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Category: lab day

Friday, 3 May 2013

07:26 – Let me rephrase that. Some months ago, I said that a nice young couple had moved into the house across the street from us and three houses down. As it turns out, maybe not so nice. The paper reports this morning that the husband has been charged with sexually molesting a student and is in jail on $500,000 bond. I’ve spoken to the wife only once, briefly, and Barbara has never spoken to them at all.

It’s probably just as well that we never see them when we’re out with Colin. It’d be awkward to run into her. I mean, what could we say? We’re sorry to hear your husband’s in jail for raping a student. Oh, well. I suspect that house will be on the market again shortly. The wife probably can’t afford the mortgage on one salary, and even if she could she certainly wouldn’t want to live here, with everyone knowing what her husband is accused of doing.

The girl in question is 15 years old, and there’s been no suggestion that the sexual activities were anything other than consensual. He’s only 24, and a first-year teacher. As I’ve said with regard to other similar cases, if he’s guilty, he should be fired under the no-fucking-the-students rule and never be allowed to teach again, but prosecuting him on multiple felony counts seems a bit excessive unless he in fact coerced the girl.

09:08 – Reflecting on what’s happened to our neighbor, I’m again struck by how little credit women give men for their generally excellent behavior. The simple fact, rooted in biology and instinct, is that all heterosexual guys–from boys just past puberty to old men on their death beds–really, really want to have sex with every attractive young woman they encounter. Any guy who denies this is either lying or deluding himself. Three million years of evolution has created this biological imperative: all men want to impregnate as many women as possible, thereby spreading and immortalizing their own genes.

The disconnect exists because women’s reproductive interests are diametrically opposed to those of men. A man’s part in reproduction takes five minutes. A woman’s part takes nine months. Plus the 18 years or more that it takes her to nurture her new baby to maturity. So, ideally, men want to have sex with as many different women as possible every day, while a woman wants one man who will stay with her to aid in child rearing.

The other thing is that men don’t want to have sex with just any women. They want to have sex with attractive young women. The age of the man doesn’t matter. It’s all about the age (read fertility) of the women in question. Biologically, an attractive young woman is attractive precisely because she’s fertile. It’s a subliminal thing for men. We generally don’t understand at all why a particular woman is attractive. But studies have shown that men are subconsciously evaluating the suitability of women for reproduction, subconsciously judging things like their hip/waist/bust ratios and so on. And, while we think of pheromones as something that apply to insects and “lower animals”, we humans are just as subject to pheromones as any other animal. It has been established beyond question that men find women most attractive when the women are ovulating. How can we tell? Because, subconsciously, we recognize that these women smell fertile.

And that brings up the second disconnect. Women think it’s unfair that, regardless of their age, men remain sexually attractive to women, and in fact many women find older men more attractive than younger ones, while men are sexually attracted to young women. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of men find women in their teens and 20’s most attractive. It’s because women of that age are in by far the most fertile period of their lives. Women’s fertility begins declining when they’re in their late 20’s, and declines precipitously after age 35 or so. But neither women nor men are to blame here. We’re both simply acting on instinct. The wonder is not that some men stray in favor of younger women. The wonder is that most of us don’t. Most of us are well-trained to act against our own instincts, and women don’t give us nearly enough credit for that. As Anonymous famously observed:

Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous

Until very recently, women were realistic about this phenomenon. When a husband strayed, the wife generally didn’t divorce him. She made him aware that he’d been a very bad dog, and hit him on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. She reserved her ire for the Other Woman, whom she called a home-wrecker. She understood that it wasn’t her poor husband’s fault. He couldn’t help himself. It was the other woman who deserved all the blame, so the wife would confront her and claw her eyes out. That’s biology.

09:29 – Oh, yeah. Here’s a working link to that video that Barbara sent me yesterday. She originally sent me a WMV file rather than a link, but apparently some of my readers are having trouble viewing that file.

It’s a TV commercial, which I generally hate on principle, but I have to admit that this one was creative and well done. Speaking of things I generally hate, I see that Netflix streaming has replaced the butchered version of Coupling with the original, full-length episodes. Ordinarily, I’d refuse to watch any TV series with a laugh track, but I made an exception for Coupling. Mainly because I’m usually too busy laughing myself to pay any attention to the laugh track.

