Tuesday, 5 November 2013

By on November 5th, 2013 in science kits, technology

10:00 – With less than five days of the month gone, we’re already at about 40% of kit revenues for November 2012. Of course, we could hit another dry spell any time, but otherwise it looks like this may end up being a pretty good month. We’re still in good shape on kit inventory for everything but the forensic science kits, so we’ll get started on another batch of those.

I almost ordered a couple of USB flash drives from Costco yesterday, which would have been a mistake. The drives had a “III” in their names, which I first assumed meant they were USB 3 drives. Fortunately, I checked the data transfer rates, which were only 4 MB/s for writes and 15 MB/s for reads. Geez. Costco didn’t have any reasonably fast drives, so I’ll just order something from Amazon. I have noticed that we’re now buying a very large percentage of the stuff we buy on-line from either Amazon or Costco.


17:27 – With five days of the month gone, we’re now at 96%+ of kit revenues for November 2012, thanks to a bulk order of chemistry kits from a public school distance-learning organization in Kansas. Of course, that also nearly wiped out our inventory of chemistry kits, so I’ll start tomorrow on getting another dozen or two of those assembled. Right after I get all those kits drop-shipped to the students in Kansas.

20 Comments and discussion on "Tuesday, 5 November 2013"

  1. Chuck W says:

    I have tried to figure out what it is that logs me out of this site. I always check the ‘remember me’ box, but every time I get logged out, it is unchecked. After experimenting, checked or unchecked seems to make no difference whatever. Adblock finds nothing on the site to stop, and NoScript is set to pass everything on the site.

    So this morning when I refreshed, it logged me out again. I was probably logged in constantly for at least 2 weeks (since the last Firefox upgrade). Sometimes, it lasts only a day or two.

    Wierd.

  2. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    It’s WordPress, and it logs me out, too. Very annoying.

  3. MrAtoz says:

    Another step towards Obummer’s non-military military. If the union wants it, why not? Next McCain will back it being the RINO he is.

    http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/arming-tsa-officers-hits-resistance-on-the-hill-99345.html

  4. MrAtoz says:

    Hey Mr. Lynn! Any comments on this CO2 into gas and oil wells causing earthquakes in Tejas? The companies should just say that is how they are combatting global warming.

    http://ca.news.yahoo.com/co2-injections-likely-culprit-texas-earthquakes-study-004939487–finance.html

  5. Lynn McGuire says:

    CO2 (and steam and natural gas) oil well injection have been long used for enhanced oil recovery. I have long been concerned that CO2 injection for CO2 storage is a bad idea as the pressure is in the 4,000 to 6,000 psia range.

    When I was working at TXU, we had a salt dome storage facility for natural gas in northeast Texas. One winter, we managed to get it up to 5,000 psia which was the equivalent of ten billion cubic feet of natural gas in that salt dome. We started getting reports from the oil well owners in that county that all their wells started producing again. We had managed to crack our salt dome and were flooding the 1,000 ft deep to 2,000 ft deep rock strata with natural gas. We had no idea it was leaking for months as we just turned on the high pressure recip compressors and let them pump away. When we used all the gas by March or so, the leakage stopped (the pressure dropped and the crack closed).

    And, CO2 is heavier than air and will collect in a valley if it leaks there from the subsurface. If you get a lungful of CO2 (greater than 15%???), you are toast as you cannot expel it due to passing out. I maintain that all personnel working in CO2 extinguished closed areas should be wearing an air pack. The micro earthquakes that are happening are just icing on the cake. I smell a lawsuit (or many) coming.

    BTW, no major CO2 injections for global warming have occurred yet. There is a fairly serious debate that separating the CO2 from the combustion exhaust and compressing it to 5,000 psia will use half of the power from the power plant. Certainly half for a coal plant, maybe 30% for a combined cycle natural gas plant.

    Now that three nuclear power plants have been shut down due to natural gas competition (Vermont Yankee, San Onofre), I see CO2 sequestration as a growing question. The compressor guys are licking their chops at contemplating all these high pressure high flowrate compressors.

  6. Lynn McGuire says:

    I think everyone should be armed. We are talking about open carry of pistols here in Texas (we already have open carry of long guns). Get on a plane, get a gun! Either that or fly nude.

  7. Chuck W says:

    I do not even own a TV, but it seems the latest discoveries about King Tut, are not getting a whole lot of exposure. British scientists have done experiments relating to Tut’s charred body, and after nearly a century of speculation about how he died, have concluded it was in battle: he was on his knees on the battlefield when run over by a chariot, squashing his pelvis and chest innards. That explains why his leg was broken and there was no heart in the mummy. Then a hasty job of burying him (the tomb was sealed before paint was dry on the walls) caused the mummification linens to spontaneously combust after burial and cook the body at very high temperature.

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/king-tut-s-mysterious-death-finally-solved-film-says-1.2355828

    London’s Channel 4 will air a new documentary exploring the new findings on 10 November. I heard about this during my daily morning listening to BBC’s World Service News, but there is nary a hint of it on the BBC website—probably because BBC is in competition with Channel 4.

  8. Lynn McGuire says:

    BTW, I got voter id turned down here in the Great State of Texas today. I went to the voting place for the new house and found out that I had forgotten to submit my new address to the voting authority in the county. So, my drivers license address and the voting address did not match each other.

