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Category: government

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

08:44 – More smoke and mirrors on the Greek bailout. Essentially, the EU and ECB (but not the IMF) have agreed to take a huge loss on their outstanding loans to Greece, but not by an explicit writedown of those debts. Instead, the EU/ECB are taking that loss in the form of extended maturities, reduced interest rates, and rebates that allow the actual debt to be reduced significantly while the nominal value remains the same. In other words, Greece will default, again, but the EU/ECB can (falsely) claim not to have written off any of the debt. So they’ve kicked the can down the road yet again, ensuring that Merkel can be re-elected before any of her voters notice that they’ve been royally screwed.

The ChromeBook arrived yesterday. I fired it up briefly and then put it on the charger. I’m still considering what exactly to do with it. For the time being at least it’ll be running ChromeOS, although I haven’t ruled out installing Linux on it. One way or another, it’ll be Barbara’s personal system. She’s already using the Chrome browser on her Linux desktop, so that won’t be a problem. But she’s running standard Linux applications for other things: Korganizer/Kontact/Kmail for mail and calendar, LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets, and so on. I’m not entirely sure that Barbara is ready to be migrated to web-based apps for those things. Or that I want to migrate her email to gmail. I mistrust the cloud, and I’m not delighted at the idea of Google seeing (and storing) everything we do.

I got snail-mail yesterday from a company called MuniServices, saying that they were working on behalf of the City of Winston-Salem to identify businesses that didn’t have a business license. So I called the city offices this morning to ask why I needed a business license for Winston-Salem since my business was buying and selling on the Internet; that I worked out of my home and had no business premises; that I didn’t meet customers at home or at their locations; that I had no business signage or vehicular traffic at my home, and so on. I said that if I needed a business license, there must be literally a thousand eBay sellers in Winston-Salem that also needed one. The woman I was speaking with jumped in to interrupt me, saying that I didn’t need a business license and that she’d send email to MuniServices to let them know that.

14:21 – UPS just showed up with six cartons of bottles and caps, something like 7,000 of the things. At first, I was going to do what I usually do, which is move the boxes off the front porch and into the library, off the foyer. But then, not being a rookie at this being-married thing, I had second thoughts. Barbara just finished putting up the Saturnalia tree and otherwise decorating the library, so she probably wouldn’t be best pleased if she came home to find the room filled with boxes. So I asked the UPS woman if she’d mind rolling the boxes down around back. She did so, and even put them in the garage for me. So now the worst thing Barbara will notice when she gets home is a large stack of boxes next to where she parks.

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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

08:33 – The EU finance ministers met all night, but couldn’t agree on giving any more money to Greece. It might help if they stopped referring to these disbursements as “loans” and started referring to them as what they really are. Gifts. Meanwhile, there’s another EU summit starting, this one concerning the EU budget. As you might expect, this one is also divided along the norther-tier/southern-tier line, with the northern tier wanting to economize and the southern tier, lead by France, chanting gimme, gimme, gimme.

The euro is already toast, of course, but what we’re seeing here is the EU itself beginning to fracture. Cameron is trying desperately to keep the UK in the EU while appeasing the euroskeptics among his own Tories and in the rapidly-growing UKIP. But a majority of Brits already favor leaving the EU, and a referendum on continued EU membership can’t be far in the future. Cameron’s efforts are misguided anyway. The only part of the EU that benefits the UK is the common market, and the UK needn’t be in the EU to remain in the common market. And even if the EU were foolish enough to refuse Britain membership in the common market without membership in the EU, the economic impact on the UK would be minimal. Reduced trade with the EU might be a percentage point or two, but no more. And without the taxes associated with EU membership, nor the ridiculous level of regulation that goes with EU membership, nor the social welfare costs incurred because of EU-mandated open borders, the UK would actually be much better off. And the UK is by no means the only northern-tier EU nation that is beginning to realize that the math for EU membership doesn’t add up.

It’s about time. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has formally recommended that birth control pills be made available over-the-counter, something that should have been done 20 years ago, if not 30. Now they need to get to work on approving other drugs for OTC availability, including marijuana, oxycodone, heroin, and cocaine. Everything, in fact, except antibiotics. And while they’re at it, they should consider placing acetaminophen on Schedule I in recognition of the fact that it’s the most dangerous drug in common usage.

