I admit it.

Blogging is still embarrassing.  There is just something so inherently narcissistic about it that it's painful.  Unless you're traveling and doing something really cool like working in Antarctica or something.  For the vast majority of us, blogs really are not necessary.  And the people I started this thing to connect with never post (because blogging is embarrassing and we all have real lives).  Although I totally would read their posts, rapt, if they ever posted!!  AHEM.  But I'm really not doing anything that requires me to blog about it.

I'll tell you the truth.  I started the blog to try and get my soap company's website better rankings on google.  But because Kokosolie Soaps are going to be going into retirement very soon (and because it hasn't worked since I haven't updated this thing more than once a month), I know I will have absolutely no motivation to keep it up.

BUT!  Keep a look out for me if I actually do something cutting edge or unique like clone a wooly mammoth or something one day.

And for good measure: lots of new soap at Kokosolie Soaps.  Get them before they're gone forever!  Pass on the word to your friends!

Using Complexity Theory to "Fix" Our Public Education System

There's been a lot of controversy about the charter schools that are popping up all over the country in response to under-performing public schools in low-income areas.  One of the most commonly made complaints made by critics of the movement is that charter schools do not solve the problem for the majority of kids that aren't lucky enough to win the lottery to enter the school.  Another, less studied, response to the idea of charter schools is, "why don't we just fix the public schools?"

Both of these positions express valid concerns, and education policy makers would be wise to consider them.  Many who have these and other strong reactions to the idea of these quasi-public charter schools, however, seem to be missing a critical, but not immediately apparent, function of charter schools in this country.

Many opponents of the charter school movement cite the consistently successful public education systems of such countries as Finland and Denmark, where charter schools and even standardized tests are non-existent.  Finland and Denmark, however, have homogeneous populations just over 5 million people with some of the highest rates of economic equity in the world.  The United States on the other hand, is a relatively new country faced with serving the needs of 300 million plus demographic that is divergent in race, socio-economic status, culture, language, and religion.

For such a population, semi-privatization of education through charter schools may not be the final solution to the growing and distressing problem of the education gap between the poor and the rich, or the performance gap between America's children and those of other nations.  Charter schools, are, however, an intermediate stage in our progress toward an education system that works not just the lucky few that can afford all of the aspects of what it takes to be academically successful.  Because "fixing the public schools" is not as simple as it sounds.  You might think, "why doesn't someone just go in there, tell everyone what to do, and make things run right?"  It seems the most straightforward answer to that is that we don't really know what it takes to make a system that has to educate such a diverse demographic "run right". 

It is unlikely that a real, inclusive solution will involve progress only in one direction.  There are simply too many people, with too greatly varying needs to make a panacea likely.  And barriers to academic success are not only found in the classroom, so it follows that the solution cannot be found only in the classroom.

With the complexity of the problem established, perhaps it has become more clear why charter schools might be necessary in order to ultimately "fix the public school system".  The public school system is called a system precisely because it shows some basic consistency amongst schools.  These schools are governed on a larger scale by a set of policies that all schools must follow.  These schools are also obligated to accept all students in their district, which means they're almost always over capacity with a limited amount of flexibility in terms of their policy making and hiring and firing capabilities.  By definition, a system must act together as one and work together.  We've already established that the America public system is already inundated with the demands of a huge population, and, moreover, a heterogeneous population.

Imagine trying to implement untested policies and models on such a system all at once, without establishing a control against which to compare the results of such policies.  It would be chaos.  In order for educators to glean what it takes to make the public school system to run right, there must be a lengthy, rigorous, peer-duplicated period of experimentation.  Once we do discover what works in raising the academic performance of each and every student in the, as it is well established to be, uniquely challenging climate of the country, the model or models would need to be developed and adapted for implementation on a large scale. 