    So, I had to drive to my old voting place to vote, about 7 miles away. Sucked but I could not argue with it since I am a big fan of voter id.

  9. jim` says:

    Cool story ChuckW, thanks.

  10. SteveF says:

    Ohhh… that King Tut. I thought you were talking about that jackass in the White House.

  11. Chad says:

    Now that three nuclear power plants have been shut down due to natural gas competition

    It seems some environmentalists have done a 180 on nuclear power:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/energy-environment/top-climate-scientists-ask-environmentalists-to-support-nuclear-power-in-climate-battle/2013/11/03/79a345b0-4473-11e3-95a9-3f15b5618ba8_story.html

  12. Chuck W says:

    I guess I did not really know as much about Tut as I thought. Somehow I missed results of all the DNA testing that was done between 2005 and 2007 on many of the Egyptian mummies. Turns out King Tut’s parents were brother and sister. And Tut married his half-sister, a product of his father and famous wife Nefertiti. Tut’s wife, who was about 3 years older than he, Ankhesenamun, whom he married when he was 9 years old, had 2 stillborn children by him, so there was no successor to the throne when Tut perished in the chariot squash. Enter his adviser and tutor of longstanding, a guy named Ay, who was his wife’s maternal grandfather.

    Tut was a peacemaker, and became friends with many of his father’s enemies, including the nearby Hittite empire. After Tut’s death, Ankhesenamun wrote to the Hittite king announcing a fear for her life, and asking him to send one of his sons to marry her and take her to safety. That son was killed on his way to marry Ankhesenamun. Ankhesenamun ultimately married her grandfather, which it is assumed was done to lend legitimacy to Ay’s accession to the throne. Ankhesenamun would have been about 21 at the time of Tut’s death. She died not long after marrying Ay, but nothing is known about the circumstances of her death, and her mummy has never been found. Speculation is that she never received a state funeral. Ay never inducted Ankhesenamun as a royal consort, and his queen was a later wife.

    Ay was a man of war, and during the course of waging them, had his empire crushed by the Hittites that Tut had befriended.

    The other thing I have never heard before, is that it took CT scans of Tut’s mummy, to show that his left rib cage was seriously broken and many parts, including some ribs and the sternum, have been missing all along since discovery of the tomb in 1923. One would have thought this information would have been known long before the CT scan and influenced thinking on how Tut died—which never before had included trauma. But apparently that was not known. What has been known for a long time, however, is that Tut’s mummy is the only dead Pharaoh whose heart is missing. Religious thinking of the time was that the body had to be intact to participate in an afterlife.

    Tut apparently had to use canes to get around, for reasons that are not entirely clear (as paintings of him do not show the canes, but writings speak of them); there were well over 100 canes buried in the tomb with Tut.

  13. Lynn McGuire says:

    Shutting down the nuclear power plants is causing global warming emissions to rise in the land of fruits and nuts:
    http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/EE-California-emissions-rise-on-San-Onofre-shut-down-0511135.html

    And is causing the California power prices to rise:
    http://www.scpr.org/news/2013/07/24/38334/california-power-prices-up-59-percent-after-san-on/

  14. OFD says:

    “…he was on his knees on the battlefield when run over by a chariot, squashing his pelvis and chest innards.”

    O if only our kings and presidents had to actually go to war in-person every time they bellowed for one somewhere. Last English monarch to be KIA was King Richard III, at Bosworth. Recently found under a parking lot over there in Perfidious Albion.

  15. Lynn McGuire says:

    Don’t forget about Gustavus Adolphus!
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_Adolphus_of_Sweden

    Europe would look a lot different today if he had not been killed at the head of his troops in 1632 at the Battle of Lützen. Adolphus was poised to take over the entirety of Europe for the Protestants.

  16. OFD says:

    “Adolphus was poised to take over the entirety of Europe for the Protestants.”

    Which would now be totally moot. Europeans and the English have dumped their Church and their religion. Well, they have a different religion now; mainly consists of consumption and cowardice, like ours here. Soon their religion will change again, to Survival.

  17. SteveF says:

    Turns out King Tut’s parents were brother and sister. And Tut married his half-sister, a product of his father and famous wife Nefertiti. Tut’s wife, who was about 3 years older than he, Ankhesenamun, whom he married when he was 9 years old, had 2 stillborn children by him … Tut apparently had to use canes to get around

    All of those factoids are unrelated. When you’re descended from the gods, blessed by the gods, or represent the gods, purity of the divine blood is more significant than little things like chromosomes. And those stillborn children were probably the result of improper sacrifices or impure thoughts or something.

  18. Ray Thompson says:

    hen you’re descended from the gods, blessed by the gods, or represent the gods, purity of the divine blood is more significant than little things like chromosomes.

    I wonder if the mooch is the long sister of the self appointed king?

    Yes, I am talking about the president Obama and his wife NSA as I know you are listening.

  19. OFD says:

    Some of these jokers imagine themselves to be royal descendants of the pharaohs and that they had a mighty and complex civilization long before Greece or Rome, who stole it from them. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that; I’ve seen her senior paper that she did at Princeton and she’s a frigging imbecile. Barry, however, is a very clever lad.

  20. SteveF says:

    I’ve never heard anything good about the wendigo, whether in terms of acumen, personality, or self-control.

    (Bill’s remark about “Mr. BileThroatVomit Guy” is a reference to something else I wrote.)

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