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Category: news

Saturday, 21 June 2014

07:49 – Barbara got home around lunchtime yesterday. Colin and I are both delighted.

Kevlar inventor Stephanie Kwolek dies aged 90. I never met her, although had things been different I might have. One of my junior high school classmates was her niece, Kathy Kwolek. Kathy was close friends with Debby Dailey, who lived two houses up the street from me. They were two of the first girls I noticed as girls. I was interested in both of them, particularly Kathy, who was far prettier than Debby, but both of them were too busy doing teenage girl things to take much notice of me.

More work on science kits today.

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Thursday, 19 June 2014

07:55 – Three days down, two to go until Barbara returns home tomorrow evening. I think Colin just figures she’ll be home when she gets here and there’s no use worrying about when that will be.

I see that Obama has F-18’s flying “recon” over Iraq but has ruled out airstrikes. That’s a shame. Airstrikes would be nice, but they should be even-handed so that the US can’t be accused of taking sides. I’m thinking napalm and FAE’s. Lots and lots of napalm and FAE’s. If we obliterate both sides, no one could later claim that we were showing favoritism.

14:51 – Building more forensic science kits has become a high priority. Normally, forensic science kits make up roughly a tenth of total kit sales, so we typically keep only a dozen or so in stock. In the last week, we’ve sold four forensic science kits, which is at least double what I’d expect, particularly with June being a slow month. What’s very odd is that three of those four have gone to Austin, Texas. I wonder if someone is doing a co-op summer science forensics program. Fortunately, Barbara has already labeled 60 sets of bottles for the FK01A kits, and I have most of the solutions already made up. Now I need to make up the four or five solutions I’m short of and get a PO done for some hardware items.

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Thursday, 12 June 2014

08:39 – It’s a small victory for sanity, but the city government has finally decided to kill the West End trolley service downtown. The “trolley” is actually just a standard city bus duded up to look like an old-fashioned trolley. It’s been running since 1988, and has never had many riders. The vast majority of the time, it has no riders at all, and just drives around empty but for the driver. Every time someone gets on that bus, it costs city taxpayers $23. And it took the city council 25 years to realize that it was a waste of money.

I read an interesting article on CNN yesterday, America’s middle class: Poorer than you think

In terms of average net worth per adult, the United States comes in at $301,000, fourth behind Switzerland, Australia, and Norway. But in terms of median net worth, the US comes in 19th, at only $45,000. Neither of these numbers is particularly useful. The average is skewed by the fact that the US far and away leads the world in millionaires and billionaires. If you consider a group of 100 people, one of whom has a net worth of $100,000,000 and 99 of whom have a net worth of zero, the average net worth of that group is $1,000,000. The median is skewed by the fact that the poor in the US have essentially zero net worth. The bottom 40% hold less than 0.5% of total US net worth, the bottom 60% something under 5%, and the bottom 80% something like 10%, leaving about 90% of total US net worth to be shared among the top 20%. If you want numbers that provide a better picture of the US middle class, look at the net worth and income necessary to be in the top quintile.

10:16 – Most of the backorders are starting to clear out. UPS showed up yesterday with 200 beakers and 480 graduated cylinders that had been backordered for a couple months, and FedEx is supposed to deliver 300 5/10/15X folding pocket magnifiers today that have been backordered for 3 months or more. That’s a relief, because we were down to only 50 or so of the magnifiers in inventory, and just four of the cylinders. Now all I need to do is get all this stuff moved downstairs and checked into inventory.

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Sunday, 8 June 2014

10:45 – We’re doing the usual Sunday stuff. Barbara just finished cleaning house. I finished the last of the laundry and started hauling stuff downstairs from the library/living room.

We’re getting to the point where kit components are in reasonable supply, so I’m going to shift gears from working on kits every day to devoting two days a week to stuff that’s been on my to-do list for a long time. Such as finishing the earth science manual, getting started on the manual/design for AP Chemistry and AP Biology, and so on. Not to mention doing some cleaning up and uncluttering of the upstairs.

