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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.

Read the comments: 80 Comments

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

Read the comments: 29 Comments

Saturday, 20 April 2013

08:58 – I watched with disgust last night as the authorities captured the second muslim terrorist alive instead of gunning him down as he so richly deserved. I kept thinking how unfortunate it was that the cops used flash-bang grenades instead of fragmentation grenades. Or they could have just done a Bonnie & Clyde on that boat, and put a thousand rounds or so through it.

10:51 – Barbara brought her sister’s failed desktop system home the other day. At first I thought it was a dead power supply, but replacing it did no good. I suspect a dead motherboard, and the system is old enough that it made no sense to replace a bunch of components. Instead, I just picked one of the systems sitting under the table in my office. That turned out to be an old system that we’d built as a project system for (I think) the second edition of the Perfect PC book. The system is old, but it has almost zero time on it. When I fired it up, it sounded like a leaf blower. Barbara said it didn’t sound all that loud to her, and Frances said they didn’t care because the system sits in a spare bedroom where it wouldn’t bother anyone. So I went ahead and installed Linux Mint 13 LTS on it, which gives me four years of not having to worry about updating the OS. Frances and her husband are stopping over sometime today so we can get their email, Skype, and so on set up. Right now, it’s in Barbara’s office, connected to her peripherals and Ethernet cable.

As long as I have Barbara’s system disconnected, I’m going to go ahead and swap it out for her new system. The old one is a hex-core processor with lots of memory, and was originally intended to replace my main system. Barbara’s old system failed, and the hex-core system was just sitting there, so she’s been using it for the last year or more. It’s much more system than she needs, so I built an Intel Atom system for her to replace it. The hex-core then moves to my office to replace the antique Core2 Quad 9650 that’s currently my main system. Barbara uses little more than email and browser on her office system, so a quad-core Atom is more than sufficient.

I’ve already done several backups of her hard drive, so once I pull the hex-core system from her office, I’ll put her current hard drive on the shelf, replace it with a 3 TB drive, and install Linux Mint 13 LTS on my new main system.

Read the comments: 20 Comments

Friday, 19 April 2013

07:38 – Congratulations to the FBI and Boston Police. It took them only three days to identify and track down the two terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. As I write this, one of the terrorists is dead, killed in a shootout last night, and the other is the subject of a massive manhunt. Unfortunately, a police officer was also killed last night and another seriously injured. Let’s hope the cops track down and kill the other terrorist before he hurts anyone else. In what comes as no great surprise, it appears that the two terrorists are brothers from Turkey or Chechnya, which means they’re almost certainly islamic.

08:31 – When I was adding money to Barbara’s PlatinumTel prepaid cell-phone account the other day, I checked their phone offerings. Barbara’s phone used to be my phone, so when hers died I just gave her mine. I’d intended to order another of the same model, but they didn’t have any in stock at the time. So I’ve been checking periodically to find that or a similar model. I wanted a clamshell phone with no gimmicks. All I wanted was a simple four-banger phone to make and receive calls, something that folded so that I could just put it in my pocket without worry about cracking the screen or whatever. But for several months PlatinumTel had nothing on offer other than models with slide-out keyboards and various smartphones. The other day they had $30 Alcatel One-Touch 665 phones in stock, so I ordered one for myself. I so seldom need a cell phone that this one is ideal. No contract, $0.05/minute, and very simple to operate.

11:09 – I’m hoping they don’t capture the second terrorist. That just means a trial and prison. That’s too good for him. Ideally, I’d take him alive and feed him, slowly and feet-first, into a wood chipper. But we all know that’s not going to happen. They haven’t even cut off the first terrorist’s head and posted it on a pike. So about the best we can hope for is that the cops shoot the second one and that he dies in agony before he gets to the hospital. The hospital! Why on earth did they even bother to transport the first terrorist to a hospital instead of letting him bleed to death on the street?

