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Category: news

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

09:50 – Barbara’s been gone 72 hours. So far, Colin and I are making do. Only four more days until she returns.

I called AmEP yesterday afternoon just to make sure that Katie was okay. She said she and her husband are fine, as is the business, but that much of Fort Collins and the surrounding area is a complete wreck. She was off Thursday and the business was closed Friday. She said it took her about two and half hours yesterday to drive the two or three miles from their house to the office. Almost all of the bridges are out, and the traffic was a bumper-to-bumper parking lot. But they’re still operating normally, taking orders, receiving shipments from their suppliers, and sending out shipments to their customers. Colin barked while were talking, and I told Katie that that was my Border Collie assistant. As it turns out, Katie also has a Border Collie. She got her when she was in college, and the BC is now 13 years old.

I told Katie that our next science kit would probably be earth science, and that I wanted to include rock and mineral specimens. AmEP has dozens of different rock/mineral kits in their catalog, but as I told Katie I fear single-sourcing anything. I’d hate to have a standard kit that requires a product that the vendor might discontinue without notice. She said that their rock/mineral kits are an “evergreen” product for them. They sell them in large numbers and have been doing so for years. They build the kits themselves rather than importing them from China or wherever. They actually employ a geologist and they own the quarries where they get their rock specimens. Katie said they’d be happy to do a custom kit for me, or if I preferred they’d sell me the stuff in bulk. So, for example, I could order 50 pounds each or whatever of 1″ chunks of 25 different rocks and minerals and build the kits ourselves.

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Sunday, 15 September 2013

08:52 – Barbara’s been gone 24 hours, and Colin and I are already descending into barbarism, filth, and squalor. Last night, we stalked, pounced, and killed our dinner and ate it raw. That frozen Stouffer’s chicken and brocolli pasta bake never knew what hit it. It was kind of crunchy, though. Next time, we may heat it first. All of Barbara’s training is not lost on us, however. I’m doing a load of laundry as I write this, and later I’ll clean the toilets.

I have all but two of the solutions I need for a new batch of 60 biology kits made up, and most of the bottles filled. I’ll make up three liters each of the 6 molar hydrochloric acid and 6 molar sodium hydroxide solutions today and try to finish bottling everything. Tomorrow I’ll build a dozen or two biology kits and then get to work on what I need to build more chemistry and forensic kits. As expected, kit sales have started to tail off a bit. Some days, we ship six or eight kits and other days none or one. We’re still averaging about three a day, but that’s starting to decline. In October/November, we’ll probably average 1.5/day and then jump back up to around two a day in December.

10:18 – I’m getting a bit concerned about Katie Dugan, who’s my rep at one of our wholesalers, American Educational Products. She’s a delightful young woman, and I talk with her regularly, most recently a day or two before the flooding started. AmEP is in Fort Collins, Colorado, which until this morning I thought was not one of the worst-affected areas. The news reports kept talking about Boulder, but this morning I saw one that mentioned that Fort Collins and its county have more than 350 people unaccounted for, which is the bulk of those unaccounted for. I hope Katie and her new husband are okay.

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Thursday, 29 August 2013

12:21 – AEP has this to say about the collapsing BRICS economies: Emerging market rout is too big for the Fed to ignore: The US Federal Reserve has told Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe to drop dead.

It’s not, you know. Too big to ignore, that is. No matter how this plays out, the world’s economy is going to take a big hit. It’s the Fed’s responsibility to minimize the effect on the US economy, and the hell with Brazil, India, China, and the rest. And, although the Fed has made pretty much nothing but mistakes for the last several years, in this case they’re making the best of a horrible situation by winding down so-called Quantitative Easing while there’s still at least a glimmer of a hope that it’s not too late. Too late for the US, that is. It’s already too late for the eurozone, and the BRICS are toast. Brazil is already a walking dead man, with India and China not far behind. They all hoped to avoid the so-called “middle income trap”. None of them managed to do so, and now they’ll pay the price. And a heavy price it’s going to be.

Work continues on building and shipping science kits. This month is shaping up well, at roughly twice the revenue of August 2012. That’s been helped along by a couple of large bulk orders, but even without those we’re doing pretty well.

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Thursday, 22 August 2013

07:58 – The main headline in this morning’s paper was N.C. students not as ‘college ready’ as peers

The results from spring 2012 are in. The average score of North Carolina public high school juniors taking the ACT dropped from 21.9 the previous year, which was a full point above the national average, to 18.7, which was dead last. In fairness, the article did point out that this drop was expected, and why. In 2011, only about 20% of public high school juniors took the test; in 2012 100% of the juniors were required to take it. Obviously, the average is going to be much lower if you test all students than if you test only the top quintile.