Work continues on building chemistry kits and biology kits for inventory. I’m also putting together a small initial run of two new kits, maybe half a dozen or so of each. I’d build more of the new kits now, but one of the components common to both is on backorder. I’m supposed to be getting a case of a hundred of those in a couple weeks.

13:10 – I just got email from WSU saying that Colin is homozygous normal with respect to the MDR1 gene. That means we don’t have to worry about giving him ivermectin-based heartworm medications, as well as a slew of other medications. We’re very relieved.

14:46 – Greece is pissed. It says it’s met all the requirements for the next aid tranche. (It hasn’t, of course; it hasn’t even come close to meeting all the requirements it agreed to before the first bailout a couple of years ago. In fact, it hasn’t even tried to do what it agreed to do.) The EU knows that Greece hasn’t met all of the requirements. Greece will promise anything to get more money and then simply not do what it promised. But EU spokesmen have had very nice things to say about how hard Greece is trying. Not that that’s bought Greece anything. Even if the tranche is approved, none of it will actually benefit Greece. It won’t even be under Greek control. The Troika controls disbursements from the bail-out funds, and all of those disbursements go to pay off creditors, mostly other eurozone governments and banks.

What I don’t understand is why Greece continues to participate in this charade. If I were the Greek government, I’d tell the eurocrats to get stuffed. I’d default on all outstanding debts and return to the drachma. Yes, that means that no one will lend any money to Greece in the forseeable future. So what? No one is lending them any money now. And, yes, it means that Greece will be doomed to at least a decade of absolute poverty and suffering, and probably two decades. Again, so what? They’re doomed now no matter what they do. And continuing as they are will simply make that suffering last longer. At least if they were free of the euro they’d be able to recover, albeit very slowly. Greece will never be a wealthy country. In fact, it will never be even a middle-class country. But this single-minded focus on staying in the EU and euro is foolish and against Greece’s own interests.

So if I were Greece, my goal would be not just a complete default, but a disorderly complete default. If I were going down, I’d want to take the entire EU with me, most particularly Germany. And, even more particularly, Angela Merkel, whom the Greeks almost universally hate. Hate with a passion. Their comparing her to Hitler was not exaggerating how they feel. And defaulting would doom Merkel politically.

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Tuesday, 20 November 2012

09:36 – Greece is on tenterhooks today, awaiting the decision by the eurogroup finance ministers as to whether the long-overdue €31.2 billion aid tranche will be released. It won’t be, at least not today. Germany and other guarantors require approval by their legislatures, which is unlikely to occur for at least a few weeks. And the IMF is not likely to approve any IMF funds being disbursed until it can be sure that Greece’s debt pile is “sustainable”, whatever that means.

At a minimum, it means Greece must default yet again to reduce its outstanding debt burden. The IMF categorically refuses to take any loss on its loans to Greece, as does the ECB, as does the EC. The IMF simply can’t do so under the rules that govern it. Even if it could, its major non-European financial supporters refuse to take any loss, arguing that Europe is rich enough to pay its own damned bills. The ECB also simply can’t do so under the rules that govern it. The EC–read Germany, Holland, and Finland–simply can’t take any loss because their voters would crucify any politician who agreed to do so. So. the short answer is that no one is willing to pay. They’ve all written off Greece, and are concerned only with minimizing their own losses on what they’ve already given to Greece and with buying time until the next elections have passed.

Meanwhile, pity the poor private-sector investors. You remember them. The last time Greece defaulted, they lost 75% of the value of their investments. And now Germany, grasping at straws to put off the inevitable until Merkel can be reelected, has proposed that those same PSI folks take another 75% writedown. That’s 75% off the remaining 25%, taking their total loss over 90%. Even that is a drop in the bucket against Greece’s gigantic debt pile, but Germany (read Merkel) hopes it’ll be enough to stave off the eventual collapse until next autumn, when she must again face her voters. It sucks to be Angela.