Charter schools are an excellent way to allow testing of many variations of models on manageable sample of the population.  They are experimental groups that are then commensurable to the control group of the public school system as it is.  Should the ultimate solution to the problem be that all public schools are transformed into charter schools (a growing trend referred to as "school turnaround"), the entire system will have been transformed into a more horizontally governed system, but one which still functions under similar principles and is subject to similar standards and funding.  Such a horizontally governed system will allow individual schools to respond to the needs of their community, rather than attempt to apply a blanket model that may or may not serve the cultural needs of its demographic.

The interaction between charter schools and the larger system of public education that governs them can be characterized as a complex adaptive organization, laid forth in complexity theory.  Applying principles of complexity theory to the interaction of charter school and school system can clarify the role that charter schools are playing in actually strengthening our public school system, rather than destabilizing it, as it may appear on the surface.  While the functioning of less stringently governed entities within a historically highly traditional organization can be disconcerting, complex adaptive systems functioning under the principles laid out by complexity theory have been shown to evolve in ways that cause the least amount of functional disruption for a maximum positive effect.

So give charter schools some time to show us what, at this point, only such specialized and methodical experimental pools can show us.  Perhaps they will help us transform the system, perhaps they will help us to apply a new model to the system, or perhaps they will become the system.  Critics and supporters a like will play an important role in making sense of what we learn in the next several years and decades from the charter school movement.

How to use our national resources wisely

Things we should be spending all of our money on:

Teleportation

Setting up a colony on another planet

Creating more absorbent paper towels

How to make cream cheese

This post was scheduled to be "how to be happy", but I suppose anything to do with the making and eating of cheese is closely related to matters of happiness.

Cream cheese is the easiest of all of the cheeses to make. Why? Because it doesn't require you to slaughter a baby goat and harvest rennet (a mix of natural enzymes specially designed to digest the milk from the mother) from its stomach to separate the protein and fat from the whey. In fact, if you know a bit about how bacterial growth is effected by temperature changes, you can use good old yogurt culture from an unpasteurized store-bought yogurt.

The most important factors in creating the creamy texture the name cream cheese demands is temperature and timing. If you keep your cultured milk too warm for too long, you'll end up either with thick curds, more like cottage cheese, or a sour watery drink more like watered down yogurt. While both of these will still be edible, they will not be smooth, buttery, delicious cream cheese.

So before you begin, be sure you have the ability to maintain the temperature of your cultured milk at around 75 degrees Fahrenheit (around 23 or 24 degrees Celsius) for 8 to 12 hours. Turning your oven on at 350 degrees for about 5 minutes before you put your cultured milk in should do the trick. Just keep the door shut as much as possible after you've turned the heat off. If that doesn't work for you, try getting a cooler and placing jars or water bottles filled with hot water around your cultured milk.

We will henceforth call the little critters that are going to magically turn your milk into cheese overnight Rumpelstiltskins.  They are going to do all of the hard work for you, but we're going to help them out by killing off any competition.

Here's what you'll need:

1 quart of whole milk (cow, goat, sheep, it's all good)
1 pan big enough to fit 1 quart of milk
1.5 - 2 quart container with lid (Mason jars, pyrex bowls, tupperware will all do)
1/4 teaspoon of yogurt
food thermometer (if you have one, but you can do without one)

Fine grain strainer like this one
A bowl this strainer will fit over
Cheesecloth




Here's what you do:

1. Get your yogurt culture out of the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature as you gather the rest of the materials and prepare to start.

2. Scald your milk. That means heat the milk in your pan on the lowest possible heat to approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit. This is going to kill off all of the bacteria that would otherwise compete with your Rumpelstiltskins and affect the texture of your cheese.

(If you're one of those people who likes to "modify directions" to "speed things up", and you don't have a lot of cooking experience, trust me. Unless you have a milk watcher, keep your heat low. Because milk is full of so many carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, rapid or uneven heating causes a skin consisting mostly of fats and carbohydrates to form over the milk, which then traps bubbles of steam, creating foam which will easily boil over or scorch on your nice clean pan. You can avoid this by heating slowly and stirring occasionally.)


