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Category: news

Monday, 18 March 2013

10:51 – There seems to be a great deal of surprise that Cyprus has stopped asset transfers in preparation for stealing up to 9.9% of bank depositors’ account balances. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised. That’s what governments do. They call it a “tax”, and they can do it anytime they want and in any amount they want. That kind of thing happens in the US and other first-world countries as well. It just happened with ObamaCare. And it’s even more likely to occur in places with undemocratic, dictatorial, autocratic, unelected governments, like the EU. Cypriot bank account holders should be thankful that their government, at the insistence of the Troika, stole only 9.9% or less of their account balances. They could have stolen it all.

So, Cyprus becomes the fifth eurozone nation to be bailed out, following Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. Italy can’t be far behind, and France not far behind Italy. When those two go, it’s game over for the euro. Meanwhile, the Protestant northern-tier nations look on, dreading the day when those bills come due, while the Catholic southern-tier nations continue to run up huge bills they have no hope of ever paying. Merkel is mortgaging Germany’s future solely to improve her chances of being re-elected this autumn, which looks increasingly unlikely to happen. And the downward slide of Greece has already passed the “developing nation” third-world level, and is quickly headed for whatever’s worse than third-world. And, as much as I’m glad not to be European and particularly not on the euro, I keep thinking that it can happen here. In fact, if we don’t soon start taking a meat-axe to spending, it will happen here.

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Thursday, 14 March 2013

07:57 – So, the catholics have a new pope. I’m not sure why anyone cares, including catholics, although from the amount of news coverage one would think something important had been going on. One vicious old bastard with medieval attitudes retired; now the catholics have a different vicious old bastard with medieval attitudes. Meet the new boss. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

Speaking of ignorance, the county commissioners of neighboring Rowan County insist on starting meetings with sectarian prayers. The ACLU pointed out that this is illegal and asked them to stop doing that, but they refused. So the ACLU is suing the county. I think that’s a mistake. The ACLU should be suing those commissioners personally. The taxpayers of Rowan County should not be liable for paying the costs to defend the indefensible actions of this group of individuals. Closer to home, a local legislator has introduced a bill that would allow local school systems to offer bible study courses in public schools. Why can these morons not get it through their tiny little brains that there is no place for religion in government? None. Government is supposed to represent all of the people, not just this subset of very vocal religious nutcases.

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Friday, 1 March 2013

07:39 – Barbara arrived home about 2200 last night, after a long day, visiting her mom in the hospital, and then having dinner with her dad and sister. She says her mom is doing better, although from her description it sounds as though Sankie is still acting paranoid and delusional. Barbara is hoping she’ll be well enough to come home next week. I hope that’s true, because it’ll allow her and Frances to stop alternating nights staying with their dad.

According to the morning paper, there’s a revolt brewing about the new property tax values that have recently been mailed to homeowners, but not in the usual sense. The county reassesses tax values every four years, and every time in living memory until this time, those values have gone up. This time, a lot them went down, some by high percentages. The paper mentioned two in particular, one woman whose new assessment on her home was for only 50% of the 2009 tax value, and a second whose new assessment was for only 30% of the 2009 tax value. Both of these homes are located in East Winston, which is the poorest area of Winston-Salem and predominantly black. And many other homes, in East Winston particularly, have also had dramatic reductions in their tax values. Some spokesmen for the black community are publicly accusing the county of conspiring to destroy the black community, saying that their equity is being “stolen” from them. The reality, of course, is that these new valuations probably overstate the actual value of the homes, if anything. Assessed tax values do not determine either the selling price of homes or the loan value for those seeking to refinance. Even if the county tax assessor had left those values at their 2009 levels, those homes wouldn’t sell for any more than they do now, nor would banks be willing to lend money using those homes as collateral. So, in essence, these people are actually demanding that they be charged higher property taxes. Geez.

11:07 – This is pretty cool. We just made the OEDb’s list of the 100 All-Time Greatest Popular Science Books. Our chemistry book is at #51 (although the books aren’t ranked) alongside titles like Cosmos, A Brief History of Time, The Origin of the Species, Gray’s Anatomy, The Elegant Universe, and many other really great science books. We preen.

15:31 – If I ever wondered why biological stains are called “stains” rather than “dyes”, I’ve just had it brought home to me in spades. I’ve been filling 60 sets of stains bottles for biology kits, and the last two I’ve filled–Hucker’s crystal violet and Sudan III–are the stainiest stains I work with. I’m used to them staining polypropylene beakers and glassware, sometimes indelibly for all practical purposes. No solvent I’ve tried will remove some stains from plasticware and even abrasive cleanser has difficulty removing some stains from glassware. But today I was using my bottle-top dispenser, the parts of which that are in contact with the liquids being dispensed are made of Teflon. Teflon, the very definition of “nothing sticks to it”. But these stains do. It’s really no big deal. The staining is cosmetic only, and by definition it’s not going to leech out to a different solution, at least in concentrations that are detectable even instrumentally.