The article also pointed out that white and Asian students have higher average scores than black, Hispanic, and American Indian students, but it failed to draw the obvious conclusion. Comparisons between states are meaningless unless those results are normed to take into account both the percentage of students who take the test and the racial makeup of the tested population. States whose students are primarily white and Asian are going to have better averages than states with significant percentages of black, Hispanic, or American Indian students.

Less obviously, the percentage of students in a given state who are home-schooled has a disproportionate effect on average public high school test scores. Home schooled students are, on average, much brighter than public school students. There’s self-selection going on. Homeschooling drains the best students from public schools. I don’t have the data at hand, but I’d be willing to bet that if homeschooled students from across the US were grouped and treated as a separate state, their average scores would put them not just first of all states, but far, far above whichever state ranked second.

Most colleges and universities now recognize the reality that homeschool students are the best of the best. Only a few years ago, many colleges were leery of homeschool students because they lacked public school transcripts. Now, many colleges and universities, including many of the most prestigious, are actively recruiting homeschool students.

13:49 – Oh, yeah. A couple of very important things about homeschooling and standardized test scores that I forgot to mention in my earlier post. First, students who’ve been homeschooled for only a year typically average 59th percentile on test scores. Students who’ve been homeschooled for several years or longer typically average 90th to 93rd percentile. Second, for homeschooled students, racial disparities in standardized test scores begin narrowing quickly even after only one year of homeschooling. After two or more years of homeschooling, racial disparities in standardized test scores essentially disappear. That is a truly damning indictment of public school systems.

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Saturday, 3 August 2013

08:29 – Time-Warner Cable is in a big fight with CBS over retransmission rights. I keep hoping that one of these times the cable TV company being extorted will tell the network doing the extorting to get stuffed and just stop carrying their signals. The whole idea of requiring cable TV companies to pay for retransmission rights is stupid anyway. The networks broadcast their programming as free OTA signals. All the cable TV systems do is pick up that signal and provide it to their subscribers, who could have gotten it OTA for free. The cable TV systems aren’t charging for the content; they’re charging for providing the equivalent of the antenna. These retransmission fees already total several billion dollars a year, all of which comes out of cable TV subscribers’ pockets. The networks are being paid twice, first by their advertisers and then by cable TV subscribers.

It’s long past time that we put a stop to this. In fact, it’s long past time that we put a stop to OTA TV and cable TV and put television networks out of business. That RF spectrum is wasted on broadcast TV. It would be much better used for wireless data. And the cable TV companies should become pure broadband data providers. If people want to watch TV programming, they should be doing it via IP packets. There’s absolutely no need for broadcast television networks, local TV stations, cable TV, or any of the rest of the obsolete infrastructure that grew out of the way things were done 60 years ago.

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Wednesday, 31 July 2013

08:11 – I was surprised to read in the paper this morning that North Carolina has legalized the use of firearms suppressors (“silencers”) for hunting and other purposes. I was even more surprised to read that North Carolina is the 40th state to have done so. Of course, suppressors remain tightly controlled under federal law. They’re legal to buy and possess, but only after paying a $200 transfer tax, and even then transporting them is tightly controlled. Ironically, suppressors are unregulated in many countries. The last time I checked, one could walk into a hardware store in Britain and buy (for example) a Parker-Hale Sound Moderator, no questions asked.

Perhaps this means more Americans will find out what a suppressor actually looks like and sounds like. Contrary to how they’re represented in movies and TV, a suppressor–even for minor calibers like .22 rimfire–isn’t small. For a serious caliber, it’s typically the volume of a soda can, if not larger. And they don’t hiss, whistle, or thump. A good one reduces the report of a major caliber pistol from a resounding boom to a loud pop, like what you hear when you prick a balloon.

I’m shipping another box of stuff to “our” USMC unit in Afghanistan today. After I finished packing it, I was surprised how dense that box is. It’s USPS Regional Rate Box B–which has a volume of 615 cubic inches or 10 liters–and the sucker weighs over 13 pounds (6 kilos). I guess that’s what happens when one packs a box full of mostly canned foods. I’d used lots of packing tape originally, but I went back and taped the hell out of it again, just to make sure it doesn’t come apart.

12:07 – Now that I’m 60, I’m even more conscious of my physical and mental limitations. I mean, I’ve known for many years that I can no longer play serve-and-volley tennis anywhere near the level that I did when I was 20. As Barbara has pointed out, my arm would probably fall off when I served, and I’d probably drop dead of a heart attack before I reached the net. And that’s not even counting the fact that my vertigo would probably land me face-first on the court as I followed through, armless, on my serve.

