12:00 – Things are a bit hectic here. I’ve already shipped half a dozen kits this morning, and I’m trying desperately to get more built. I just shipped our last forensic science kit, we’re almost out of the CK01B chemistry kits, and we’re running low on biology kits. Oh, yeah, and I just got a custom order for 25 sets of chemicals, none of which we currently have in stock.
09:27 – The weather forecast is glorious for the next several days: cool, cloudy, gray, and drizzling. The high today is forecast to be 71F (22C), and our lows for the next several days are to be around 60F (~15C). Not traditional August weather for around here.
Barbara spent most of yesterday helping her sister move stuff out of storage and into the new room that Frances and Al have just built onto their house. She’s cleaning house right now, and then we’ll get started on more science kit stuff.
08:02 – Well, here it is almost a full day later, and still no Mercedes-Benz. Not so much as a Yugo, nor even a skateboard. I have wasted two candles proving that prayers are not answered, which I knew anyway. Oh, well. I’ll just use the rest of the case in science kits, where they’ll at least do some good.
I did manage to find a source for the food coloring dyes for the AP Chemistry kit. I needed FD&C Blue #1 (Brilliant Blue FCF or E133), FD&C Red #40 (Allura Red or E129), and FD&C Yellow #5 (Tartrazine or E102). I’d found a Canadian supplier who was willing to sell me five kilograms of each for about $500 each, but that would have been enough for something like 100,000 kits. Fortunately, I found a supplier in the UK who packages these dyes in 25 g containers, so I ordered a supply of all three. Of course, the per-gram price was much, much higher than the Canadian supplier’s price, but I can live with that. They’re shipping via slow boat, so the product won’t arrive until early to mid-September, but I can live with that, too.
12:20 – Barbara and I are still watching Dawson’s Creek. We’re in season five now, and the kids are college freshmen taking first-semester final exams. The episodes we watched last night had them pulling all-nighters, desperate to learn what they needed to know before they took the exams. I commented to Barbara that it seemed counterproductive to show up in a zombie state for a final, and not only had I never done that, I’d never even cracked a book to study for a final exam on anything. She said she’d pulled an all-nighter once before a final exam, and the results were catastrophically bad. Her professor was a pretty nice guy. He noticed that she was a zombie, asked if she’d stayed up all night studying, and told her to get some sleep and show up that afternoon to retake it.
09:42 – There have been several large-scale studies done to test the hypothesis that prayers are answered. Without exception, the results have falsified that hypothesis. The only reasonable conclusion is that either there’s nobody on the other end or, if there is, he doesn’t give a shit what one prays for.
I decided to add my own bit of data. When I was searching for something on Amazon Wednesday morning, I happened across a case of votive candles. You know, the kind that people light in catholic churches. So I figured, what the hell, I’d order a case and try them out. UPS showed up with them yesterday afternoon, only 30 hours after I’d ordered them. This morning I lit one and then very devoutly sang Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz”. It’s been almost an hour, and so far nothing. Not so much as a moped, let alone the S-Class Benz I was expecting.
I had high hopes for these candles. At about $0.20 each, I figured I could get an incredible rate of return on my investment. I mean, $0.20 for a Mercedes-Benz? And that was just a small-scale trial. I figured that by the time I’d burned my way through the whole case I’d be richer than Bill Gates. But so far it’s not looking good.
10:11 – The Winston-Salem restaurant that had been giving a 15% discount for praying publicly has discontinued doing so. Apparently the owner got a nastygram from a national atheist group pointing out that it was a violation of federal civil rights laws to charge atheists more than religious people. So the owner stopped giving the discount, fearing that she’d be sued if she continued doing so.
I think the whole thing is stupid. Businesses and individuals should be free to discriminate in favor of or against anyone they please. It’s government that must be completely neutral.
10:05 – Building and shipping kits continues, as does work on our new Earth Science and AP Chemistry kits.
09:43 – I’m still spending most of my time building and shipping science kits, reordering stuff we’re running short of, and so on.
In addition to regular buses, the Winston-Salem Transit Authority runs smaller Trans-AID buses to take elderly and disabled people to doctor appointments and so on. Yesterday, only a mile or so from our house, someone fired a bullet through the window of one of those buses, narrowly missing the driver and one of the three passengers. I hope the cops catch whoever did it and, assuming it was intentional, the court sentences the SOB to a long prison term.
09:39 – Kit sales are running at three a day, which is a decent rate for early August. Later in the month and into September, that rate should jump significantly.