I’ve been reading The Grass Crown, the second in Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome series. Last night, I was reading a section covering the Social (Marsic) War. The Roman commander besieged an Italian town held by the rebels, who thought their water supply was secure. It wasn’t, but only because the Romans undertook a massive engineering feat to stop the flow of the river from which the town got its water. Eventually, they surrendered. The Roman commander proceeded to order the slaughter every adult male in town, and then turned out the women and children without food into the war-torn landscape to starve and freeze to death. Another Roman commander took another besieged rebel town, whereupon he set up an assembly line with 100 of his legionaries flogging all of the rebel men. After the flogging, they moved down the assembly line to another section, where 100 more of his legionaries beheaded those who’d already been flogged. The commander then turned the women of the town over to his legionaries to be raped and then killed. And, at that, the Roman commander was being merciful because these were Italians, who’d until recently been friends and allies of Rome. If he had wanted to, the Roman commander could have ordered all of the rebels to be crucified instead of being put to the sword.

This was during the late Republic. From Julius Caesar’s time onward, Rome had even less of a sense of humor about rebellion and particularly killing Roman citizens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people thought long and hard before doing anything to piss off Rome. I think it’s time we considered emulating Rome in that respect. Crucifying muslim terrorists would be a good start.

21:17 – As of mid-afternoon, Barbara was planning to leave work at 3:30 and head home. We were planning to take Colin to the vet for his annual checkup. Then the USWS issued a tornado watch for the afternoon through 9:00 p.m., so Barbara called to reschedule the vet appointment for next Friday. At that point, she planned to stop at the supermarket on the way home and have a relaxing evening, assuming the hospital would release her dad tomorrow.

Relaxing evening. Some joke. The hospital decided to release Barbara’s dad this afternoon with almost no notice. So she went over there to pick him up and take him back to their apartment. But Dutch needs to be on IV antibiotics for a week or ten days longer, so the hospital was supposed to send a supply home with them. Barbara or Frances would have to change the supply container once a day. I wasn’t crazy about that idea. Someone who’s on IV antibiotics should be in the hospital, with qualified medical staff administering the drugs. The last time this happened, Barbara called in tears because she’d made one minor mistake in the procedure. She thought she’d killed her dad. I told her then that she or her sister shouldn’t be doing this; a nurse should be doing it.

That was bad enough, but it got worse. The hospital was supposed to send over a supply of the drug to Dutch and Sankie’s apartment, and then have a nurse come to teach them how to administer it. Well, the nurse showed up, but the supply of drugs didn’t. And to make matters even worse, the drug supply container has to be changed every 24 hours, at 8:00 p.m. Not during the day when the visiting nurse could do it, or at least Barbara or Frances could do it with less inconvenience, but specifically at 8:00 p.m., which means that Barbara or Frances would have to drive over there specially every evening at 8:00 p.m.

So of course my first thought was that they should just discard the first container before it was empty and substitute a full one, which would allow them to change the daily time from 8:00 p.m. back to something a bit more convenient. No dice, Barbara said. The hospital would provide only the number of containers needed to do things on the schedule they mandated.

Not that that turns out to matter much, because the hospital released Dutch knowing that he couldn’t even stand with his walker, let alone walk or even get out of a chair. Barbara assumed, of course, that they’d had him up and walking every day. They hadn’t. He’d been in bed constantly for the entire week. He’s completely helpless, and needs someone who’s able to physically manhandle him into and out of his chair and so on.

But of course the hospital never did bother sending over the drugs that Barbara and Frances are supposed to adminster. So I got a call from Barbara about 8:35, saying she was at the hospital emergency room with her dad, pleading with them to give him the drug that they say is so important he get at 8:00 every evening.

Then, adding insult to injury, the hospital tells Barbara that they wanted to release Dutch to a nursing home, but Barbara refused to allow them to do so. She told them that she’d done no such thing. When the social worker called earlier in the week, she said the hospital planned to release Dutch to a nursing home so that he could get physical therapy. Barbara told the social worker that the physical therapy, and occupational therapy as well, could be done at her parents’ apartment.

What concerned me the most was that Barbara said as soon as the emergency room gave her dad the IV antibiotic, she was going to drive him home. Presumably she intends to stay the night, since Dutch sure can’t be there on his own or with just Sankie. I told her she should tell the hospital to keep her father until he’s actually in a fit state to be discharged, and that doesn’t include being on IV antibiotics or being unable to rise from a chair. She said the hospital told her they couldn’t refuse treatment, but Dutch would have to pay for it. Bastards. They had no business discharging him in the first place.