11:12 – Texas Republicans favor ‘reparative therapy’ platform for gays

Morons. There are two things wrong with their reasoning, if such a word can be applied to their thought processes: first, the implicit assumption, with no supporting evidence, is that there’s something wrong with being gay, that it needs “fixing”. Second, there’s the explicit assumption, again with zero supporting evidence, that it’s possible to “convert” someone from being gay to being straight. In all of the history of H. sapiens, that’s been accomplished exactly zero times. If you are heterosexual and doubt the truth of that statement, just try to imagine “therapy” that would cause you to “convert” to being gay.

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Friday, 6 June 2014

07:58 – Happy Birthday to me. I turn 61 today.

Barbara mentioned last night that it’d be a good idea to stay away from the Wake Forest University area until Angelou’s funeral is over with. I suggested this morning that Barbara take an alternate route to work rather than attempting Reynolda Road, which passes the main WFU entrance. Apparently, WFU will be closed to the public tomorrow for the funeral. It’s likely to be a real media circus, with Oprah Winfrey and Obama’s wife speaking, which of course means the SS will also be out in force. It’s also possible the Westboro Baptist Church nutters will show up to protest because Angelou was a vocal supporter of gay rights. That, of course, means we’ll also have a large group of bikers out to protect the family from the WBC nutters.

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Thursday, 5 June 2014

08:07 – Public schools have been in the news here lately. With the Republicans firmly in control of state government, big changes to public education are in prospect.

Legislators are doing their best to do away with tenure for public school teachers. That suffered a setback recently when a liberal judge ruled that the state couldn’t take back something that had already been granted. I expect the state supreme court will reverse that decision. And North Carolina is withdrawing from Common Core, which the state just began implementing recently. A review panel has been set up, tasked with adopting new state curriculum standards, with the provision that Common Core is not acceptable even if the panel determines that it is the best available alternative. And legislators have carefully crafted a new law to get around US Supreme Court decisions on restricting religion in public schools.

The real problem is that the politicians have set their sights far too low. The fundamental problem is public schools, period. The North Carolina constitution requires the state to provide an elementary through high school education to all children. But the constitution doesn’t specify how that is to be done.

The solution is to establish an educational voucher system. A real one, one that is available to all students’ families rather than just a tiny percentage. And one that is funded directly by the pool of money allocated to public education. Those vouchers should be for the amount the state currently spends per student, and the amount of any voucher redeemed at a private school should immediately be deducted from the budget allocated to the public schools in that student’s district.

It’s also important that the state implement absolutely no requirements or standards for private schools, including any restrictions or requirements concerningn secular versus religious, teacher certifications, and so on. It should be entirely up to the private schools themselves to set their own policies and to the parents and students to decide what constitutes an appropriate education.

The immediate result of such a true school choice program would be that public schools would have to compete efficiently and effectively in an educational free market if they want to survive at all. Most would not, and that’s all to the good. Would some students receive very poor educations? Of course they would, but almost certainly fewer than currently receive very poor educations in our existing public schools.

15:05 – I’ve been making up solutions and filling bottles all day, hundreds of bottles. And I just got to the next item on my to-do list, which is methyl red solution. Methyl red, AKA 2-(N,N-Dimethyl-4-aminophenyl)azobenzenecarboxylic acid, is extraordinarily insoluble in water. So much so that the solution we use, 0.02% w/v, exceeds the solubility of methyl red. That’s 0.2 g/L. If I simply add 0.2 g of methyl red to a liter of water, about 90% of it (at a guess) remains undissolved.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this. The sodium salt of methyl red is considerably more soluble than the free acid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking about that when I ordered what amounts to a lifetime supply of the free acid. So I need to convert the free acid to the sodium salt. That’s easy enough to do: simply dissolve the methyl red free acid in a (very) dilute solution of sodium hydroxide to form a solution of sodium methylredate. (I lay claim to creating that anion name; Google finds zero instances of it.)

