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Category: government

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

08:28 – Thanks to the kindness of a reader, I now have a legal copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I attempted to install it on the new Atom system in the den yesterday afternoon, and the system behaved exactly as it had when I attempted to install several flavors of Linux. What’s worse is that it’s behaving exactly as the old Atom system was behaving. With the old system, I thought at first that the problem was the video drivers in the new releases of Linux. I then concluded that it was a hardware problem. I then replaced the system, which behaved the same way. I then attempted to install Windows 7, which behaved the same way. I now conclude that the problem is either the display, although I’ve never seen a display behave like this, or perhaps the cable, although I’ve used both analog and digital cables. The next step is to connect the old system to the TV and see if it works. If so, I’ll replace the display and cables and end up with two functional Atom systems, one for Barbara’s office and one for the den.

As we approach the end of September, kit sales are definitely getting more sporadic. Some days, we ship three or four kits, other days one or two, and some days none at all. The next couple of months are likely to be slow, averaging one or two kits a day. Things will pick up again in early December, as people start ordering kits for Christmas and the beginning of the second semester. Then around mid-January they’ll drop off again and remain slow through about April, when they’ll start to pick up again. We’ll ship a lot of kits in June and then be covered up with orders again in July and August and into September.

I want to have two more kits available for 2013, which means I need to take advantage of these slower periods to get the kits and associated manuals complete. My goal is to complete the Life Science (grade 7) kit and documentation in October and November and be ready to start shipping kits in early December. That gives me mid-January through April to do the Physical Science (grade 8) kit and documentation and have them ready for summer shipments.

Ideally, I’d like to have a third middle-school kit–Earth and Space Science–also available next year, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I simply won’t have time to write the documentation and design and produce the kits and still get everything else done.

11:54 – Wow. If the riots in Spain were bad, the ones now going on in Greece are catastrophic. Various reports put the figures at 50,000 to 100,000 Athenians rioting in support of the general strike. I’m actually surprised that the Greek government has been able to field as many riot police as they have. The sympathies of most of those police officers must be with the rioters. And those police are facing desperate people armed with Molotov cocktails. It may not happen this time, but with Greece facing almost daily protests and riots, sooner or later the cops are going to respond with lethal force. Greece is already effectively ungovernable. Once the government starts shooting protesters, there’s no way back. And the Greek people have not yet begun to experience the level of suffering that they’re inevitably going to face. They’re throwing firebombs now. What are they going to do when the money completely runs out? We’re looking at the beginning of what is likely to become a bloody civil war.

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Saturday, 22 September 2012

08:22 – Barbara is due back this afternoon or early evening. Colin and I can’t wait.

With only about six weeks left until the election, the EU is doing its part to help re-elect Obama. The IMF, the EU, and the ECB (the so-called Troika) were to have announced their decision about more bailout money for Greece next month. Instead, they’re delaying the announcement until after the US elections, which makes it abundantly clear what their decision is going to be. They’re going to cut off Greece, letting it go down the toilet, and they’re afraid that the inevitable economic earthquake would damage Obama’s chances. I hope that their cynical attempt to influence US elections fails miserably and that the euro collapses just in time for the election. I’d rather see the eurozone collapse entirely than see Obama re-elected. Not that O’Bomney would be much better.

I decided to expand the basic set of prepared microscope slides for the Life Science kit from 10 to 25 slides and make the slide set optional. That’ll lower the base price of the Life Science kit and avoid forcing people who already have some or all of the necessary slides to purchase something they already have. I’ll also make that slide set an option with the biology kits. I issued a PO yesterday for the first batch of 25 prepared slides. We’ll get the prepared slides in bulk and have to assemble the sets ourselves.

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Tuesday, 18 September 2012

08:09 – Colin and I are preparing for Barbara’s departure tomorrow morning. She’s heading up to the mountains for a few days with her friend Marcy. So, as usual, it’s wild-women-and-parties for Colin and me. Either that, or a Heartland marathon. We’re currently up through episode 12 of series four, so that leaves us with seven episodes in series four, 18 in series five, and one in series six to watch while Barbara’s gone, or roughly 19 hours worth. We may be able to get through those, and maybe even restart on episode 1 of series one. I also need to build more chemistry kits.

Meanwhile, events on the world stage are looking grimmer and grimmer. I’m not exactly expecting Israel to attack Iran next month, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened. Greece is on the brink of a literal civil war, and Spain is very close to fragmenting, with secession sentiment running rampant in the Catalonia and Basque provinces. Spain and Italy are both demanding that Germany pay their bills, but both refuse to accept Germany’s terms. Things are very close to the breaking point. And the US is led by what history will probably regard as its worst president ever. Geez.