But just wait until Barbara gets home. I’ve been doing cleanup in her kitchen sink. It’s “stainless steel”, but (you guessed it…) it’s now stained in pretty hues of violet, red, and orange. Fortunately, I know from experience that those stains can be removed, eventually, with a lot of abrasive cleanser and elbow grease. I’m not going to bother cleaning the sink today because I still have some work to do that would just stain it again. But I will clean the sink thoroughly tomorrow.

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Monday, 25 February 2013

09:40 – Barbara’s mom called Barbara’s cell phone again yesterday. When Barbara answered, her mom was just repeating Barbara’s cell phone number over and over again. Barbara couldn’t get her mother to respond, so she finally just hung up on her mom and called the nurses’ station. She ended up talking to her mom’s social worker, who interviewed Barbara about her mom’s medical and other history. The mystery of how Sankie was getting their phone numbers was cleared up when the social worker told Barbara that she’d seen Sankie wandering around carrying a slip of paper with phone numbers on it. Barbara told the social worker that she and her sister couldn’t take calls from their mom, particularly at work, and asked her to make sure that Sankie had only Dutch’s home phone number. Barbara is still hopeful that her mom will recover, of course, but I’m afraid that this is the new normal.

I’ll be spending some time this week filling bottles, thousands of them. I’m really glad I decided to buy that bottle-top dispenser. It speeds up filling immensely, even counting cleanup time between different solutions, particularly when I’m doing 60 to 240 bottles at a time. Meanwhile, I’ll also get labels printed for yet another batch of 60 chemistry kits and 60 biology kits. That’s about 5,000 container labels for Barbara to apply. Which means I need to get a few thousand more bottles and caps ordered.

17:01 – Well, the Italian elections are over, and if there’s one thing clear about this mess it’s that Italian voters have rejected “austerity” resoundingly. Bersani and his left-wing Democratic Party did much worse than expected, losing the Senate to a resurgent Berlusconi and his People of Freedom Party and winning only a 35% to 29% margin in the lower chamber. Former comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement did much, much better than expected, with solid third place numbers in the polling. Mario Monte, the technocrat imposed on Italy by the EU, was a far distant fourth.

Bersani and Berlusconi hate each other’s guts and their parties’ policies are diametrically opposed, so there’s almost no chance that they will form a coalition. In essence, Italy is now without a government and is likely to remain so until new elections can be held later this year. Which means the ECB will no longer be propping up Italy’s bonds. Which means you can expect to see Italian bond yields start to skyrocket, sooner rather than later. Which means the euro crisis is back, bigger and badder than ever. Not that it was ever really gone. It was just smoldering. Watch it now, as it bursts back into flames worse than anything we saw at the “height” of the crisis. At this point, the most likely outcome is that Italy will crash out of the euro, returning to the lira, and default on its massive debt pile. The follow-on effects for Greece, Spain, Portugal, and France are likely to be catastrophic.

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Thursday, 21 February 2013

07:52 – Well, yesterday I defended Joe Biden’s remarks on women defending themselves. Today, I’ll defend a list published by the University of Colorado of last-resort recommendations for women to defend themselves against rape. Conservative bloggers and commentators have been ripping into UC for suggesting that women who are about to be raped urinate or vomit to discourage the would-be rapist, suggesting the UC list should have instead focused on telling the women to fight back. UC actually offered good advice. A woman who fights back is much more likely to be beaten or killed, and will probably still be raped despite her resistance. If instead the woman urinates or vomits (and, I’d add, defecates), her would-be rapist is likely to walk away in disgust.

The new neighbors had the street parked up again last night, which is the fourth time in a couple of weeks. It’s worse than I’d feared. I was hoping it was something relatively innocuous, like getting together to watch a basketball game or have an orgy. But it’s worse than that. Much, much worse. One of our other neighbors told us what’s really going on. They’re having prayer meetings. Crap. There goes the neighborhood. Until now, with the sole exception of the fundies that live next door, the street has been pretty much secular. As far as I know, there aren’t even any other regular churchgoers, let alone evangelicals. Now we have Holy Rollers living just down the street from us.

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Wednesday, 20 February 2013

08:28 – The website problems should be fixed. Dreamhost tech support checked the problem. It turned out that the Apache server that serves this site had been hanging.