3. Turn off the heat when your milk reaches 180 degrees Fahrenheit (this is where a food thermometer comes in handy).

(If you don't have a food thermometer, look for slight frothing on the edges of the milk. To give you a reference point: Liquids at 116 degrees Fahrenheit or higher temperatures create a pain sensation in humans that we associate with "burning".  Someone with moderately high pain tolerance would be able to keep their finger in milk at a 116 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple seconds.  At 115 degrees, you'd probably be okay hanging out with your entire hand in the pan for a few minutes.  At 180 degrees, it should be instantly uncomfortable to touch the milk. Just a disclaimer: I am NOT recommending that you stick your finger, hand, or any other body part in a hot pot of milk.)


4.  Pour your scalded milk in your 1.5-2 quart container.


5.  Stir your yogurt culture (approximately 1/4 teaspoon) into your milk gently, but thoroughly. Your Rumpelstiltskins are sensitive creatures that can be disturbed by vigorous shaking, so take care not to be too enthusiastic.

(If you use too much culture, the bacteria will not only compete with each other by eating up too much of the food (the sugars in the milk) too fast, the PH of the milk will drop too quickly (Rumpelstiltskins work by converting sugar into lactic acid), causing the fat molecules to remain hydrophilic, which simply means that the fat will not separate from the water and you're going to end up with yogurt instead of cream cheese.)


6. Cover your newly cultured milk lightly with a lid or a towel and put it in a warm place (see above) immediately.   Don't put the lid on too tightly or fill the container to the brim because the Rumpelstiltskins need oxygen to do their work.)


8. Leave the culture alone for 8 hours.  If after 8 hours, you see that the water and solids have separated, take the milk out and proceed to the second stage. Otherwise, leave it for another 4 hours.

9. Strain your newly made cream cheese. Try not to mix the separated liquid and cheese as you strain. Place your fine grained strainer in a bowl and carefully pour off the liquid on top of your cheese (this liquid is called whey).


10. Line your strainer with the cheesecloth and pour/spoon out the cheese into the strainer.


11. Bring the edges of the cheesecloth together and twist the cloth to gently squeeze out the excess water in your cheese curd.


12. Place the cheesecloth, still twisted up around the cheese, back in the strainer and put the whole contraption (strainer and draining bowl together) into the fridge. Leave it like that for 8-24 hours, but don't be afraid to try some cream cheese before then if you can't wait.

13. The cheese should fall right out of the cheesecloth when it's dry enough. And what you want to do with it after that is up to you! I recommend saving the whey that has drained out of your cheese. It contains a lot of free amino acids and beneficial probiotics. It's great to use in soups, sauces, and if you're really brave, as a refreshing, slightly slimy drink with a pinch of salt (Lassi, a common Indian drink is made in a similar manner and is valued for combating heat exhaustion). **EDIT: Also great for using as a hair condition because it's full of hydrolyzed protein (more on hydrolyzing protein and making hair conditioners in a future post about the chemistry of hair care).

How to learn to ride a bike

I didn't learn to ride until I was nine years old. It's not pretty to see a slightly chubby, near teenager looking like your grandmother on a walker while kids the height of her femur whiz by on their unicycles.

I hated learning new things - at least those I wasn't instantly good at - because I cringed at every wobble. I hated everyone knowing how unbalanced I was. I hated me knowing how unbalanced I was. So I put off learning to ride every year, until that momentous ninth one.

The greatest obstacle to learning anything is getting over that fear of wobbling. The fear of humiliation makes you hesitant. And the hesitance makes you fall. While you're thinking you look like a less cute version of one of those large mammals that start trying to walk 30 minutes after they're born, you are learning.