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Thursday, 13 September 2012

07:43 – Ignoring the First Amendment, the federal government is now focusing its efforts on determining who made the short video that islamists used as an excuse to attack the US embassy in Libya and murder US diplomatic personnel. I haven’t seen the video, but reportedly it is “insulting” to islam, accusing its “prophet” of child molesting, womanizing, and murder. All of those charges are true, so I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

It seems to me that it’s long past time for the US and all other civilized countries to break off diplomatic relations with islamic regimes, withdraw their embassies to such countries, and expel the embassies of those countries. There is no point to talking with such people. There has never been a point to talking with such people. I don’t care what they do in their own countries, as long as they keep it there. Let them murder and enslave their own citizens. It’s not our business. We should shun them and their hateful so-called religion. Nor is it our business if, say, Israel decides to turn one of those islamic countries into a smoking pile of radioactive rubble.

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Friday, 7 September 2012

09:19 – Things are slow at work, so Barbara decided to take today off. Her parents are starting their move this weekend from their house to the retirement facility. For now, they’ll be moving into a guest apartment temporarily while the one they’ll ultimately be in is cleaned and painted. We’ve been accumulating boxes for the move, which is no problem at all here, with science kit component shipments arriving frequently. Barbara just hauled a load over to her parents’ house, where she’ll spend the day helping them get some of their stuff packed up and ready to move tomorrow.

Science kit sales have been erratic. Some days, we sell only one or two science kits, or even none. Other days, we sell five or eight kits. As of now, we’re still in relatively good shape on biology and forensic science kits, but we’re down to half a dozen finished chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we have a dozen more that just need to be boxed up and 30 more after that in progress. The biology kits worry me a bit. We have about 20 of those in stock, but once we run dry we have to start from scratch to build a new batch. That means making up and bottling a bunch of chemicals and so on. So I guess we’d better get started on a new batch of at least 30. I’ll probably make up and bottle sufficient chemicals for 60 kits and leave the extra 30 sets of chemicals in stock when we build a batch of 30 kits. That makes it a lot quicker to build another batch of 30.

I remember the first time we had an order from the same person for both a chemistry kit and a biology kit. That happens relatively frequently, but I thought it might be a while before one person ordered all three of the kits in one order. That happened this morning for the first time. I just thought how I’d have reacted as a teenager or even an adult to have all three of these kits show up at the door. It’d be like Christmas in September.

10:39 – Wow. Drew Peterson convicted of murder on literally zero evidence. I haven’t really followed the case, but my sense of it from what I’ve read is that he probably is guilty. But this prosecution violates what had until now been a sacrosanct principle of criminal law: hearsay evidence is not evidence at all. The state had to pass a special law to allow hearsay to be admitted in Peterson’s trial. Otherwise, the prosecution had no case. Since the beginnings of our legal system, it’s been a fundamental precept that “better 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted”. It is up to the state to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. There is nothing about this case but reasonable doubt, but in its determination to convict this guy no matter what, the prosecution (i.e., the government) managed to get the rules changed. This fundamental violation of legal principles may come back to haunt us. It’s a small step from this to the Star Chamber.

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Wednesday, 22 August 2012

09:51 – Barbara’s dad visited one of the retirement facilities yesterday and loved it. They keep one unit available for prospective residents to stay in overnight to see how they like the place. I suspect Barbara’s parents may give that a try.

It’s official. Greek living standards have already gone into the toilet, and are going to get worse. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said, “Greek living standards have declined over the last three years by approximately 35%. A return to the drachma would immediately lower it by at least another 70%.” So, a 35% decline takes them from 100% down to 65%. A further 70% decline takes them from 65% to 19.5%. Samaras is an optimist. Their living standards are going to plummet whether they return to the drachma or remain in the euro.

12:27 – Duh. I’m currently making up Herzberg’s stain for the forensic science kits. It’s a rather involved process. I’d made up only a small amount when we were writing the book, but now I wanted to make up enough for at least 200 kits. (The stain is stable for years, but each batch differs slightly in its characteristics, so I wanted to make up a big batch to start with.) So I scaled things up a bit, which often comes to grief.

The first step is to make up a saturated solution of zinc chloride. Zinc chloride is extremely soluble in water. One liter of water will dissolve more than four kilos of anhydrous zinc chloride, producing about 2.5 liters of saturated zinc chloride solution with a specific gravity just over 2.0 g/L. Of course, zinc chloride is deliquescent, which means that standard trade material can be anything from truly anhydrous to a syrupy liquid. In practical terms, that means you don’t bother weighing out the solid zinc chloride; you just keep adding it to the liquid until some remains undissolved in the container.