Just how dilute? Well, the stoichiometry says that one mole of sodium hydroxide reacts with one mole of methyl red. The molecular mass of the free acid is 269.30 g/mol, while that of sodium hydroxide is 39.9971 g/mol. But making up a liter of 0.02% methyl red requires only 0.2 g, or 0.00074+ mole. Accordingly, for a 1:1 correspondence, I need about 29.7 milligrams of sodium hydroxide. The standard 6 M sodium hydroxide solution that we supply with many of our kits contains 240 mg/mL, so I’d need to add about an eighth of a milliliter of that solution per liter. The plastic pipettes we buy 10,000 at a time deliver about 33 drops/mL, so call it four drops.

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Thursday, 29 May 2014

08:00 – I didn’t quite finish building the biology kits yesterday, but I’ll get that done today. Fortunately so, because I have outstanding orders to fill today.

The US MSM has paid little attention to the seismic shift in European politics over the last week. Embarrassingly, UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tories finished third in the EU elections, far behind the UK Independence Party (UKIP; think the British version of the Tea Party). The Tories even managed to finish slightly behind Labour. But it’s not just the UK. Voters in most EU countries voted heavily for Eurosceptic parties. In France, voters’ rejection of Hollande’s Socialists was stunning, with Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN; think the French version of the Tea Party) essentially sweeping the election.

These elections bode ill for the EU in general and the euro in particular. Here’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s take: Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit FTA:

If Europe’s policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.

British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence – or worse – of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.

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Friday, 23 May 2014

07:35 – Barbara is taking today off work. With the holiday Monday, that gives her a four-day weekend. We’d planned to sleep in this morning, but Colin woke us at 6:15 vomiting. At least he wasn’t up on the bed at the time.

Barbara has lots of work planned for the next few days, including painting the new columns on the front porch and the new threshold at the back door. I hope we can keep Colin away from the wet paint. Over the years, our experience with Border Collies and wet paint hasn’t been good.

There’s an article in the paper this morning about state government subsidies for movie and TV production companies. North Carolina has been a major participant. Most of the action takes place in Wilmington, where many TV series have been or are being produced, including Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, Hart of Dixie, Under the Dome, Revolution, Sleepy Hollow, and Eastbound and Down.

But now many states are rethinking these tax breaks and production credits, wondering if they’re getting enough bang for their bucks. Many states are eliminating subsidies entirely. North Carolina is tweaking the rules, eliminating subsidies for talk shows and sporting events and focusing more on credits for building production facilities and other infrastructure. I suspect that North Carolina has already reached critical mass, with major production facilities already located here, a continuing flow of talented and skilled graduates from Winston-Salem’s North Carolina School of the Arts, and our generally low cost of living.

09:16 – In terms of physical components, chemicals are by far the largest cost item in our kits. The chemical cost for a bottle ranges from a few cents to a few dollars each, depending on the chemical. But the second largest cost item for physical components is the containers themselves, which range from about $0.15 to $0.90 each. That may not sound like much until you realize that one kit may contain 50+ containers.

Until recently, I’ve been happy with our primary container supplier. Their prices are competitive, they stock most of the containers and caps we need, and they ship quickly. They also provide free ground shipping on any order of $250 or more, which isn’t a problem for us. But I’m starting to worry about them. In the past, I’d place an order with them and it would be shipped the same day or the following day. I’d generally receive it two or three days after I placed the order. But on the last couple of orders they’ve been much slower to ship. It’s not a backorder problem. When I placed those orders, they showed all items as in-stock. But rather than ship the same or the following day, they’re now taking five to ten business days to ship. In one sense, that’s not a big problem. I always keep reasonable stock levels of the containers we use. But I do wonder what’s going on with them.

11:44 – Amazon just added a new benefit for Prime members, called Amazon Prime Pantry. They charge $6 for shipping, but that’s for a very large box. Adding a Prime Pantry item to your cart starts a new box. Each Prime Pantry item states how much of a box it fills. If you exceed the volume or weight capacity of the box, it automatically starts a new box.