And then there’s France, which Moody’s has just cut one notch from AAA. That leaves Fitch, a French company, the only one of the Big Three ratings agencies that still rates France AAA. These sovereign bond ratings are pure fantasy anyway. As I’ve said before, there’s not a single country in the eurozone that deserves anything higher than a junk rating. They will all default eventually, either explicitly or by the euro being inflated to a small fraction of its current value. Either way, investors in “sovereign” eurozone bonds are going to lose most or all of their investments.

I’m building science kits today.

11:19 – Barbara stopped by the library the other day to pick up some books she had on hold. One of the ones she got for me was Last to Die, the most recent of Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles series.

On page 58, Dr. Maura Isles is touring a rather special private school, asking questions of her tour guide, Lily. The following exchange jumped out at me:

Lily: “Professor David Pasquantonio. He teaches botany, cell biology, and organic chemistry.”

Isles: “Rather advanced subjects for high school students.”

Lily: “High school?” Lily laughed. “We start those subjects in middle school. Twelve-year-olds are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for.”

My feelings exactly. You’ll seldom get any more out of even bright students than you expect. If your expectations are low, so will be their performance. If your expectations are high, they might surprise you. No one’s told them this stuff is too hard for them.

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Friday, 16 November 2012

07:14 – I had an interesting conversation with our mailman yesterday. I commented on the $15+ billion loss the USPS had just reported, and he commented that much of that was because of the $11+ billion USPS is forced to pay to fund health care for future retirees, something that no other federal agency does. I said that in the long run it didn’t really matter because none of us were ever going to see the pensions and retirement health care that we were supposedly paying for now. He agreed completely and commented that he thought it was time to start stocking up on canned food. I said, “We already are,” and he replied that he and his wife were as well.

Over the weekend, we’ll build another 30 chemistry kits and another 30 biology kits for inventory. Although sales are much slower now than they were in August/September, slow is relative. So far this week, we’ve sold two forensic science kits, two biology kits, and four chemistry kits. We’re still in good shape on forensic science kits, but we’re down to only three chemistry kits and two biology kits in stock.

10:12 – I just finished making up the last chemical but one for the chemistry kits. (That one is starch indicator solution, which I make up in the kitchen rather than the lab.) As usual, I waited until last to make up the hazardous/obnoxious chemicals, finishing up with 6 M sodium hydroxide, which’ll dissolve a glass stirring rod if I’m not careful. So, today I’ll fill and cap the final six or eight sets of 30 bottles for the chemistry kits. I’ll leave the sealing to Barbara. She likes to shrink the cap bands on the 30 mL bottles of regulated chemicals with the heat gun.

As always, I feel a bit hypocritical when I’m working with chemicals for the kits. I always wear splash goggles, of course, but I don’t wear gloves for any of them. Having concentrated bases or acids contact my hands doesn’t really worry me. If it happens, I just rinse the stuff off with cold water. I do draw the line at concentrated hydrochloric, nitric, and sulfuric acids, though. Those I’ll handle without gloves. But anything much more hazardous/corrosive than those I’ll wear gloves for, if not double gloves.

15:46 – Barbara is leaving work an hour or so early this afternoon to go run errands and then have dinner with her parents and a couple of friends. I just finished the last set of bottles for the chemistry kits. We now have 30 of each chemical and 60 of several. So I decided to knock off early, too, and watch some more Heartland reruns.

When I started watching Heartland reruns yesterday, I noticed that Netflix streaming was showing 67 episodes. That’s 13 episodes from series one and 18 episodes each from series two, three, and four. Until yesterday they had only 45 episodes available: all of series one and two and the first 14 episodes of series 3. But then I checked the Netflix website, which is still claiming to have only those 45 episodes. Oh, well. I prefer to watch streaming, but I have series three, four, and five on disc.

Read the comments: 23 Comments

Thursday, 15 November 2012

08:00 – ObamaCare strikes. The top headline in our paper this morning was “Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Cuts 950 Jobs“. The spokesman made a point of saying that the cuts were preemptive, and not a result of any financial difficulties. WFU/BMC is preparing itself for the new economic realities. As the article pointed out, we can expect to see similar cuts at other hospitals across the state and the nation.