So I started with 250 mL of distilled water, expecting to end up with about 625 mL of saturated solution, or about 1.25 kilos worth. I have some 1.5 liter PET wide-mouth bottles, which seemed ideal for mixing the stuff up. I even checked chemical resistance and found that PET was resistant to solid zinc chloride and saturated solutions of it. So I started by transferring the roughly 400 g of zinc chloride that remained in an open 500 g bottle to the 1.5 liter PET bottle, adding 250 mL of water, and swirling.

My first clue that I’d overlooked something was the steam condensing on the upper interior surface of the 1.5 L bottle. Ruh-roh. PET is indeed resistant to zinc chloride solutions. What it isn’t particularly resistant to is heat. Of course, I’d neglected to look up the heat of solution for zinc chloride, which turns out to be significant. It seemed possible that the solution would actually come to a boil. The bottle was softening as I watched it, deforming visibly. So I quickly poured the solution into a large polypropylene beaker. (I’d previously checked chemical resistance and found that in addition to PET, LDPE, HDPE, and PP are completely resistant to zinc chloride solutions.) PP is autoclavable, which means it can easily withstand the temperature of boiling water. It’s not possible under standard pressure for even a saturated solution of zinc chloride to boil above the softening/melting point of PP, so I knew the PP would be fine. Right now, I’m waiting for the solution to cool down before I add more zinc chloride. Now I know to use an ice bath.

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Monday, 20 August 2012

07:49 – The euro game of smoke and mirrors continues. There was concern that Greece would be unable to pay off more than €3 billion in bonds that are coming due this month, thereby forcing Greece to default (again), but Greece was able to get off a €4.1 billion bond auction last week of three-month t-bills. The problem is, it really is all smoke and mirrors. The bonds Greece has to pay off this month are held by the ECB. The t-bills that Greece sold last week were bought by Greek banks, which borrowed the money to buy the t-bills from–you guessed it–the ECB. In effect, the ECB provided Greece with a bridge loan to carry Greece just long enough to get the next installment of the bailout, which is by no means guaranteed. Talk about the Walking Dead.

We continue to build and ship science kits.

15:33 – I’m re-ordering components for the science kits, and as always our costs are going up. I just had to post a notice on the biology kit page that we’re increasing the price of that kit from $170 to $185 as of 1 October. I hate doing that, but we simply can’t absorb these increases. The current price of the kits is based on components ordered and paid for back in February, and the costs have increased significantly in the last six months. Sometimes dramatically. One component, fortunately not one of the more expensive ones, has more than doubled in price since February. The government keeps reporting that inflation is low, but that’s sure not my experience.

Meanwhile, I’m about to make up three of the nastier solutions that are in the forensic science kit. All three of them are essentially pure concentrated sulfuric acid, with 1% of something added: diphenylamine (diphenylamine reagent), ammonium metavanadate (Mandelin reagent), or formalin (Marquis reagent). If you’ve ever worked with concentrated sulfuric acid, you know that it’s a dense, oily, viscous liquid. So I’m considering how to fill the bottles for the kits.

One method I considered and ruled out was to buy an auto-burette, which is basically an automated bottle filler. Each press of the pump dispenses the volume you’ve set on the device. Using it is quick and easy, and it’d be worth while if I were filling 500 bottles at a time, or even 200. The problem is, there’s a significant amount of time and effort required for set-up, tear-down, and clean-up. Using an auto-burette to fill 30 or 60 bottles at a time actually takes more time and effort than doing it manually.

I could just fill the bottles manually from a beaker, but concentrated sulfuric acid is difficult to pour into a narrow-mouth bottle without spilling it. The kits will include only 5 mL of diphenylamine reagent and 10 mL each of Mandelin and Marquis reagents, but we’re using 30 mL bottles for all three of them because the 30 mL bottles have wider mouths than the 15 mL and smaller bottles. The solutions are so thick and viscous that it’s almost impossible to pour them into the 15 mL and smaller bottles.

But before I decide to pour from a beaker, I think I’m going to try using a 10 mL serological pipette with either a pipette bulb or a pipette pump. It’s not that I’m worried about getting too much liquid in the bottles; rather I’m concerned about dispensing too little. It’s pretty tough to judge 10 mL let alone 5 mL in a 30 mL bottle. I could dispense by weight, but weighing each bottle to make sure it meets a minimum weight is a pain in the petunia. With the pipette and pump or bulb, it should go pretty quickly. Just suck up liquid from a beaker until it’s above the 5 mL or 10 mL index line, as appropriate, and then let it run into the bottle. The only thing that concerns me is the viscosity. The liquid may take too long to run out of the pipette. Oh, well. The only way to find out is to try it.