So I started playing around with it, just to see how much would actually fit in the box. I’m still building our long-term food storage (as opposed to just the car emergency kits). Lipids are an issue for long-term storage, and one of the best ways to store lipids is canned Crisco. The manufacturer says Crisco remains good for at least two years, but in fact an unopened can will remain good for at least ten years, and probably a lot longer. We don’t routinely use Crisco here, but Barbara frequently uses vegetable oil for frying chicken, stir-fry, etc. Crisco works just as well for that as liquid oil, so I decided to add some Crisco to the box. (Incidentally, canned Crisco is also excellent for emergency lighting. Sticking a piece of string in a can gives you an emergency candle that’ll burn all day long for literally a month.)

Despite Python, I happen to like Spam canned meat, so I added a few cans of that as well. I ended up with 11 48-ounce cans of Crisco and 14 12-ounce cans of Spam in that one box. Amazon informed me that my box was 100% full and asked if I wanted to check out.

I typically place several Amazon.com orders per month, and every time it offers a discount if I apply for an Amazon Visa card. I finally decided to click on the Learn More link, and I liked what I saw. I’d been using our Costco AmEx card at Amazon. It provides a 1% rebate on all purchases, with a higher percentage for Costco purchases. The Amazon card provides a 3% rebate on Amazon purchases, and lower percentages on non-Amazon purchases. So I filled out the on-line application, asked for a second card for Barbara, and clicked Submit. After about 10 seconds, the screen refreshed and said the card was approved and that it had been set as our default payment method for Amazon purchases. It also said I’d been issued a $60 credit that would be applied automatically to our next Amazon order unless I told them otherwise.

Given that we make a huge percentage of our purchases from either Costco or Amazon, it makes sense to have a stored-branded card for each. We already have a Visa card from our credit union, but it’ll be easy enough to cancel that. The new card has only a $5,000 credit limit, but I’m sure we can get that increased if we need to.

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Wednesday, 21 May 2014

09:37 – We’re getting low on biology kits, so I’ll get started on a new batch today. We got a good start last weekend on cleaning out the upstairs work/inventory room. Once we finish that, I’ll have room to store a couple hundred or more kits there.

14:03 – I found this surprising: Only 56 percent of Americans can perform the five core swimming skills

The article notes that 86% of Americans believe they can swim, which apparently means that 30% of the people you encounter believe they can swim, but can’t. Hmmm. I believe I can swim, but perhaps I’m wrong. I learned to swim before I started elementary school. Our junior high school had an indoor pool, and half our gym classes took place in the pool. In high school and college I spent lots of time every summer swimming and diving, and I passed the Water Safety Instructor test in college. But I haven’t tested the hypothesis in probably 35 years or more, so perhaps I’ve actually forgotten how to swim.

But apparently nearly half of Americans lack even basic swimming skills, which is disgraceful. How can parents not teach their children to swim? How can schools not require that children demonstrate the ability to swim? Talk about a fundamental skill. If in fact 44% of Americans can’t swim, I’m surprised that only 10 people a day drown in this country.

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Monday, 19 May 2014

07:50 – I learned something from a front-page article in the paper this morning. I’d assumed that North Carolina had a modern medical examiner system. Not so, as it turns out. We have what are called medical examiners, but in fact the setup is more like the old, obsolete coroner system. Medical examiners are appointed by the state medical examiner, and there are no qualifications required. We apparently have nurses, paramedics, and morticians working as medical examiners. And, incredibly, they’re paid piecework, a flat $100 per body. They don’t even get mileage for visiting the scenes, so they usually don’t. In one of the cases described, the medical examiner ruled the cause of death a car accident. Fortunately, the funeral home noticed four stab wounds in the guy’s back. The medical examiner said she’d looked at the guy’s body at the morgue, but hadn’t bothered to turn it over. Quincy wept.

10:39 – We have a contractor doing some work today. They showed up around 8:30 and got to work replacing the columns on the front porch, which were rotting. They installed aluminum replacements. That took a couple hours. Now they’re chiseling out the rotting threshold of the back door, replacing it, and replacing the storm door out to the deck. Barbara’s been wanting to do these projects for a while now, so I’m sure she’ll be happy when she gets home and sees that they’re complete. Colin is not happy about what’s going on, though. I have him penned up to make sure he can’t help with the projects.

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