That’s just the beginning of the destructive and distorting effects that ObamaCare will have on our economy and our society. I have many acquaintances who own small businesses, and several of them have told me that they’ll be making changes to minimize the effects of ObamaCare on themselves and their companies. These range from shifting away from using all full-time employees toward temporary/part-time/contract labor to cutting payrolls to get under the 50-employee statutory minimum to splitting their companies into two or three smaller companies. Two or three that currently provide health insurance have said that they plan to eliminate it because it’ll be cheaper to pay the annual fine than to continue to pay health insurance premiums. One thing is sure: ObamaCare is going to hurt small businesses and their employees.

10:04 – Well, that was interesting. They’re still re-roofing the house across the street. Colin is terrified of popping and banging sounds, so I’ve been taking him downstairs and out the back door.

The instant we went out the back door, Colin froze in his alert position. I followed his sight line and saw what I at first thought was a stray dog down in the corner of our back yard. But Colin wasn’t barking frantically, as he would if there was another dog in his yard. Instead, he froze and snarled. Let me tell you, Colin has an absolutely vicious-looking set of fangs and a low, rumbling growl that should scare anything.

It was a coyote, of course, and it quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I could just see what was running through its mind in the instant before it turned and ran for its life. “Holy Shit! That thing is twice my size and its ears stick straight up. WOLLLLLFFF!”

11:31 – Well, crap. I just finished making up three liters of IKI (iodine/potassium iodide) solution for the kits. I make this solution and many others up in gallon orange juice bottles that Barbara provides me at a rate of about one a week. So, I just finished making up the three liters of IKI when I realized that I’d need to transfer it to glass bottles because the IKI penetrates the orange juice bottles if it’s left in them for more than a few days. So off I went in search of six 500 mL glass bottles with cone liners. I found six of them, all already filled with IKI solution. So now I have six liters of IKI, which is enough for about 200 kits. Oh, well. The stuff keeps forever, and fortunately I have many spare glass bottles to transfer it to.

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Wednesday, 14 November 2012

07:51 – The MDR-1 test kit for Colin showed up yesterday. It contains two tiny little brushes to do cheek swabs. The instructions said that food can interfere with the test, so we decided to do the cheek swabs first thing this morning, before Colin had eaten.

So, Colin was lying on the love seat in the den while Barbara was sitting on the sofa opening the envelopes that contain the brushes. I sat down beside him. His ears went flat as he watched Barbara opening the brush envelopes. I could tell exactly what Colin was thinking: “You’re going to stick those in my mouth and use them to obtain specimens of my squamous epithelial cheek cells, aren’t you?” I told him that was exactly what we were going to do. He cooperated pretty well. I’ll send the swabs off today for testing. My guess is that Colin doesn’t have the MDR-1 mutation, or if he does it’s heterozygous. But it’s worth $70 to find out for sure.

The paper this morning reported a horrible accident in Yadkinville, which is just down the road from us. A three-month-old baby was killed by the family dog, which apparently mistook a multi-colored stocking cap she was wearing for a ball and bit her head repeatedly. What surprised me was that the paper reported that the police had investigated and ruled the incident an unpreventable accident. Nowadays, it seems that nothing is ever an accident. There’s always someone to blame. But apparently the authorities recognized that no one was at fault here and that the family was going through enough already without criminal charges being filed.

09:50 – Riots have broken out along the southern tier of the eurozone. Riots as in Molotov cocktails and rioters throwing bricks at police, who are responding with rubber bullets. (Those, incidentally, are no joke; they can seriously injure or even kill people.) Greece is really at the tipping point. Even moderate, formerly middle class people are now talking about revolution. As one commented, what do they have to lose? As another said, all it’ll take is a spark. And they’re going to get that spark as it becomes clear that what Greece has agreed to will not be enough to secure any kind of long- or even medium-term funding.

I was amused by the list of demands made by the European Trades Union Convention, nearly all of which are utterly impossible to meet, for both political and economic reasons. Here they are:

• Economic governance at the service of sustainable growth and quality jobs,
• Economic and social justice through redistribution policies, taxation and social protection,
• Employment guarantees for young people,
• An ambitious European industrial policy steered towards a green, low-carbon economy and forward-looking sectors with employment opportunities and growth,
• A more intense fight against social and wage dumping,
• Pooling of debt through Euro-bonds,
• Effective implementation of a financial transaction tax to tackle speculation and enable investment policies,
• Harmonisation of the tax base with a minimum rate for companies across Europe,
• A determined effort to fight tax evasion and fraud,
• Respect for collective bargaining and social dialogue,
• Respect for fundamental social and trade union rights.