This series (the original British version, NOT the pathetic US knock-off version) gets my vote as the funniest TV series ever. Funnier than Black Adder, even. I’ve been re-watching an episode or two after I knock off for the day and am waiting for Barbara to get home from the gym. Last night, I watched S2E1, which had to be the funniest TV episode ever. I then watched S2E2, which had to be the funniest TV episode ever.

10:56 – Today, I’m making up three different types of antibiotic test paper for the life science kits: neomycin sulfate, penicillin G potassium, and sulfadimethoxine. These test papers are commercially available from BD and other suppliers, but they’re ridiculously expensive for student use. Home Science Tools, for example, sells a set of eight 1/4″ (6.35mm) discs, two discs of each of four antibiotics, for $3.95. That’s $0.50 per disc. Or, even worse, about $1.56 per square centimeter. Or they’ll sell you vial of 50 discs of any of the four antibiotics for $11.50, or $0.23 per disc.

The main reason these tiny test discs are so expensive is that they’re intended for medical/diagnostic use. The antibiotic concentrations are very precise and tightly controlled, and BD and other suppliers always have to build in a lot of margin to cover legal costs if they’re sued. But this is gross overkill for student lab sessions.

We do everything we can to keep the costs of our kits as low as possible, and this was a clear case of something we could do. Make our own antibiotic test papers. The antibiotic concentrations are the same for all three of our test papers: about 100 micrograms per square centimeter, accurate to maybe 10% either way. That’s more than accurate enough for school science labs. This in contrast to the BD discs, which have different concentrations for different antibiotics. (That’s because serum levels are an important consideration for human treatment; the achievable concentration in blood serum varies from antibiotic to antibiotic. For our purposes, we’re actually better off having the same concentration for each antibiotic, so that students can compare apples to apples when they determine which antibiotics are most effective for different types of bacteria.) And, rather than supply the papers as tiny discs, we’ll supply a 2.25×3″ piece of each paper. That’s about 43 square centimeters of each. That’s enough for at least 50 tests with each type of antibiotic, and at a small fraction the cost of using the BD discs. The students can punch their own discs with a standard paper punch.

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Thursday, 2 May 2013

08:17 – The morning paper says we have measles in a neighboring county. The apparent source is a Hare Krisha commune. The paper says the Hare Krishnas “discourage” vaccination. Geez. The article also says that, according to the CDC, of every 1,000 children who are infected, one or two will die. That’s actually understating the problem. In recent outbreaks, mortality rates have varied from about 0.1% to more than 1%.

A lot of people who read these figures may find them worrying but not terrifying. After all, a 0.1% to 0.2% mortality rate is bad, but it’s not the black plague. The problem is that measles, like all viruses, tends to mutate. And while the current strain, which probably originated in the first half of the 20th century, has a mortality rate under 1%, historically some measles strains have had mortality rates of 70% or thereabouts. That’s 700 dead people of every 1,000 infected. And no one knows if or when another deadly strain will develop. Avoiding inoculation is playing with fire.

UPS showed up at dinner time yesterday with a bunch of boxes. Our living room is now populated with hundreds of splash goggles, hundreds of lab thermometers, hundreds of disposable scalpels, hundreds of teasing needles, etc. etc. And I just cut another purchase order for hundreds of beakers, graduated cylinders, and other kit components. That’ll be it for a while. I’m starting to run out of storage space for component inventory.

My bottle-top dispenser died the other day. It’s a pretty cool device. It works kind of like those pumps they use in ice cream shops to dispense toppings. There’s a slider that can be set to dispense any volume from 2.5 mL to 30 mL, accurate to 0.1 mL. The pump sits on top of a reservoir bottle. To fill a container, I simply lift the pump body, put a bottle under the dispensing tip, and press down on the pump. Using it, I can fill 350 to 400 bottles an hour, or twice that many if Barbara is capping the bottles as I fill them. It’s definitely not something I want to do without.