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Friday, 3 August 2012

09:46 – Kit inventory is getting uncomfortably low, with only 15 chemistry kits and seven biology kits in stock. As of now, we’re shipping around 12 to 15 kits a week, which is a good rate for early August. That rate is ramping up, and will probably be double or triple the current rate late in August and into September. As of now, we have 30 more biology kits that need only final assembly, and 60 chemistry kits that aren’t far behind. The next batch will be 30 forensic science kits, followed by another 60 biology kits and then another 60 chemistry kits. Earlier this year, I thought I’d be pleased if we sold 60 total kits in August. It looks like that won’t be a problem.

Barbara just emailed me with very sad news. Randi Weiss, one of the attorneys at Barbara’s firm, died suddenly yesterday of cancer. Barbara’s email summed up in two sentences how everyone felt about Randi: “She was brilliant and kind. It is really a blow to the Firm.”

Randi’s doctorate was in molecular biology. I’d exchanged several emails with her and spoken with her on the phone a couple of times. I told Randi that at some point I intended to do a lab manual and kit that focused on molecular biology, and she had kindly agreed to be my tech reviewer for that project. Although I never met her face to face, I’ll miss her.

11:58 – It seems that Spain is in even worse debt trouble than anyone thought. A Polish legislator has pointed out that Spain borrowed about $60 million worth of gold from Poland about 400 years ago. At current gold prices, and assuming that Spain pays 400 years’ worth of compound interest at the natural 3% annual rate, that means Spain owes Poland just over $8 trillion. Some might argue that a debt 400 years old is impossible to collect, especially since neither Spain nor Poland is the nation it was 400 years ago. But in my opinion, debts, most especially including sovereign debts, must be paid. Of course, in effect this means that Germany now owes Poland $8 trillion, beyond whatever Germany still owes Poland for what it did to Poland in WWII. I suspect that Poland would be willing to settle for $8 trillion even.

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Thursday, 2 August 2012

08:09 – Mario Draghi made what may in retrospect be recognized as a strategic blunder last week when he announced that the ECB would do whatever was necessary to save the euro. It was certainly a tactical blunder by anyone’s standard. Draghi’s comment led to a big upswing in the markets, which took his word for it. The trouble is, it is not within the power of Draghi or the ECB to save the euro, and whatever measures he announces today will either fall well short of what is required or will exceed the authority of the ECB.

The Germans do not control the ECB, and it’s quite possible that Draghi will today announce that the ECB will grant the ESM a banking license. Doing so is not in their power, and is specifically prohibited by treaty, but that may not stop them. And if the ECB announces that it will grant the ESM a banking license, the Germans will go berserk. In effect, granting the ESM a banking license will allow it to make unlimited purchases of sovereign bonds without “sterilizing” those purchases by selling other bonds that it already holds, which means those purchases will be funded by printing money. That is the line in the sand that Germany refuses to cross. If the ECB takes this step, it paints Germany into a corner with only one way out: departing the euro and returning to its own sovereign currency. And you can bet that Germany, which absolutely refuses to give the southern tier what amounts to an unlimited right to spend Germany’s money, will depart the euro before it allows that to happen.

So, Draghi has two choices. He can announce steps that are grossly insufficient to save the euro, and the markets will respond accordingly. Or he can announce that the ECB will grant the ESM a banking license, and Germany will respond accordingly. It sucks to be Draghi.

10:00 – What a shocker. Mario Draghi announced precisely nothing, and the markets are responding accordingly. Draghi didn’t give them the ESM banking license. He didn’t even cut the interest rate. All he did was promise to do something unspecified at some unspecified future date. So much for yet another “last chance to save the euro”. News flash: there is no chance, last or otherwise, for the euro. Speaking of which, I just moved series two of The Walking Dead to the top of our Netflix disc queue.

I just spent a couple hours cleaning up my lab, unpacking and inventorying chemicals, and so on. I really need to get some horizontal space freed up.

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Friday, 27 July 2012

07:50 – This Chick-fil-A thing is getting ridiculous. As far as I remember, I’ve never eaten there, and now that I know that the company is owned by a bunch of anti-gay bigots, I never will. But for the government to deny the company the right to open a restaurant is a gross abuse of government power, and a clear violation of the First Amendment.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the polarization of American politics has become so extreme that people are arguing about whether a fast-food franchise should be allowed to open a new restaurant to serve chicken nuggets. Now, if Chick-fil-A were refusing to hire gay or divorced people, or if it were refusing to sell chicken nuggets to gay or divorced people, or if it were buying only heterosexual, married chickens, that’d be one thing. But no one has suggested that they’re doing any of those things. So the proper response here isn’t to use the force of law to prevent them from opening new restaurants. The proper response is simply to refuse to buy any of their products.

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