16:14 – I’ve spent a little bit of time visiting some of the prepper sites that have been linked to in the comments recently, and there’s something I really don’t understand. A lot of these folks seem to be overly-concerned with the shelf-life of stored foods. I mean, are they really storing 25- to 50-year supplies of food? If not, why do they care about the difference? Or perhaps they’re stocking grains and other foods by the ton, figuring that maybe their great-great-grandchildren might have some use for them.

I also think it’s interesting that they take stated shelf-lives as gospel. For example, we just bought some canned chicken chunks at Costco. They have a best-by date three years from now. I promise you, they’ll be fine a lot longer than that. After 10 or 20 years, they might show some darkening, but they’ll still be perfectly edible and will have probably 95% of the nutrition that they have now. Heck, they’ve found 4,000 year old Hostess Twinkies in Egyptian tombs, and they were still edible.

I also wonder about some of their choices of specific foods. Do they eat this stuff now, or are they figuring that it’ll be better than nothing if they get really hungry? I suppose cost is part of this. People decide what they can afford and how much food they want to store and then buy whatever that multiplier dictates. Still, I think that’s a stupid way to go about it. We buy stuff that we eat anyway. We just buy extra. So what if the canned and dry stuff we eat is a year old? If nothing else, it provides a buffer in case anything we buy is contaminated with salmonella or something. In terms of flavor and nutrition, year-old stuff is fine. Two-year-old stuff is fine. Geez, five-year-old stuff would almost certainly be just as good as new stuff. Sterile is sterile. Preserved is preserved.

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Monday, 12 November 2012

09:24 – We did a Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. Neither of us needed very much, so it was a short run. We picked up a fresh supply of Coke for me, a couple of things I needed for kits, some stuff Barbara needed, and an extra couple or three weeks worth of canned food.

I can make a good excuse for my incorrect prediction that Romney was going to win in a landslide. Around here, it sure felt like the Democrats were in deep trouble. While the Democrats made gains or at least broke even in most of the other 49 states, North Carolina turned sharply right. This was the only battleground state won by Romney, but that was the least of it. We elected a Republican governor, replaced several Democrat US representatives with Republicans, and flooded the North Carolina house and senate with Republicans–it’s now almost 2:1–giving the Republicans a veto-proof majority in both houses. Republicans also dominated the other statewide races and at the city and county levels. Finally, the Republicans control the state supreme court, all of which makes North Carolina among the reddest of the red states. Don’t expect gay marriage or marijuana to be legalized here.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina government is busy burning down our nearest state park. They started an (un)controlled burn on Thursday at Pilot Mountain state park, intending to burn less than 200 acres. The fire has now burned more than 800 acres and is still not under control. It’s supposed to rain this evening and tomorrow, so perhaps that’ll help.

I’m working on kit stuff.

10:56 – Hmmm. The fustercluck in Greece continues, with no resolution in sight. Basically, the problem is that Greece is completely bankrupt, with huge outstanding debts, and no one wants to pay for them. The Troika–the EU, the ECB, and the IMF–are now bitterly divided on this issue. The IMF insists that it will not kick in any more money until Greece’s debt is somehow made “sustainable”. Meanwhile, the EU and ECB categorically refuse to take losses on the Greek debt they hold because their electorates, primarily the German people, would crucify them for doing so. So, the situation as of now is that the IMF is refusing further funds and the EU/ECB is refusing further funds. Neither of them is willing to budge.