As it turned out, the thick glass cylinder inside the pump body had cracked longitudinally. I checked the manual, and found that nowhere did it list the name or contact information for the manufacturer. So I called the wholesaler I’d bought it from. They said they’d send me a replacement cylinder but that they didn’t have any in stock, so it might be a week or so before it shipped. I decided this was something I needed to have a spare for, so while I had them on the phone I gave them a verbal purchase order for another dispenser, this one a 5 to 60 mL unit with a 2,000 mL heavy glass reservoir. That ships today, so I should have it early next week.

The units cost about $200 each, but as I told Barbara last night even if it had turned out that the original unit wasn’t under warranty and couldn’t be repaired, it would still have been worth it. I’d used it to fill a few thousand bottles, at cost of a few cents a bottle. Simply in terms of time saving, that unit had already paid for itself.

11:22 – I just made up two liters of 1.5% methylcellulose, a viscous solution that’s used to slow live protozoa when viewing them under a microscope. Methylcellulose has an interesting property: it’s freely soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water.

The first time I ever made up methylcellulose solution, I had that fact firmly in mind, which just goes to show that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I sprinkled the methylcellulose into ice-cold water and ended up with a globby mess. The problem is, the stuff clumps, resulting in little globs with slimy surfaces and dry powder inside the blob. The best way to make up the solution is to sprinkle the methycellulose power gradually and with stirring into very hot water, in which it’s insoluble. You end up with a suspension of the powder, which you then cool in an ice bath. The tiny solid particles in the suspension dissolve as the water cools, and you end up with a nice, even, non-globby solution.

12:00 – This is simply beyond belief. And public schools wonder why they’re losing so many of their best students to homeschooling.

Subject: Fwd: [IP] 16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For Science Project Mistake | Alternet
From: “Dale Dougherty”
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 11:24 am
To: Online Editors at Make
Robert Bruce Thompson
Brian Jepson

Insane.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: *DAVID J. FARBER*
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Subject: [IP] 16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For
Science Project Mistake | Alternet
To: ip <ip@listbox.com>

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/16-year-old-girl-arrested-and-charged-felony-science-project-mistake?akid=10386.21554.88KhZl&rd=1&src=newsletter833535&t=3

16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For Science Project Mistake

A Florida teen with an exemplary record is facing federal charges after conducting what a classmate calls “a science project gone bad.”

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot is accused of mixing housing chemicals in a small water bottle at Bartow High School, causing the cap to fly off and produce a bit of smoke. The experiment was conducted outdoors, no property was damaged, and no one was injured.

Not long after Wilmot’s experiment, authorities arrested her and charged her with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” according to WTSP-TV. The school district proceeded to expel Wilmot for handling the “dangerous weapon,” also known as a water bottle. She will have to complete her high school education through an expulsion program.

Friends and staffers, including the school principal, came to Wilmot’s defense, telling media that authorities arrested an upstanding student who meant no harm.

“She is a good kid,” principal Ron Richard told WTSP-TV. “She has never been in trouble before. Ever.”

“She just wanted to see what happened to those chemicals in the bottle,” a classmate added. “Now, look what happened.”

Polk County Schools stands by its decision to expel Wilmot, asserting in a statement, “there are consequences to actions,” and calling Wilmot’s experiment a “serious breach of conduct.”

h/t Reason

12:44 – I may have been mistaken in my first reaction to the story of the girl charged with a felony. I just got off the phone with Carmen Drahl at Chemical and Engineering News. She told me a bit more, although she’s having a hard time getting solid information because, as she said, “everyone has lawyered-up”. But it’s possible that this girl actually committed a terrorist act. Or it may be that she simply had an experiment go wrong without realizing the dangers of what she was doing. Without knowing her motivation, it’s impossible to say whether she had bad intentions.

Carmen informed me that her experiment involved reacting aluminum with drain cleaner, but we don’t know the details. I suspect the “drain cleaner” was sodium hydroxide (lye). If so, the reaction with aluminum produces hydrogen gas. If the reactants are confined in a soda bottle or other container, the pressure of the hydrogen increases until the container bursts, splatting concentrated lye solution over anyone in the vicinity. Getting concentrated lye solution in the eyes will permanently blind someone in literally five seconds flat, and will also cause severe chemical burns to exposed skin.