Despite the fact that nearly all drivers rate themselves as above average, I recognize that I must be distinctly below average. I’m simply no longer in practice. For years, I’ve driven maybe five or ten miles in an average month. Months go by when I don’t drive at all. I try to avoid driving unless it’s really necessary. I mean, when I’m driving, I feel as if I’m driving about as well as I ever did, but I know that must be an illusion. At age 60, having driven probably less than a thousand miles in the last decade, I simply can’t be very good at it.

And I know I can no longer trust my memory as I once could. The other day, I was talking with Paul Jones and mentioned an organic compound by its trivial name, sulfanilic acid. Paul said something like, “that’s o-aminobenzenesulfonic acid, right?” What flashed through my mind was something like, “I thought it was para rather than ortho, but Paul’s the organic chemistry professor, not me.” So I kind of agreed with him and made a mental note to look it up later. It is in fact para, and there was a time when I’d have known that without having to look it up. I knew the structures of hundreds of organic compounds by their trivial names. No more.

But it’s not just forgetting facts. It’s forgetting things I need to do. For example, I was just down in the lab refluxing some Kastle-Meyer reagent. Instead of standing there watching it reflux for half an hour, I came back upstairs. There was a time when there was zero chance that I’d forget I had that reflux running. No more. This time, I set the timer in the kitchen to ding. Which it just did.

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Monday, 29 July 2013

08:07 – I didn’t realize that this phenomenon had made it to Britain: All part-time Sports Direct staff employed on zero-hours contracts

That’s been commonplace here for years, of course. Many US employers, particularly brick-and-mortar retailers and fast-food restaurants, employ as few full-time permanent staff as possible. They depend largely on part-time and temporary employees, who are generally paid minimum wage and receive few or no benefits. It’s even worse in the US than what the article describes in Britain. Not only are part-time employees unsure “of how many hours they will work each week”, they’re unsure of how many hours, if any, they’ll work each day. It’s not uncommon for a temp employee to be called out in the morning to work for a couple hours, be sent home, and then be called out later the same day to work another couple of hours. About all they can be sure of is that they’ll never be offered enough hours in a week to qualify as full-time.

I think this practice is contemptible, and I’ll never engage in it myself, but I don’t really blame the employers. It’s just a matter of unintended consequences. Well-meaning legislators and bureaucrats attempt to protect low/no-skill workers by implementing laws and regulations, including minimum-wage laws. Employers defend their own interests by taking advantage of every exception and loophole to the maximum extent possible. Employees suffer. If the laws and regulations are tightened, the employees find they have no jobs at all.

I remember the first time we invited Mary and Paul to go along as our guests to Costco. Mary declined. When I asked her why, she said that she didn’t like how Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Costco, and similar companies treated their employees. My impression was that Costco wasn’t like that, so I did some quick research, including talking to a Costco employee. Mary was and is right about Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. They treat their employees very badly. But I found that Costco employees were at the time being paid an average of $41,000/year and had full benefits. I sent Mary a couple of links to articles about how Costco treated its employees, and told her about the Costco employee I’d spoken with. This woman was a single mom, and praised Costco to the heavens. When she started with Costco, during her probationary period before becoming full-time permanent, she wasn’t yet eligible for the full benefits package. She was a single mom, and her child was ill and needed expensive medical treatment. Costco found out about her situation and waived the waiting period, putting her and her child under full medical coverage before they would normally have become eligible. By doing that, Costco gained an employee who will be loyal for life, and showed themselves to be the kind of company we want to do business with. Yeah, Sam’s Club may be a bit cheaper because their labor costs are lower, but we’ll never know because Sam’s Club is not the kind of company we want to do business with.

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Friday, 26 July 2013

07:31 – Yet more evidence, as if any more was needed, that really smart people sometimes do incredibly stupid things. Dr. Robert Ferrante, a University of Pittsburgh medical researcher, is accused of murdering his wife, neurologist Dr. Autumn Klein, by poisoning her with cyanide.

I mean, come on. Conventional wisdom has it that physicians make the most dangerous murderers. (I’d put them fourth, behind toxicologists, biologists, and organic chemists/biochemists.) But the point is that any of those people should be able to figure out how to murder someone without being caught. Dr. Ferrrante moronically decided to use cyanide, which is trivially easy to detect both from the symptoms exhibited by the victim and in the body after death. To top it all off, having decided to use cyanide, rather than synthesizing it himself–which is trivially easy even without access to a lab–he actually ordered 250 grams of the stuff on his university credit card, the only item he ordered that had no place in his research activities.