The IMF has the whip hand. Their debt is senior to that held by the EU and ECB. So, at this point, the most likely outcome is that the IMF will walk away, leaving the EU and ECB holding the bag. The EU and the ECB are unlikely to throw good money after bad. It seems likely that the Greek debt that comes due this week will be paid off by an accounting trick. The ECB can allow Greek banks to increase the percentage of Greek bonds on their books, allowing the Greek banks to purchase the worthless bonds that Greece will issue to rollover those coming due. But in reality that translates to the ECB lending Greek banks yet more money that will never be repaid, so the question for Germany becomes whether it’s worth throwing away a few billion more euros to buy just a little more time. That’s the same situation Germany has been facing, and so far they’ve decided to throw away the money each time the situation has arisen. What Germany (Merkel) really wants is to put off the crash until she runs for reelection next autumn, but that’s becoming increasingly costly. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Merkel finally decided to bite the bullet and say enough is enough. If that happens, Greece goes completely belly up this week. If Merkel decides to pay one more time, Greece will totter on for a few more weeks.

Here in the US we have the upcoming so-called “fiscal cliff”, which the MSM describe as moderate tax increases coupled with dramatic spending cuts. In fact, it’s no such thing. It’s large tax increases coupled with spending increases that will be smaller than they might otherwise have been. No one, including the Republicans, is talking about actual cuts in spending. Why bother. They’ve dug us into a hole so deep that there’s no getting out of it. Might as well just continue digging. Our economy can’t get deader than dead.

The government figures on debt are even less trustworthy than their figures on inflation. I don’t even bother to keep track of what the government claims our debt is. Something like $17 trillion IIRC. In reality, as I’ve said before, if you calculate our debt honestly, including off-budget items, unfunded commitments, and realistic demographics and NPVs, our actual debt at all levels must exceed $100 trillion. I’ve seen credible figures claiming it’s well over $200 trillion. As Everett Dirksen famously said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money”. And we’re talking about debt levels four or five magnitudes higher. A billion dollars is more than $3 for every US citizen, man, woman, and child. A trillion dollars is $3,000 each. The $17 trillion the federal government admits to is more than $51,000 each. The real debt is almost certainly at least $300,000 per citizen and may be twice that. The obvious outcome is that those unfunded commitments aren’t going to be honored. Or they’ll be honored at face value with grossly inflated dollars. Either way, it’s not going to be pretty.

I’m working on kit stuff.

14:26 – For those of you who don’t read the comments…

It all makes sense now: Gay marriage legalized on the same day as marijuana makes perfect biblical sense. Leviticus 20:13: “A man who lays with another man should be stoned.” Our interpretation has just been wrong for all these years.

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Monday, 29 October 2012

08:11 – Barbara called yesterday to let me know that her dad is to be released from the hospital Tuesday morning. Unlike last time, there’s no infection or other problems. It’s just the CHF. Her sister and brother-in-law returned yesterday, as planned. She and her mom are staying. She’ll drive them back tomorrow. I’m not particularly happy about them being stuck down at the beach in the middle of this storm, but at least the main effects of the storm will be farther north. It’s chilly here, and there’s a stiff breeze, but that’s about all we’ve seen so far of the effects of Sandy. There are higher winds and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow, along with heavy snow in the mountains to our west, but that’s nothing compared to what’s expected to our north.

Our supply of science kits continues to dwindle. I’m waiting for some 125 mL polypropylene bottles for the biology kits. Those should arrive today or tomorrow. And I’m labeling bottles for the chemistry kits in every spare moment. We should be able to get a new batch of 30 of those assembled this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, Germany is coming to realize that those “risk-free investments” in what have turned out to be junk sovereign bonds are anything but risk-free. German taxpayers are now on the hook for more than a trillion euros in junk debt. When this realization hits home, there’ll be a firestorm in German politics. All those Mercedes and BMWs that Germany “sold” to the southern tier were actually gifts, along with everything else the southern tier “bought” from Germany. Germans are already seriously pissed; they’re going to be livid.

I periodically get emails ridiculing me for saying that the US is in relatively good shape compared to Europe, and indeed compared to just about anyone else. Yes, we’re in bad shape, but we’re fully capable of growing our way out of it. Europe is moribund, if not in Cheyne-Stokes. Here’s another of the reasons why.