Our local paper has reported several incidents in the last few years of someone leaving one of these nasty little devices where someone can find it. They look just like a soda bottle partially filled with water, but if you pick one up that causes the lye solution to contact the aluminum foil. Very quickly, the bottle bursts and sprays lye solution over the unfortunate person who picked up the bottle. Most people think these devices are placed by teenagers as a prank. Some prank. These devices have only one purpose: to kill or seriously injure a person or pet who disturbs them. There is no question in my mind that making and placing one of these devices is a terrorist act.

But again, the key question is the girl’s motivation. She may have just done something stupid, with no intent to harm anyone. Teenagers do stupid things. So do adults. But if this girl intended to harm someone with her experiment, expelling her and prosecuting her for committing a terrorist act is appropriate. My guess, not knowing much about the case, is that she had no intent to harm anyone. But we need a lot more information before we can know for sure.

16:56 – After reading more about the situation from several sources, I’m now convinced that this young woman had no intention of hurting anyone. She’s a straight-A honors student, liked by everyone. She’s never been in any trouble before. Both the students and the teachers and administrators say she’s a good person. She appears to be a victim of the mindless “zero-tolerance” policies that are so popular nowadays. Release the girl, I say.

It sounds to me as though she did this on school grounds because she lives in an apartment and didn’t have anywhere safe to work, pursuing her love of science. That’s a failing on the part of the adults around her, but I’m afraid she’ll end up paying the price for their failures. And, apropos of nothing, Barbara just sent me this:

papierlose-welt

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Wednesday, 10 April 2013

08:38 – Barbara is taking the day off and driving up to Mt. Airy with a friend. They’re going to spend the day visiting antique stores and doing other girl stuff. They’ll have a nice day for it, with no chance of rain and a forecast high of 84F (29C). Yesterday’s official high was also 84, although it actually touched 90F (32C) here.

Yesterday I had to mail a replacement for a broken Petri dish. As usual, I sent that first-class mail rather than Priority Mail. Sending parcels by first-class mail is less expensive, although it’s limited to packages of no more than 13 ounces and doesn’t offer tracking. But the USPS Click-and-Ship website lets me generate postage labels only for Express Mail and Priority Mail, so for first-class parcels I use regular stamps. The postage for the package I sent yesterday was $2.41 (versus $5.15 for Priority Mail). Five first-class stamps are $2.30, so I had to add a sixth, for a total of $2.76.

I was already on the USPS website to find out how much postage was required, so I decided just to order a roll of lower-denomination stamps. They had rolls of a hundred $0.20 stamps for $20 plus $1.25 shipping, so I decided to order two rolls. I added them to my cart and tried to check out. Everything seemed to be going fine. I entered the CVN for the credit card number I have on file for them and clicked the Submit Order button. It came back to the previous page and displayed a message in red that said I hadn’t entered my telephone number, which was required. Nowhere on that page was a field for telephone number. Geez. I guess I’ll just pick up a roll of $0.20 stamps the next time I’m at the post office.

The taxes are finished, although I won’t mail them until the 15th. I plan to spend some time today cleaning up my lab and making up more solutions for kits.

12:09 – I see that a New York City councilwoman is pushing hard to get a law passed to make it illegal to buy “counterfeit” purses and watches. Not sell them, you understand. Buy them. And the law she proposes has teeth: up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail. Geez.

So-called “counterfeit” consumer products are not a societal problem. If someone wants to buy a “counterfeit” purse or watch, whose business should that be? Certainly not the government’s. In effect, we have the government police doing the companies’ jobs for them, at public expense. If Louis Vuitton or Coach or Rolex is concerned about people buying and selling “counterfeits” of their products, it should be up to them to do the policing. Let them sue the sellers.