Read the comments: 21 Comments

Thursday, 18 April 2013

07:58 – The lead article in our morning paper is about the efforts of local Republican state legislator Debra Conrad (formerly Conrad-Shrader; apparently she’s gotten a divorce) and a large group of other Republican state legislators to pass a bill that would (a) allow medical personnel to refuse to participate in performing abortions, and (b) allow employers to exclude contraception coverage from the health insurance they provide to employees. In other words, they’re striving to make North Carolina just like North Dakota, which has, de facto if not de jure, outlawed abortion.

Conceptually (so to speak), I have no problem with either of the measures in their bill. Medical personnel should be free to refuse to perform abortions, just as their employers should be free to fire such people, who are refusing to do their jobs. And employers should not be forced to provide medical insurance that covers contraception. Indeed, they should not be forced to provide medical insurance at all. I’m all in favor of personal freedom. But this bill isn’t about increasing personal freedoms. To the contrary, it’s all about restricting personal freedoms.

This bill is really about forcing women to have babies whether they want to or not. What these maniacs would really like to do, if they could get away with it, is outlaw contraception and abortion, period. In fact, I suspect they’d like to make it illegal for women to refuse to have sex. The only purpose of women, as far as they’re concerned, is to produce babies. Lots of babies, who can then be raised to be good little Christians. Preferably Southern Baptist.

13:03 – I’m glad someone said it: Godless in Boston mourn, too

16:20 – Oh, my. Cyprus has now decided that their bailout isn’t a done deal, but requires approval of their legislature. It’s anyone’s guess what the legislature will decide, but anti-EU feeling is certainly rampant among the legislature, reflecting the feelings of the general population. From the point of view of many Cypriots, dealing with the EU after the bad faith the EU has shown them is simply feeding the hand that bites them. If Cyprus decides not to participate in the bailout, the ECB can no longer legally support Cyprus, which then crashes out of the euro in a matter of days. That’s assuming that Merkel doesn’t order the ECB to continue supporting Cyprus until after she’s re-elected, or so she hopes. In reality, Merkel’s re-election is by no means certain.

Read the comments: 44 Comments

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

07:55 – All we can do now is wait for the FBI to determine who committed this outrage. If there’s one thing the FBI is good at, it’s accumulating and sorting through huge amounts of data, which is what they’re doing right now. FBI analysts are going through thousands of business surveillance and cell-phone videos and photographs frame by frame, looking for images of the person or people who placed the bombs. Eventually, they’ll have recognizable images of the perpetrator or perpetrators, and at that point things will begin to unravel quickly for the terrorist or terrorists. Someone will recognize and identify one or more of the people in the images, and a massive manhunt will be underway. Let’s hope the criminals aren’t taken alive.

Meanwhile, for most of us, life goes on. UPS showed up yesterday with the 2,000 beakers I was waiting for, along with some other stuff I had on backorder. Over the next few days, I’ll be doing final assembly on a few dozen more science kits. I’ll also be checking out Barbara’s sister’s desktop Linux box, which needs to be repaired or replaced. Fortunately, Frances does most of her computing on her pad and her husband uses a notebook, so they’re not in a big rush to get this system back. I can take my time and get it right.

Read the comments: 62 Comments

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

07:40 – There doesn’t appear to be a lot of hard information available yet about the Boston Marathon bombings. After watching video of the event, my first impression is that this is very unlikely to be state-sponsored terrorism. Although so far no group has claimed responsibility, I think it’s more likely to be domestic terrorists like a lunatic-fringe anti-abortion group or white separatists. From the appearance of the explosions, the bombs appear to have been small and crude, perhaps something as simple as a kilo or two of black powder surrounded by ball bearings. The brilliant white flash one expects from a detonation of high explosives was missing, and there was far too much smoke. If I’m right, these devices could have been built by almost anyone, using materials they could have purchased at a Home Depot.

07:59 – I’m surprised that we haven’t yet heard any demands for new bomb-control legislation.