09:47 – Here’s one of the big reasons why I do what I do. These two emails arrived this morning, and are pretty typical of the emails I receive regularly. First up, a young scientist:

On Sunday 28 October 2012 09:13:14 pm you wrote:

Dear Mr. Thompson,

I am Nicholasand I am a huge fan of science , Over the summer I bought your book on chemistry after I took chemistry camp , a few months later I saw your biology book and finaly , I got your forensic book from barnes and noble on the 14th . I really love your books and you are a good author . Before I got your books I found a science store near my house called the Colorado Science company in december . The next day I went there and it looked really cool they had chemicals,microscopes, telescopes and lab supplies.You know its funny I am only 9 years old and I know alot about science.In my room I have a great science desk with a microscope, chemicals, rocks, minerals, books,a piece of american indian pottery,and marine biology specimens. When I am a grownup I want to be an archeologist and a professor of science.

I just wanted you to know that I am a big fan of your books.

Sincerely,
Nicholas

Hi, Nicholas

First, thank you for the kind words. My first love was science, and for the last few years I’ve devoted all of my time to doing what I can to help young people develop their interest in science by hands-on lab work. I’m 50 years older than you are, but I still remember vividly being your age and working at my own science bench. You are at the beginning of a long and wonderful journey.

I applaud your ambition to become a scientist. We need all of the young scientists we can get. Realize that, like most young scientists, your focus may change as you get older. You may indeed become an archaeologist, but you might instead decide to become an organic chemist or a particle physicist or an evolutionary biologist. Or whatever. My point is that it’s important not to focus too much on just your current interest. Make sure along your journey to learn as much as you can about biology, chemistry, physics, and math.

Please keep me posted on your progress.

And a response from Rob in Adelaide, whose original email I posted recently:

On Saturday 27 October 2012 06:27:41 pm you wrote:Dear Bob

Thank you very much indeed for the prompt and thoughtful response. I admire your pragmatic enthusiasm to teach science.

I actually bought “Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments” first and only later noted your website and Home Chemistry Kit. I run an Ophthalmic Science Research lab in the Hanson Institute, Adelaide, so I can fairly easily source the equipment and materials independently.  But your Kit certainly looks great and would have been convenient. The image of your kit on the website brought back great memories of a chemistry set I had as a kid, something that started me on a scientific pathway. My 10-year-old daughter saw the photo of the chemistry set and her eyes were wide with excitement!

I will have to start ordering to try and make up something that looks as exciting as your kit: we have an old laundry that I need to turn into a lab for Xmas!

Regards

Rob

Hi, Rob

That’s great!

When I was about your daughter’s age, my dad helped me turn a corner of the basement into my own lab. I wonder if he knew then that he’d started me off on a life of loving and doing science. We need all the young scientists we can get, and it sounds like you’re doing for your daughter what my dad did for me. She’ll look back on this later and realize how lucky she was to have you for her dad.

Best regards.

Bob

13:33 – Although I was under the impression that he died in about 1825, Thomas Bowdler is apparently alive and well. What else to think about this abomination, an “improved” version of Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet? This cretin does more damage to a classic work of fiction than Reader’s Digest Condensed Books ever did to the books they butchered. This jerk can’t even get the aspect ratio of his cover right.

14:29 – Hah! UPS showed up a little while ago with boxes from one of my wholesalers with the stuff I ordered last week. Among them I found five dozen of the 125 mL polypropylene bottles. (I almost strained myself lifting the smallest of the boxes, which contained 90 sets each comprising 72 frosted flat slides, a dozen 3mm thick cavity slides, and a box of coverslips. Talk about a dense little turkey. I suspect that box would be literally bullet-proof. Fifteen to 30 centimeters of densely-packed glass will easily stop a bullet.)

So I labeled 30 bottles and filled them plus an extra three unlabeled. I now have everything I need to build 30 more biology kits. All I need to do is pack everything up.

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Friday, 26 October 2012

10:07 – Colin and I finished series five of Heartland and started again with series one. It’s interesting to watch Amber Marshall reset from a 23-year-old woman playing 20 to an 18-year-old girl playing 15. The rest of the cast doesn’t look all that different jumping back from 2012 to 2007, including, oddly enough, Jessica Amlee, who was 13 when the series premiered and 18 as of the final episode of series 5.