This is a civil matter, not a criminal one, unless the sellers are falsely (and convincingly) claiming to be selling the real product. If a seller offers a fake Coach purse for $100, for example, it’s clear to any reasonable person that this could not possibly be the genuine $1,500 Coach purse. It’s either fake or stolen. On the other hand, if the seller attempts to sell a fake Coach purse for $1,200, a reasonable person might believe it to be genuine. That’s fraud. Let the police concentrate on real crimes like fraud, not pseudo-crimes like violating someone’s copyright. And, before anyone mentions it, I am aware that there are times when fake products can indeed be a societal problem. Criminals regularly sell fake products that do matter–things like pharmaceuticals and aircraft fasteners and automotive brake pads–where lives are actually at stake. But no purchasing manager is going to buy a fake $50 aircraft bolt if the price is suspiciously low. Buyers of this type of item are being defrauded, and the sellers should be prosecuted on that basis, not for copyright violations.

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Friday, 8 March 2013

06:47 – While I was concentrating on other things, the finished-goods inventory of biology kits got away from me. We sold two of those yesterday, which took us down to only three biology kits in stock. We have all the subassemblies to build two more, but that’s still only five total. Fortunately, with minor exceptions, we have all the components we need to build another 60 biology kits, but it will take some time to get those assembled.

One of those exceptions is the 100 mL polypropylene beakers, of which we have only 34 in stock. I have 600 more on order, but they won’t arrive until the end of this month. Biology kits include one of those beakers and chemistry kits two. So I think I’ll build a dozen biology kits, which leaves me enough for 11 more chemistry kits to go with the dozen that are already in finished inventory. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that 17 biology kits and 23 chemistry kits will hold us through the end of the month. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting everything assembled for 60 more biology kits and 48 more chemistry kits, less those beakers.

11:29 – So, I’m down in the lab making up a liter of phosphate-buffered saline 10X concentrate. I opened a new gallon of distilled water, poured some into the container I was using to make up the PBS, and noticed a puddle on the counter top. I’m not usually that sloppy, so I soaked it up with a towel and replaced the gallon jug of DI water on the counter. A moment later, I looked down. There was another puddle. Apparently, just removing the cap from the jug was enough to start it leaking. I’ve never had that happen before.

One can buy PBS tablets that simply need to be dissolved in the specified amount of DI water to make up PBS, but I didn’t have any. So I made up the PBS from reagent-grade sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, and phosphoric acid. I was using a clean 1-liter softdrink bottle as a disposable mixing container, planning to transfer the solution later to a 1-liter polypropylene bottle and autoclave it to sterilize it. Then I realized that autoclaving was gratuitous. Of course, I’ll autoclave the working dilution before using it, but I wanted the 10X concentrate sterile as well just to make sure nothing grew in it. But of course I didn’t need to autoclave to sterilize the 10X batch. I’d already dissolved the sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide in 250 mL of so of DI water, making a solution that was extremely alkaline, probably 0.5 molar with respect to hydroxide. More than enough to kill microorganisms and spores on contact. So I transferred that solution to the 1-liter bottle, swished it around to contact all parts of the bottle and cap, and declared the storage bottle sterile. I then added the phosphoric acid, creating the buffer, and topped up with DI water. That should be sufficient. It’s a water-clear solution in clear plastic bottle. If the next time I pull it out it looks at all cloudy, I’ll just autoclave the hell out of it. But I don’t think that’ll be necessary.

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Tuesday, 19 February 2013

08:50 – Sometimes I do really moronic things. Yesterday, I was making up two liters of the nitrogen-free Fertilizer C concentrate for the biology kits. That solution contains trace amounts of boron and cobalt, but the primary chemical is 194 grams of calcium acetate monohydrate.

So I went to the chemical stock shelves where I found a 500 g bottle of reagent-grade calcium acetate monohydrate. The only problem was that it had only a few grams of the chemical left in it. Rats. Normally, I reorder when I get short on something, but in this case I’d apparently forgotten. Either that, or I have a new bottle somewhere that I don’t remember. Oh, well.

But I had plenty of glacial acetic acid and calcium hydroxide on hand, and it’s easy enough to synthesize calcium acetate by reacting those two chemicals. One mole of calcium hydroxide reacts with two moles of acetic acid to form one mole of calcium acetate and one mole of water. Simple enough, and it doesn’t even foam as calcium carbonate would.