Read the comments: 43 Comments

Thursday, 4 April 2013

09:01 – Interesting article in the paper this morning about the costs of various diseases. Dementia, including Alzheimer’s, is by far the most costly, at around $1,000/year for every man, woman, and child in the US. And no possibility of a cure. Neil Young’s lyrics kept running through my mind: “And once you’re gone, you can never come back, when you’re out of the blue and into the black.” People with profound dementia are in a very real sense brain-dead. Even if our medicinal chemists come up with a miracle cure, at best it will stop the progress of the disease. It won’t reverse the physical damage to the brains of people who already suffer from profound dementia. A person without a functioning brain is no longer really a person. The kindest thing we could do is euthanize them.

Work on kits continues.

15:40 – The weather around here this time of year is highly variable. Yesterday, for example, it was sunny and the high according to our thermometer was 74.3 F (23.5C). At this moment, it’s 36.4F (2.4C) and there’s frozen precipitation falling. And it’s of a sort that I don’t remember ever seeing before: snleet. Or perhaps slnow. It’s simultaneously snowing and sleeting.

Read the comments: 33 Comments

Wednesday, 3 April 2013

07:48 – The city of Stockton, California is declaring bankruptcy, driven under by the costs of government services, primarily pension and retiree health-care costs. It’s not the first, and won’t be the last, city or state government to find itself in that position. What we’re watching is just the early manifestations of a phenomenon that’s going to come back to bite us. Unions, particularly public-employee unions, have extracted promises to pay that are unsustainable. They would be unsustainable even in a good economy. In the bad-and-getting-worse economy we’re in now and likely to remain in for at least the next several decades, believing that these commitments will be met is delusional.

Here’s what I think is going to happen. Ultimately, all of these government pension and health-care promises will be broken, and all of them will be transferred to the existing Social Security and Medicare programs. Retirement and health-care programs for all federal, state, and local government employees–including military and congressional retirees, post office employees, and so on–will be folded into Social Security and Medicare, along with all resources that have been set aside to fund these separate programs. Nor will government programs be the only ones affected. Most or all private retirement programs will also be folded into the big tent of Social Security and Medicare. Ultimately, it’s not going to matter what you were promised. What you’re going to get is what everyone else gets: Social Security for a pension and Medicare for retiree health care. And that’s all.

14:05 – In breaking news, CBC has renewed Heartland for a seventh season.

I’ve always hated manual labor, and I despise getting sweaty. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell people that after he’d had a bath and a change of clothes my brother could walk out the back door, stand on the porch for 30 seconds, turn around, and come back in filthy. I, on the other hand, could play all day in a mud puddle and come back in cleaner than when I’d started.

So what I’ve been doing this morning, assembling chemical bags for the chemistry and biology kits, is not one of my favorite jobs. But at least I now have most of what I need to take our finished goods inventory on both kits to between 40 and 50 each. Except, of course, beakers. I was expecting those to arrive right around now, but when I talked to our supplier last week she told me they’d not gotten them in as expected and that she hoped they’d arrive this week. Oh, well. We have a dozen or so of each kit in stock, which’ll hold us for some time. If the delay gets much longer, I can always cancel the beaker order and get them from one of our other suppliers that does have them in stock.

And I’ve changed plans for the antibiotic test papers that we are including in the life science kits. Originally, I planned to run 8.5×11″ sheets of chromatography paper through one of our laser printers to cover the paper with edge-to-edge labeling in a small font: “SUL” for sulfadimethoxine, “NEO” for neomycin, and so on. The problem is, running that paper through the printer changes its absorption characteristics, and what’s worse it changes them unpredictably. I’d done some testing on an unprinted sheet (which absorbed about 8 mL of solution) and made calculations accordingly. Each sheet is about 600 square centimeters, and I wanted a concentration of 100 micrograms per square centimeter. It was easy enough to figure out how much solution I needed and of what concentration. Until I found out that apparently the fuser of the laser printer messes up the absorption characteristics of the paper. Crap.