The news from the EU remains as bad as ever and getting worse. I don’t think the politicians realize that the lull they’ve had over the last couple of months was merely the EU crisis passing through the eye of a hurricane. The winds are already picking up again. After the premature announcement a couple days ago about the release of the months-overdue tranche of the Greek bailout being released, it’s now clear that it has not been and that Greece has been given until Sunday to agree to the Troika terms. As of now, it looks unlikely to happen. If not, what happens Monday is anyone’s guess.

I’m still working on building science kits, designing new kits, and writing documentation for them. I also need to spend some time cleaning up downstairs, particularly my lab.

11:54 – Since I moved to Dreamhost from the shared server that Brian and Greg ran for a decade or more, I’ve really missed the spam filtering options that I had on their server. So I finally got around to emailing Dreamhost tech support to request some changes.

I have two requests that I would like you to consider enabling:

1. Currently, blacklisting is allowed only by <domain>.TLD. I would like to be able to blacklist by TLD. For example, it would be very useful to allow blacklist of all .CN and .BR domains, along with those from most of the rest of the non-English speaking world outside of western Europe. Ideally, this would be implemented with a page of checkboxes that allowed one to blacklist all TLDs with one click and then un-blacklist the ones you wanted to allow through by clearing the checkboxes for those domains.

2. My former service provider provided a squirrelmail spam filtering option called “discard silently” that permanently deleted the spam emails rather than moving them to a quarantine area. I would very much like to have this option.

Thank you for considering this request.

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Wednesday, 24 October 2012

07:57 – Reuters is reporting that the Greek government has struck a tentative deal with the Troika to release the long overdue €31.5 billion tranche and allow Greece to avoid default a month from now.

As usual, the terms are a joke. No one, including Greece, knows exactly how many people are employed by the Greek government, but it must be more than a million. That’s 10% of the Greek population. Not the working-age population, you understand. The entire population. If Reuters has it right, Greece will announce that 2,000 of these people, about 0.2% of state employees, will be put on notice that their jobs are to be eliminated a year from now. That’s 2,000. Not 200,000, which would have been a more reasonable first step toward reducing the size of government. And the layoffs will be a year from not, not right now. Then, Greece will serve one-year notices on a further 6,250 state employees every three months through 2013. So, Greece is going to lay off, eventually, about 25,000 state employees, or something like 2%. Not 250,000 which would have been a reasonable start. Drop, meet bucket.

As usual, it’s really all about Angela Merkel. She’s running for re-election next autumn, and she wants to make sure she’ll be re-elected. She doesn’t want the euro to collapse until she’s safely re-elected. She’s trying to spend as little as possible to ensure that.

13:17 – Barbara is leaving tomorrow to drive down to the beach with her parents. They’ll be back Sunday. Instead of wild-women-and-parties, I think I’ll just continue the Heartland marathon. I’d made it part way through series five the last time Barbara was away, so the question now is whether I should finish series five and then start series one again, or should I finish series five and then watch the first four episodes of series six before starting the cycle again?

When I mentioned to Barbara that Amber Marshall had gotten engaged a couple of months ago, she asked if I was disappointed. Eh? Barbara knows that I adore Amber Marshall, but it never even occurred to me that anyone would believe that I wanted her for myself. She’s an extraordinarily attractive young woman, and not just physically, but she’s young enough to be my daughter. I told Barbara that, to the contrary, I was delighted for Amber and wished her well. Now, it’s true that if I ever found out that Shawn Turner wasn’t treating Amber well, I’d have at least a passing thought of driving up there and pounding him into the ground head-first until only the soles of his feet showed, but that’s as far as it goes. I am protective of young women, not covetous.

17:29 – One of Barbara’s friends picked her up a little while ago to go out to dinner. Before she left, Barbara made me an early dinner. So, I fired up Heartland S5E13 and sat there watching it while I was eating dinner, with Colin begging the whole time. After I finished eating, I lit my pipe, intending to smoke it for a few minutes before I fed Colin. He let me know verbally that he wanted his dinner. I ignored him. He asked again. I told him to give me just a couple minutes. He then walked over to the DVD player, snouted the eject button, turned around, and looked at me. People who haven’t lived with Border Collies would pass this off as a coincidence. Those who have lived with BCs would believe it might have been intentional. Colin has certainly watched me closely many times as I ejected and inserted discs. I’m not 100% convinced it was intentional. Only about 99%.

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