So I calculated the equivalent masses. The 193 grams of calcium acetate I needed was 1.10 moles, which corresponds to about 81.5 grams of calcium hydroxide. I then calculated the amount of glacial acetic acid I needed. The molar mass of acetic acid is 60.05 g/mol and its density is 1.049 g/mL, which means 1.10 moles would be 66.06 grams or 62.97 mL. But my reagent-grade acetic acid assays at 99%, so I divided those values by 0.99 and weighed out 66.73 g of acetic acid.

Calcium acetate is unusual in that it exhibits retrograde solubility. That is, it’s less soluble in hot water than in cold. I checked the solubility at room temperature and decided to dilute the acid aliquot to about 600 mL to provide enough water for the calcium acetate to dissolve. I then added the dilute acid to the calcium hydroxide, expecting the powder to disappear relatively quickly as it reacted with the acid.

Calcium hydroxide is only very slightly soluble in water, so as I swirled the slurry I wasn’t surprised to see a lot of suspended solids. I was surprised that the solids settled out on the bottom of the vessel, showing no sign of disappearing. Anhydrous calcium acetate is essentially odorless, but the more common monohydrate form and calcium acetate solutions have a very distinct odor. It’s not at all unpleasant, and has a slight undertone of vinegar that’s caused by the calcium acetate hydrolyzing to calcium hydroxide and acetic acid. So I sniffed the reaction vessel and detected a strong odor of calcium acetate but no vinegar odor at all. You’d think that’d have given me a clue, but no. I decided that the reaction might be slower than I’d expected, so I decided to give it a while to finish reacting.

It finally hit me. Duh. One mole of calcium hydroxide reacts stoichiometricly with two moles of acetic acid, not the one mole I’d added. So I added another 67 g of glacial acetic acid and swirled the reaction vessel. Sure enough, nearly all the solids disappeared, but after standing there was still no odor of vinegar. So I added a few extra mL of acetic acid, just in case. It’s not like a bit of extra acetic acid will harm anything. We supply this concentrate in 15 mL bottles. Diluting 125 mL of part A, 30 mL of part B, and 15 mL of part C yields 12.5 liters of nitrogen-free fertilizer working solution, so this concentrate ends up being diluted with more than 800 parts water.

13:50 – I now have all of the solutions made up for biology kits. Except for the ones for which I was short of chemicals–I have enough for at least 60 bottles of each of those–I made up enough for 120 or more kits, which should hold us for a while. Now to start filling bottles.

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Monday, 18 February 2013

10:01 – I told Barbara yesterday morning that the change in her demeanor was profound following her and her sister’s decision that they would no longer attempt to parent-sit nights. She’s shed a very heavy burden, and it’s obvious just looking at her. She’s smiling and laughing again. She and Frances will continue to see their parents frequently to take them to doctors’ appointments and so on, but they’ve laid down the law to their parents, telling them that they, their parents, are now responsible for watching over each other at night. If something happens to Sankie, Dutch will be there to summon assistance, and vice-versa. There’s no need for Barbara and Frances to put their lives on hold just so one of them will be there every night on the off chance that something bad will happen.

Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. We decided that once the weather improved a bit we’d head out to shoot some clays. It’s been a long time for all of us. As I said to Paul, we shouldn’t put this off much longer. We need to Become One with Obama. Before we do that, I’m going to buy a 12-gauge 870 pump shotgun in open cylinder choke for myself and maybe a 20-gauge 870 pump for Barbara, assuming I can find any for sale. Walmart is out of stock at every store within a 50 mile radius. Paul suggested that Barbara might want to try Mary’s 20-gauge 870 pump before we decided between 12 and 20 gauge for Barbara. My concern isn’t with light clay loads, which Barbara could easily handle in 12 gauge. My concern is that a 12-gauge with magnum buckshot or slug loads is more weapon than just about any woman can handle comfortably. For that matter, it’s too much gun for many men. Free recoil is roughly twice that of a .30-06 rifle, which very few women can use comfortably for more than a couple rounds at a time. What I may do is take along a few magnum buckshot loads to the clays range and let Barbara try shooting them. My guess is that she’ll decide a 20-gauge would be plenty.