Barbara is off on a day trip with her friend Bonnie Richardson. She’s been working very hard lately and needs a break. I’ll be working on science kits, as usual.

11:37 – I just got email from AmEx saying that they believed an unauthorized charge had been made on my card. Indeed it was unauthorized, which I told the lady on the phone. She’s canceled the current card and issued me a new one, which is supposed to arrive Monday. This is getting annoying. It seems to happen about once a year, although my record was only two or three months between new cards. Each time, it takes an hour or so of my time to get the new card issued and update sites like Amazon, Netflix, PhonePower, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and the many others with whom I have recurring transactions set up. They really need to bring back the death penalty for scammers.

12:48 – Has technology ruined handwriting?

Who cares? Teaching schoolchildren to write cursive is a waste of time. Other than my signature, I haven’t used cursive in more than 40 years, and I’ve barely used it in 50. Like everyone else at the time, I was required to learn cursive in elementary school, but I used it only when forced. Otherwise, I printed, which I could do faster and more legibly. In junior high-school, we had one required course each year in a “practical” subject. Girls took home economics and the like; boys took mechanical drawing, wood shop, and so on. Mechanical drawing emphasized neatness and, yes, printing. I don’t think I ever used cursive after that other than for those few teachers who required reports be done in cursive. Then in 10th grade I started computer programming, and that really put a nail in cursive. Well, that and the fact that I also took a typing course in 10th grade, taught by Brenda Spanish, who was an extremely attractive young woman but, alas, married to Dan Spanish, our ex-DI gym teacher.

So, I just checked. For the first time in at least 40 years, I just wrote a sentence in cursive. (Now is the time for all good men…) Not surprisingly, it was relatively neat and quite readable, if I do say so myself. Even after 40 years, muscle memory abides. I wonder if that means I could still hit the cover off a tennis ball. I also tried writing cursively left-handed, which made an unreadable mess; interestingly, I can print left-handed, albeit not as neatly as I can right-handed, but I can’t write cursively at all.

Again, I wonder why anyone cares about the decline and eventual death of cursive. Teach elementary school kids to print and to use a keyboard. Spend a little bit of time teaching them to make a reproducible cursive signature. That’s all they need.

I’ll admit that at one point I wondered whether cursive might be useful in teaching young children fine muscle control, but we now have many people in their 30’s and 40’s who never learned cursive. If they lack fine muscle control, that’s not evident from any data I’ve seen.

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Tuesday, 23 July 2013

10:38 – I remember when headline writers used to do their best to sum up the actual news story in a few words. At some point, they turned sleazy and gave up accuracy in favor of sensationalizing mundane news stories. Here’s an example: Postal Service looks to end at-your-door mail

That’s bogus, of course. USPS isn’t eliminating home delivery to existing homes. What they’ve done is require new developments to install Cluster Box Units, something they should have done years ago. And they’ve finally started to enforce a long-standing rule that when you buy a home you’re required to install a curbside mail box if there’s not one already there. They don’t require people who are already getting delivery to their door to install curbside boxes. Of course, if Issa has his way, they will eventually require everyone whose home isn’t served by a CBU to have a curbside box, but that’s by no means settled.

No matter what they eventually do, it won’t have much effect on us. We ship a lot of Priority Mail boxes, and even on days that we don’t have a PM box to ship we often receive boxes via USPS. So, one way or another, the USPS delivery person is going to end up coming to our door most days.

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Saturday, 20 July 2013

09:46 – The morning paper says the Winston-Salem cops shot another dog. Apparently, the cops responded to a home alarm and three dogs came rushing out of the garage. The cops say at least two of the dogs bit one of the cops. The dogs then ran around the house and disappeared. One dog apparently returned and approached the cops to within 15 feet (~ 5 meters) while growling. The cops shot it.

As Barbara said, the cops have a right to protect themselves from being bitten, even though the dogs were just doing their jobs, protecting against intruders. But I have to wonder if our cops haven’t gotten trigger-happy. Presumably they carry pepper spray, which would be at least as effective as small arms fire against an aggressive dog. Cops are notoriously rotten shots, and discharging their pistols in a residential neighborhood presents very real dangers to innocent civilians. To drive that point home, a month or so ago the newly-appointed Chief of Police of Winston-Salem shot a dog. He grazed the dog and wounded a woman who was in his line of fire.

I didn’t witness either incident, but my impression based on the news reports and police statements is that in both cases the cops acted irresponsibly. Their firearms should be their last choice against aggressive dogs, not their first. In the first incident, the woman suffered only minor wounds from spattering bullet fragments, and apparently no person was injured by police bullets in the recent incident. But that’s just luck. In either incident the results might instead have been tragic.

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