Emma Bennett (Lymington), 12-year-old Zoe Burden (Kilcreggan), Oliver Guess, 14 (Weston Super Mare) and 13-year-old Rebecca Lewis (Rugby).

The mystery of country-specific URL re-directs explained

I have noticed very recently that visitors to various blogs (including my own) are being re-directed to country-specific URLs when visited by readers from specific countries. So far I have seen variants of my blog (whose true URL is http://billcameron.blogspot.com/) ending in:
.IN (for India)
.com.au (for Australia)
.co.nz (for New Zealand).

A quick search on Google (where else!) reveals that this is no mere fluke. It is a practice being rolled out by Google/Blogger across various countries (starting with India, apparently) as a way of putting in place country-specific 'filtering' of content to 'comply with local laws' - or CENSORSHIP to you or me! You can read Google's rationale for this here.

I am surmising this is all the fall-out from the recent difficulties that Google had experienced in China, where it agreed initially to comply with censorship reqirements there by filtering out content viewable there that the government there did not like, until later it decided to pull out of China entirely, after an international outcry. This new mechanism presumably gives Google the ability more easily to censor content viewable from specific jurisdictions and thus 'comply with local laws' more readily (CENSORSHIP in other words!) whilst in theory not affecting content viewable elsewhere.

Whilst one cannot imagine plausibly that countries such as Australia or New Zealand, perhaps India too, are going to attempt to censor content viewable in their territories, what this change means is that the building blocks are being put in place, for commercial reasons, by Google to allow them to protect their own business interests with possibly immense negative consequences for freedom of information and speech.

Google may choose to call this 'complying with local laws', I call it what it is:
CENSORSHIP

"Anticipatory" medical care for the elderly in a Nairn GP practice

Research into end-of-life medical treatment for elderly patients by Nairn and Ardersier GP practice involved the creation of "anticipatory care plans" for 100 high-risk patients.

This sounds all very fine and dandy, but trying to get the medical and care services merely to take more than a passing interest in the care and medical needs of a frail elderly neighbour, also in Nairn but registered with a different GP practice, over the past few weeks has been frustratingly different; one almost gets the impression that they would prefer that she drop down dead to save them the bother (and cost) of intervention. So much for high-falutin' research when contrasted with not-so-'Best Practice'!

Such action, little as it is so far, has only happened because of the intervention of several concerned friends (me and another in the main) intervening direct with Social Services to put a spur to their flanks! Not happy!

Just another day in the life of the US President

President Obama attends the White House science fair:

Facebook account deleted

(Please see UPDATE at end)

I have just permanently deleted my Facebook account. It is very difficult to find out how to do this, but I have finally managed it. Apparently my data will be retained for two weeks, in case I change my mind, but I think this most unlikely. I am currently in process of removing all references to my former Facebook account in my other websites and blogs.

On one previous occasion I 'deactivated' my Facebook account, because at that time it seemed impossible to delete it, but was persuaded back for various reasons, but those reasons have disappeared. I continue to use Twitter, which I find a much more congenial and less obtrusive platform.

UPDATE (Tuesday 7FEB2012 08.02 GMT) I have resurrected my Facebook account, but will be restricting severely the way I use it from now on; I will not (at least for the present) be adding back the link to it here. Apart from a few specific uses (to exchange information with one or two people only), the only motivation for me to return is to retain the username and not allow it to be used by someone else in the future - I'm afraid I cannot write anything more positive.

Graham's Dairies profits plummet

(Please see UPDATE at end)

I've just come across this report in the Herald about the recent dramatic fall in pre-tax profits at Graham's Dairies, down 42.5 per cent, whereas turnover rose a significant 20 per cent.

This is usually a sign of over-trading, gaining turnover at the expense of margins. Graham's supplies dairy products to supermarket chains Asda, Sainsbury, Waitrose and Tesco and recently won new business from Morrisons; all have been conducting a 'price war' to gain/retain market share in the current difficult economic climate (and of course it was announced only a couple of weeks ago that Tesco has had very poor trading conditions over Christmas, resulting in a significant fall in share value for the company with renewed profit warnings for the upcoming Easter trading period).