Barbara and I joined Sam’s Club yesterday. We ended up getting a Sam’s Club Mastercard because that’s the only credit card they accept for purchases. We didn’t get much on our first trip, just a few cases of canned goods, a couple gallons of orange juice, and some frozen food. That, and a four gallon (~15 liter) carboy of spring water for $4. As I told Barbara, I didn’t care about the water itself. I wanted that heavy-duty PET carboy for making up solutions. I can buy similar carboys from one of our wholesalers, but they cost about $15 not including shipping.
11:48 – I was a bit surprised to see that Sam’s Club carries a huge variety of long-term storable food. Costco also carries long-term storable food, but a much smaller selection. I’ll buy a few items from them, but not many. Their dry goods (rice, flour, sugar, pasta, etc.) in #10 cans are considerably more expensive than the same thing at the LDS store, and I have no interest in freeze-dried stuff.
As with all long-term storage food, the stated shelf lives are entirely imaginary. Here’s one example: Augason Farms Iodized Salt Pail – 50 lbs. The shelf life is specified as “up to 30 years when sealed, up to 1 year under ideal conditions when opened”. Geez. They could just as easily have said 300 years, or 3000. Salt doesn’t spoil, not in one year, not in 30 years. Never. Sure, it may cake, but who cares? It never becomes dangerous to eat, and it never loses its nutritional value. Thousand-year-old salt is still salt. And $0.80 per pound is a lot to pay for table salt. I picked up several 4-pound boxes of Morton iodized table salt at Sam’s yesterday for $0.99 each. I’ll transfer it to clean, dry 2-liter soda bottles, where it will remain good for the next several thousand years.
None of the long-term food vendors even pretend to have any scientific basis for their shelf-life claims. All of them simply parrot other vendors’ claims. One vendor sometime in the distant past estimated that, for example, a #10 can of table sugar should still be good after 30 years, so now everyone claims more or less the same shelf life. Some of the “data” are actually funny. For example, some vendors specify ideal storage relative humidity. News flash, folks. The food in that #10 can has no clue what the humidity is outside the can. But moisture and humidity are Bad Things, so I guess they expect customers to believe that storing those cans at 30% or 50% RH will cut down on shelf life. Geez.
They also have an odd way of looking at expected shelf life depending on the type of container. The same item may be available in both #10 cans and aluminized Mylar (“foil”) pouches, with the shelf life of the cans specified as 25 years versus only 18 months for the pouches. Another news flash, folks. Aluminized Mylar provides essentially the same level of protection against light, moisture, and oxygen as the #10 can. Now, it’s true that the pouch is much more likely to have a defective seal than the can, and it’s also true that rodents are much more likely to gnaw through the pouch than the can, but the fact remains that both forms of packaging should provide a very similar shelf life assuming the seal is not compromised. If it is, all bets are off, but it’s an all-or-nothing situation: if the seal is good, the food inside the pouch should last as long as the food in the #10 can. If the seal is compromised, the food inside either the can or the pouch can no longer be trusted. So what’s with the 18-month versus 25-year shelf life estimates?
11:13 – We have everything we need to make up another batch of 60 forensic science kits except molybdate reagent, which we supply in 15 mL bottles. I made up a liter of the stuff recently, but I don’t like the looks of it. It’s a 2% w/v solution of ammonium molybdate in 32% v/v sulfuric acid, and it should be a colorless liquid. In the presence of phosphate ion and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) it reacts to form an intense blue complex that can be used for quantitative colorimetric determination of phosphate concentration. But the liter I made up is a very pale blue, which concerns me. I checked reference bottles that I made up a year ago and two years ago, and both remained colorless. So I think I’ll pitch that batch and make up a new batch.
Barbara and I decided to join Sam’s Club. We don’t particularly care for the company or its policies–particularly how it treats its employees–but Sam’s carries a lot of stuff that Costco doesn’t (and vice versa).
08:10 – We’ve sold six kits so far this month, so things are definitely picking up. They should pick up even more later in the month as we approach the start of the autumn semester. For the rest of this month and well into September my time will be fully occupied with building and shipping kits.
I noticed this headline yesterday and was immediately struck with a Cunning Plan: North Carolina restaurant offers a 15 percent discount to pray in public The restaurant happens to be in Winston-Salem, so I suggested to Barbara that we have dinner there one night. She’d never heard of it, and said she had no interest in going there. I protested that we could get 15% off if we publicly prayed. They don’t specify that any specific cult is required, so I figured we could do an atheist prayer. As Barbara pointed out, there’s no such thing as an atheist prayer. Oh, well. I suppose we could do a satanist prayer or even a prayer to Thor or Ishtar.