Lab day today. I need to make up a bunch of different solutions for the biology kits. All of those on my current to-do list are completely stable, so I planned to make up a bunch of each. For solutions that are used only in the biology kits, I’d intended to make up enough of each for about 125 kits, which is to say two liters for solutions we supply in 15 mL bottles and four liters for ones we supply in 30 mL bottles. Unfortunately, I’m low-stock on some of the required chemicals. For example, I’m down to about 15 g of eosin Y sodium, which is only 1.5 liters worth. I have 100 g on order, so I may just wait until it arrives. For solutions that are used in both the biology kits and the life science kits, of which eosin Y is one, I’d intended to make up about 250 kits worth, four L of those that we supply in 15 mL bottles and eight liters of those that are in 30 mL bottles.

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Friday, 15 February 2013

08:27 – No word from Barbara last night, which I’m hoping means her parents passed a quiet evening and night. She’s taken the day off work today. This morning she’s taking her dad to look at battery-powered scooters. This afternoon, she’s taking her mom to see the psychiatrist that her mom used to see. He does outpatient work here in Winston-Salem, but is associated with a hospital in Thomasville. Barbara said she and her sister decided to get his appraisal of her mom’s condition and then just do whatever he recommends, including possibly admitting their mom to the hospital in Thomasville. They won’t consider putting her back in the psych unit at Forsyth Memorial Hospital, where she and they had horrible experiences. The downside is that Thomasville is a 1.5 hour round trip, so visiting their mom would be more problematic, if indeed visits are even allowed.

I am extremely disappointed in Netflix streaming. Things have been pretty grim around here, so last night I decided to watch a comedy just for some light relief. I noticed that the BBC comedy Coupling was available streaming. We’d watched it several years ago on DVD, so I decided to fire it up and watch it again. I remembered it as one of the funniest programs we’d ever watched.

So I watched the first episode of series one, and it just didn’t seem right. I wrote that off to the program just getting started, and thought it must have gotten better further into the series. So I started to watch episode two, and quickly realized that some ham-handed hack had edited the episode, bleeping out words like “shit” and even cutting entire scenes. The uncut original would probably get a PG in the US. Netflix has thousands of hours of other material with stronger language and more nudity, so I was at a loss to understand why they’d butchered Coupling.

I checked the Netflix web page for Coupling, and found that Netflix had edited the episodes down from 29 minutes to 23 minutes. There were lots of reviewers commenting about the butchered editing and Bowdlerization. So I went back to our archives in search of the DVDs. Series 1 was all on one DVD, and there was a slip of paper in the sleeve saying that I’d given that disc to Mary. So I started watching series 2, which was as brilliant as I’d remembered it. Laugh-out-loud funny. I shudder to think how bad the edited version would have been.

The moral here is that if you want to watch Coupling, which you should, don’t watch the Netflix streaming version. Get the DVDs. Oh, and don’t bother watching series 4. Series 1 through 3 are brilliant. In series 4, the actor who played Jeff left and his replacement was a very poor substitute.

10:39 – Barbara just made a flying visit home for some clothes and then headed back over to her parents’ place. Last night went well. Her dad is doing fine and her mom is doing better. Barbara said she may even come home tonight and leave her parents on their own for the night.

I’ve finished making up 60 sets of chemicals for the chemistry kits, and today I start making up chemicals for another batch of biology kits.

12:15 – I just made up eight liters (2+ gallons) of Fertilizer Part A, which at 125 mL per kit is sufficient for 64 biology kits. I’m always entertained by making up this solution. Most of the solutions I make up use reagent-grade chemicals weighed on an analytical balance and dissolved in DI water. That would be gross overkill for this fertilizer concentrate, which I make up with technical-grade or fertilizer-grade chemicals, weighed on a shipping scale to the nearest gram and dissolved in tap water.

This solution is a mixture of potassium hydrogen phosphate and potassium dihydrogen phospate. The mixture is calculated to provide the correct amounts of potassium and phosphate after dilution, while maintaining the pH in the proper range. I get the first chemical in four-pound (~ 2 kilo) jars from soapgoods.com. The second is VitaGrow Giant Bloom Part C, which is available in four-pound boxes from any garden supplies vendor.