So I went to Plan B. Costco sells 12×18″ sheets of construction paper. It’s acid-free and heavy weight. It’s also about a tenth the price of chromatography paper. At first, I ordered white construction paper, intending to trim it to 8.5X11″ and try running it through the laser printer to see if the fuser affected it. Then I realized that there was a potentially much easier solution. Instead of using the laser printer to label the different kinds of antibiotic test papers, I’ll simply use different colors of paper for different antibiotics. So I ordered three different colors. The minimum order from Costco was three 50-packs of each, which should be a lifetime supply of construction paper. I’ll have to test the paper to make sure that the dyes have no effect on bacterial growth, which I’m guessing they won’t.

Sometimes I wonder how Costco does it. The construction paper colors I bought cost $1.39 per 50-sheet pack, with a minimum order of three packs. So each of the three colors was $4.17, for a total of $12.51. That included free shipping. This paper isn’t light. IIRC, it’s 76-pound basis weight, so nine 50-papers of 12×18″ paper has some heft to it. I know UPS would charge me more than $12.51 just to ship that much weight. I’m sure Costco gets a better deal from UPS than I do, but that much better? And, to top it off, Costco didn’t combine the order. I ordered the nine packs yesterday. UPS just showed up with one of the three-packs a few minutes ago. The other two three-packs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. I can’t help thinking that Costco must have lost money on this transaction.

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Tuesday, 26 March 2013

09:21 – Our ready-to-ship stock of chemistry kits had dropped into single figures yesterday, so I decided to raid my carefully rationed remaining stock of polypropylene beakers to make up another batch of ten chemistry kits, which was all I had sufficient beakers for. We have 600 each of the 50 mL and 100 mL polypropylene beakers on order, which are supposed to ship the end of this week or early next. I’ll just continue building more finished kits this week, except they won’t have the beakers in them. It’ll be easy enough to drop in the missing beakers when they finally arrive. And UPS showed up at dinnertime yesterday with 11 large boxes of stuff from another wholesaler. I had the UPS guy stack them down in the basement, so Barbara had to run an obstacle course this morning to get to her car when she left for work. They’d better not be there when she gets home, if I know what’s good for me.

We started watching a new-to-us series on Acorn streaming last night. It’s an Australian series called Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. The series is set in 1920’s Melbourne, and the lead character is a 40-ish aristocratic feminist James Bond analog. The (wo)Man with the Golden Gun, literally. It’s a fun series, with all the standard supporting characters one would expect. It’s not a parody, exactly, but obviously no one was intended to take the series seriously. At a million bucks an episode, it’s very high budget, particularly for Australian TV. I suspect they spent a large percentage of that on wardrobe and props, including the Hispano-Suiza that Miss Fisher drives. Netflix doesn’t have this series on DVD yet, let alone streaming. Barbara said maybe we should just subscribe to Acorn TV.

12:46 – In addition to being the chief cook and bottle washer for our company, I’m also the warehouseman. So I was just unpacking and checking in those 11 boxes that arrived at dinnertime yesterday. I’m getting too old for this. A case of 50 boxes of 72 microscope slides masses about 50 pounds (23 kilos), and is about the size of a shoebox. Those are dense little suckers.

13:44 – I see that the arguments about same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court are complete. Now we have to wait months for SCOTUS to make and publish its decision.

I honestly don’t see what all the to-do is about. The correct answer is obvious on the face of it. SCOTUS should rule that government cannot prohibit same-sex marriage in the same way that it ruled almost 50 years ago in the Loving case that government could not prohibit interracial marriage. Obviously, there are no arguments against same-sex marriage other than religious arguments, which the government is prohibited from considering. Those who support equal rights for gay couples are being reasonable; those who oppose those rights are utterly unreasonable. I’ve never heard any supporter of gay marriage insist that churches be forced to marry gay couples, nor even that religious bigots be forced to abjure their hateful beliefs. All supporters of same-sex marriage are asking is that the government not deny them the same rights that are taken for granted by heterosexual couples.

The truth is that the government has no valid interest in marriage, period. Government should be neither encouraging or discouraging marriage of any type, let alone requiring or forbidding it. If some gay people are offended that Barbara and I are married, tough luck. Their being offended should be of no concern to us, just as a heterosexual being offended by gays should be of no concern to gays. Offense is not injury, and attempting to use the force of government to require people to behave in ways you find inoffensive is intolerable abuse of power.

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