Amazingly - infuriatingly - you wobble and wobble, and you feel like a failure - maybe even look like a fool - but it's the wobbling itself that teaches you what upright is. Each time you sway too far to one side, your brain learns a little bit more about balancing on two wheels barely thicker than your finger.

And the best part is that learning to ride a bicycle is a lot like learning not to crap your pants or how to feed yourself: you'll never forget. And almost instantly after the wobbling stops, it'll be harder to lose your balance on your bike than it is to keep it (have you ever tried to willingly crap in your pants as a well-trained adult?)

If you get past the embarrassing, painful, ugly wobbly part, you'll have the effortless ride forever. Well, you'll have it for a long, long time, at least. It's an unfortunate fact that eventually anything you weren't born with goes, so maybe when you're ninety, you won't be riding your bicycle, but that'll be the least of your problems because you probably won't be riding your toilet either.

How to do just about everything.

I'll be honest, I don't quite understand blogging--the need we feel to do it, the rules of this world, or what it takes to capture the interest of such a disparate and attention-deficient audience. Publishing words on the internet has become a hard and fast business, and so there's a lot of pulp in the juice. I've been guilty of maintaining an angsty young adult livejournal or two in my time, on which I chronicled everything from depression to "hook-ups" to passive aggressive messages meant for other angsty, journaling peers.

Coming across these journals, all left fallow after a year or two of heavy cultivation, now as an adult is enough to put me off blogging forever. It's the same feeling that I get when I read diary entries from age 9 onward, except the cringe-factor is triple fold because these words have been floating through internet space for anyone to see. It doesn't matter that the internet offers a wonderful (and dangerous) anonymity.

But there is something amazing that bloggers and their blogs have done for me. And that is educate me. I think I've learned more from the contributions of everyday internet users about how to do for myself than I did from school, teachers, or my parents in 26 years.

Want to know how to fix the screen on your iphone or build a nuclear bomb? Wondering what all the yuppies are talking about when they brag about their "downward facing dog"? What about how to deal with the loss of a loved one or get help for depression? Just ask your friend Google. You can learn how to do just about everything on the internet. Sure, the information isn't always entirely accurate--that "it's as easy as pushing a button" element doesn't provide for rigorous fact checking or credentials guaranteed by pieces of paper earned through many expensive years of school. But it does provide for peer-reviewed results.

We are all scientists together here on the Net. We build upon each other's discoveries. Recipe sharing sites are a brilliant example. "This recipe is great," writes southerncookinglover, "but it's even better when you use an extra tablespoon of butter". Multiple users will then duplicate southerncookinglover's experiment and confirm that, indeed, it is always a good idea to use an extra pat of butter. I cannot recall a single instance, when I have thoughtfully evaluated the credibility of a source, that how-to information found on the internet has led me astray. My own bullheadedness and inability to follow directions is another matter.

And that's the beauty of this venue. It decentralizes information. You don't have to go sit in a boring lecture to listen to someone all but read his own book out loud to you and pay for the privilege. You have to think for yourself on the internet. You have to decide who to trust, and you can get 10 different opinions as easily as you can publish them: with the click of a button. And what makes this anarchistic system work is that there are people who are willing to share their hard won knowledge for free or damn near free for some reason or another. They say nothing is free. But information on the internet might be as close as you can get.

So, what you will find here, I hope, will add to this cacophonous store of human knowledge in a way that will help you do for yourself. Even if it's to help you decide how you don't want to do things. I'm a do-it-yourself-er that has tried everything from liver flushes to starting my own handmade soap small business to touching up the paint on my car. I've burned my hands a lot learning how to handle the fire properly, and if I can, I want to help others trying to learn how to do life for themselves bypass some of the blisters involved. Because the fact is, you have a store of how-to knowledge I've just been waiting to learn too. So pass it on.

New Kokosolie Soap!

Balsam Fir and Sage is a new family favorite! Have your christmas tree year round.

http://sites.google.com/site/kokosoliesoaps/shop/organicsoap