When I made up the first batch of this solution last May, I wondered why VitaGrow added blue-green dye to the otherwise colorless potassium dihydrogen phospate powder. I assumed they did it just so the fertilizer solution would be a pretty pale blue-green color. But as it turned out, having the solution colored works better for us because it’s much easier to see the level on the 125 mL polypropylene bottles as we’re filling them. So I made a note in my consolidated chemical makeup instructions document that if in the future I used a different source for potassium dihydrogen phosphate I should add a few drops of blue/green food coloring to the solution.

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Tuesday, 29 January 2013

08:41 – The cops never, ever stop looking for a cop killer. In October, 1996, a local cop, Gregory Martin, radioed in that he was making a traffic stop and requested backup. A state cop soon arrived at the scene and found Martin dead on the ground by the side of the road and no one else in sight. The morning paper says three suspects are now in custody and have been charged with first-degree murder. If they’re guilty, I hope they’re executed. Anyone stupid enough to kill a cop is too stupid to live anyway.

Barbara spent the night with her dad, and is going straight into work from there. No word yet on when her mom will be released from the hospital. Sankie is suffering from sleep deprivation and hunger. No surprise, since she hasn’t been able to sleep or eat since Dutch came home from the hospital last time. There may also be other things going on, including possibly pneumonia and a UTI. Barbara said she may be released tomorrow, but I’d be surprised. Barbara and Frances are looking into getting someone to sit with Dutch and Sankie on a temporary basis, but unless/until that happens it looks like they’ll be taking turns staying over at her parents’ apartment themselves.

Last night, Colin and I played ball and finished series four of Heartland. Barbara is home tonight, unless something changes, but will probably being staying with her dad tomorrow night. If so, Colin and I will start on series five of Heartland. Series six is running now on CBC, and I’m bittorrenting HD versions of the episodes as they air. (I keep my upload speed throttled to 0.0 KB/s, so I’m breaking no laws by downloading them; I’m not “making available” by uploading.)

The HD episodes are about 1.4 GB each, and are typically in .mkv format. The old version of DeVeDe that I use to create video DVDs doesn’t work properly with .mkv files, so I run the .mkv files through ffmpeg to convert them to mpegs, which DeVeDe handles well. I end up with six DVDs per season, three episodes per DVD. Only the first 12 episodes of series six have aired, with the final six to be aired in February and March. The good news is that series six is getting higher ratings than series five did, so there should be a series seven.

We continue to build science kits. Right now, I’m working on the new LK01 Life Science Kit.

08:59 – Barbara just sent me this video of a Border Collie trying to force an uncooperative horse to do what it’s told. Boy, does this look familiar. I see it every time I walk Colin. The only difference is that on those walks I’m the horse.

10:21 – One of the good things about my lab is that I have lots and lots of glassware and plasticware. Hundreds of individual items: beakers, graduated cylinders, volumetric flasks, funnels, stirring rods, and on and on. That means I almost always have a clean whatever-I-need. But one of the bad things about my lab is that I have all that stuff. When I use a vessel, I just rinse it and put it in the sink to be washed later. The problem is, later never comes until I have piles of stuff in the sink and covering all the counters on both sides and usually the floor, by which time cleaning up my lab becomes an Augean Stable thing. The other day, Barbara was cleaning downstairs and was about to step into my lab. She flipped the lights on, immediately flipped them back off, and just turned around and walked away.

So yesterday I decided I’d better get started on cleaning up my lab. It’ll take a while because I’m going to do it gradually. I couldn’t get to the sink in the lab, so I filled a 10-gallon (40 liter) bin with dirty glass/plasticware and carried it upstairs to the kitchen to wash it there. (Most of the stuff was already reasonably clean, so there’s no real hazard to washing it upstairs.)

The goal is to get the floor, counters, and sink in the lab completely empty and clean. That’s going to take some doing. I decided this task needed a name of its own, so I’m calling it Operation Overlord.

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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.

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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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