Graham's describes itself as the 'largest independent dairy' group in Scotland. I last wrote about the Bridge of Allan-based company in September 2010 when it was announced it was acquiring Claymore Dairies, at that time the largest employer in Nairn.

All this is unfortunately a graphic illustration of the general malaise that the country, the EU and the wider world is experiencing just now and quite probably for some time to come - as I have written here before "hold on to your hats, folks", expect things to get worse before there is even the glimmer of a prospect of them getting better (for those who remain standing).

UPDATE (Friday 27JAN2012 13.50 GMT) I had not realised that Graham's Dairies was not the only dairy company in the news. The Glasgow-based Robert Wiseman Dairies agreed a couple of weeks ago to be acquired by the German Muller in a cash deal valued at GBP 279.5 million; the company announced 16JAN2011 that more than half the shareholders have agreed; although they have not yet officially voted, it is regarded as a 'done deal'. The company produces about 30 per cent of the fresh milk consumed in the UK. For an insight into how a 'savvy' investor analysed prospects at Wiseman to his advantage click here. Like Graham's, Wiseman recently reported a major drop in profits and the further concentration in production is already worrying some farmers as Muller have apparently in recent weeks cut the price they pay for milk by 0.5p to 29.8p a litre, presumably a way of increasing their own margins (by use of their significant buying power) at the expense of producers who are faced with unavoidably increasing input costs.

What we mean ... What they think we mean

Occasionally I come across something interesting, or amusing, or both and this seems to qualify.

When British people say something [idiomatically], do other nationalities, whether English-speaking or non English-speaking, always understand accurately what is implied by the words being used? Communications between people using supposedly the same language, English, as their native tongue can certainly be fraught with misunderstanding when British, Americans or Australians are involved, although I'd say this tends to be marginally less so when I've dealt with Canadians. My own experience over the years has led me to understand that very often misunderstandings arise because people (in this case we British) do not necessarily say directly what they mean, out of 'politeness' or an unwillingness to upset the other person in a social or business context. Mind you, it is not only we British who do this - my dealings with non-European nationalities such as Chinese or Japanese have often thrown up similar mutual misunderstandings and for much the same reasons, not to mention the perils of taking at 'face value' what a French person really means when [s]he says something.

Anyway here is what I came across in the Twitter feed of someone I follow:

I asked him where he got it from and he mentioned the website of a UK charity, but it seems they got it from someplace else and so on - this article in the University of Pennsylvania's "Language Log" gives more background although how accurate or exhaustive it is I cannot say. It adds some more detail to the table above and gives a few phrases in French which can mask what is really being said. In my experience all these are scarily accurate.

Nairn man may face jail, but there's another aspect to the incident

A young Nairn man has been told he may face a jail sentence, even if the preferred punishment is a 'restriction of liberty' order (I presume this is something like a curfew enforced by an electronic tag?) for having fired an air-gun over the heads of three boys and a girls (aged between 12 and 15) who were engaged in throwing snowballs at his door. Apparently he asked them to stop doing this, but when they ignored him he used his air-gun.

It is clear that the domestic circumstance of the man who fired the air-gun are somewhat precarious and that if he cannot supply a permanent address the only alternative may be some kind of custodial sentence.

Obviously it is not acceptable for someone to use an air-gun in this manner and he requires punishment, but I wonder if the children who were making a nuisance of themselves will be admonished in any way at all? The article certainly gives no clue about this. Will their parents take them in hand and ensure they do not make a nuisance of themselves in future? Presumably they were discussing the incident (jokingly or in a terrified manner, we are not told) when their 'Guidance teacher' (whatever that is!) overheard them. Will their 'Guidance teacher' be telling them the facts of life about what it takes to be a 'good citizen'? Obviously the man possibly facing a jail sentence needs to learn about this too, but those kids need to know that they shouldn't be going around annoying their neighbours 'for a lark'!