Category: Teaching

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I started the eighth grade at Saint Anne’s High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas when I was 13 years old.  I sort of skipped the seventh grade, and the sisters at Saint Anne’s thought that I was OK to go directly to the eighth grade from the sixth.

I flourished there, and still have several of my friends there in contact.  My very best male friend was from there, and we converse almost every night.  We love each other as brothers do, and he is actually more of a brother to me than my own brother is in some respects.

Two weeks ago we began a short series on milk, in particular cow’s milk, used as a food by humans.  We mentioned that humans are the only species to drink any kind of milk after infancy (unless we feed it to animals).  We also mentioned that human milk is the very best food for human infants.  Next week we shall end the series by talking about the advantages of real milk to infants unless readers would rather see a discussion of cheese first.

Last time we pretty much focused on fresh milk and few derivatives of it.  This week we shall look at some of the derivatives of milk, either fresh or fermented.  There is a marvelous variety of liquid milk derivatives available, and some are very delicious.  In addition, there is butter which obviously is not liquid.

For a product as perishable as milk, it is amazing that so many wholesome fermented products can be made from it.  There are reasons for that, and we shall get to them in due course.

Last time we looked at the extremely busy 1976, a year filled with touring in Europe, the UK, and especially in North America.  It turns out that 1977 would be relatively quiet from that perspective, but quite lively from some others.

Townshend was burnt out from touring, and, interestingly, Daltrey was as well.  He even turned down a lucrative set of North American opportunities, saying that he could not devote the emotion and energy to a solo tour that he should reserve for future tours with The Who.

On the other hand, Entwistle and Moon lived to tour, but did not.  Moon never really had the wherewithal to tour solo, and the last time that Entwistle did he lost lots of money.  So they pretty stayed put for 1977.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I was not sure that I would be able to post tonight because I crashed my system doing something stupid night before last, but I finally got it going again.  I had to take the radical step of completely wiping my hard drive, reloading Windows, and then restoring all of the files that I had archived onto a USB hard drive.  I NEVER will make the mistake of trying to tweak my OS again!  I really like that external hard drive and will make backups of my critical files monthly.  I think that I will take it to my neighbors’ house when not using it in case of fire or somesuch.

In any event, I am here and tonight we shall discuss the railroad tracks that ran just south of my house.  It was operated by Midland Valley Lines, out of Muskogee, Oklahoma.  Mostly the branch by my house hauled coal, because Hackett coal was in high demand for making coke for the steel mills when I was a lad.

NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometry is one of the big guns in organic chemistry and biochemistry for determining how atoms are strung together in molecules.  There are many different kinds, but the two of greatest utility to chemists are proton NMR and carbon-13 NMR.  A friend of mine asked me for some help for his daughter who is studying the subject in Organic Chemistry right now, so I thought that I might as well use it as a topic for this series.

Before we get deep into the subject, note that some authors refer to NMR spectrometry and others to NMR spectroscopy.  I prefer the former term because the connotation of spectroscopy, to me at least, has to do with lenses, prisms, and diffraction gratings, making it an optical method.  There are no analogous devices in NMR, so I prefer spectrometry.

All NMR has some features in common, so we might as well cover the basics first.  By the way, this has nothing to do with nuclear energy, and the only radiation present is in the radiofrequency range, so it will not fry you.

This is heavily connected with quantum mechanics, but I shall try to use analogies that are more easily visualized than a bunch of equations.  I do not intend for this to be a graduate level abstract.

Last time we looked at 1975, and if anything 1976 was a bit more settled for The Who in some respects.  Most of their time was spent doing a huge tour, with multiple Atlantic Ocean crossings.  There were a couple of reasons for that.

Likely the largest reason was that the dispute betwixt the band and Kit Lambert was still in litigation, and it was sort of difficult to release old material, and new material was still being written.  They were stuck in a way just to perform live.  That was to my personal advantage, and more on that is to come later.

One the whole, the band were probably at their best musically in 1976.  The exception was Moon, who was beginning to accelerate his decline both personally and musically, but that did not come out until sort of late in the year.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

There is tremendous betwixt how children were raised 50 years ago and now, whether in a little town or a large city.  Tonight we shall contrast how I was raised to how children today are.  I am not talking so much about the cultural evolution as I am the technology available, but the two are quite entangled.

This is going to be sort of a stream of consciousness set of recollections about how we did things back when I was little and how it is done now.  Most of the topics are everyday activities that families do routinely.  

Of all foodstuffs, milk is unique in that it provides all of the nutritional needs for infant mammals.  In addition to nutrition, it also supplies essential antibodies the first few days to newborns.  Milk is unique to mammals, and is one of the reasons that mammals had the evolutionary advantage that they had when they arose during the age of reptiles.

However, humans are also unique in that we are one of the few mammals who continue to take it after infancy, and the only species that continues to take it after adolescence and into adulthood.  Milk is far from the perfect food for adults, but certainly can be part of healthy diet.

Humans are also unique in that we are the only species that takes milk in a natural setting from other species.  By that I mean that we actively collect it, not like giving the cat a saucer of milk.  The nutritive value of milk is species specific, and our habit to taking cows’ milk (for the most part) is quite unnatural.

If 1974 had been a bizarre year, 1975 was more structured in some ways.  Several events happened in 1975 that were important to their financial security, for both good and ill.

The most significant events of 1975 were the release of the motion picture Tommy, the release of The Who by Numbers, and the beginning of a huge tour of Europe, the UK, and North America.  Now, there were certainly some problems associated with all three of these events, but 1975 turned out to be a pretty good year for them.

However, Townshend was not a really good frame of mind for much of the year.  He was very unhappy with his place in the band and whether or not there even should be a band called The Who, at least with him in it.  It is sort of an interesting turn of events that kept them together, and there is more on that later.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Last time we talked about some cars that I helped my father restore either for resale or for keeping.  Cars seem to be a popular topic here, so we shall continue this theme about cars that were mine back in the day when I was growing up.

I have also decided to define my “growing up” period from birth to when I was 20 years old.  I have chosen this somewhat arbitrarily, but since I married at 20 it seems to be a pretty good choice.  Realistically, I do not think that anyone is grown up at 20, but I have to make some sort of demarcation.

What has happened to Keith Olbermann?  

I know that he has some health issues, but for Chrissakes, he is younger than I am, and I NEVER miss a post unless something really important is happening.  And I do not make any money posting here, either.

Last time we talked about trichonomiasis, a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that often produces no symptoms.  Chlamydia is another STI that often causes no symptoms, at least initially.  We shall investigate this condition this week and then move to topics other than STIs next time.

This infection is usually caused in humans by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis and is found only in humans.  Unlike trichomoniasis, women are more often asymptomatic than are men.  Estimates are that around 75% of women present with no symptoms whislt around 50% of men do have symptoms, almost the opposite from our infection of the week last time.

Although this is a serious subject, let us keep it a bit light.  After the fold in a song by Todd Rundgren called “You Left me Sore”.  Although most likely written about gonorrhea, it is still apt in this case.