I’m currently reading an excellent mystery that was written by one of my correspondents from Kelowna, BC. No, not Bill Grigg, although I suspect he could write a pretty good mystery novel if he set his mind to it. The one I’m reading is Speaking From Among the Bones, the latest Alan Bradley Flavia De Luce mystery. The series is set in England in 1950. Flavia is an 11-year-old girl who’s fascinated with chemistry–particularly poisons and explosives–and has access to a full chemistry lab tucked away in a disused part of their home. Barbara saw the first book at the library soon after it was published and grabbed it for me. She read it, too, and we both loved it. After I finished it, I emailed Alan to tell him that the book really resonated with me, because what Flavia was doing in her lab at age 11 in 1950 in England was pretty much exactly what I’d been doing in my lab at age 11 in 1964 in western Pennsylvania. The only real difference was that I didn’t keep coming across dead bodies.

UPS showed up yesterday with a delivery from one of our wholesalers. It was 250 test tube racks, and when they’d told me they were backordered I told them to go ahead and toss in something that wasn’t on my original order, a pack of 500 polypropylene radioimmunoassay vials with caps. My contact there had emailed me to say that they’d changed vendors for that item and that the item number had changed, as had the price. The surprise was that the price had fallen, to about 60% of what I’d expected to pay. When the shipment arrived, I found out why. Sure enough, there was a box of 500 vials, but no caps. I visited the manufacturer’s web site and found out why. The caps ship as a separate item, which my vendor hadn’t realized. I was afraid the caps would be backordered to India, which would mean a two or three month wait, but it turned out my vendor actually did have the caps in stock. They just hadn’t realized they needed to ship them as two separate boxes, so they’re shipping me a box of caps today. And, no surprise, the combined price of the new product, vials and caps, is about the same as the old one.

I plan to use these vials for packaging some items in the science kits that we’re currently packaging in coin envelopes. The vials will be faster to fill than the envelopes, and provide an air-tight seal. And, purchased in bulk, an RIA vial and cap doesn’t cost all that much more than a coin envelope

14:43 – I never expect to hear politicians say anything sensible, and that goes double for morons like Joe Biden. I have to admit, however, that Biden has actually offered some good advice about guns for self-defense. He recommends a shotgun. In fact, he’s made sure his wife has a double-barreled shotgun and shells for it, just in case the bad guys somehow get past her SS detail. To be specific, for people who aren’t experienced shooters, my recommendation is a double-barreled short shotgun with external hammers, usually called a lupara or coach gun, stored with both barrels loaded with #4 buckshot. With the hammers down, the gun is completely safe to handle, and can be stored for literally decades and still fire every time. Getting it ready to roll requires merely cocking the hammers. Meanwhile, it just sits there, inert. In Sicily, the traditional resting place was on two hooks immediately above the doorway. I like the manual external hammer shotguns for inexperienced people because I’ve seen too many inexperienced shooters, including some cops, short-stroke a pump, leaving them thinking a round is chambered when it’s not. That could prove embarrassing.

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Monday, 11 February 2013

07:50 – North Carolina is one of several states that are apparently in the early stages of revolting against the federal government. Every day, it seems, the front page of the paper has another article about one way or another that North Carolina is refusing to cooperate with the feds. We’re opting out of the expansion of Medicaid. As of July 1st, we’re reducing the duration and amount of unemployment benefits significantly, thereby becoming ineligible for the federal extended unemployment benefits program. And some local sheriffs and police chiefs have already said that they won’t cooperate with Obama’s proposed new gun control laws, because they are sworn to uphold the state and federal Constitutions. It wouldn’t surprise me if North Carolina followed Virginia, Utah and several other states in seriously considering introducing a silver- or gold-based state currency. And I’m hearing rumbles about some states considering declaring their residents exempt from paying all federal taxes. This could get interesting.

10:55 – I see the pope is going to abdicate at the end of this month. Media reports say this is the first time a pope has resigned since 1415, but in fact Gregory XII didn’t resign; he was pretty much fired from his pope job and demoted to bishop. IIRC, the RCC was then popeless until after GXII died. It seems to me that this is a great opportunity for the RCC to just wrap things up. Don’t bother electing another pope. Just let things wind down. Sell off all the assets and donate the proceeds to the current RCC members pro rata.

11:55 – I just finished filling 200+ 15 mL bottles with 1% phenolphthalein in IPA. It’s a lot quicker and easier to do that with the bottle-top dispenser rather than manually. The problem with manual filling is that the viscosity of IPA is low enough that it’s difficult to pour into the small opening of a 15 mL bottle without having it run down the sides of the bottle. The only problem with using the bottle-top dispenser is that phenolphthalein is extremely insoluble in water, so cleanup is a bit more involved than usual. Fortunately, phenolphthalein is soluble in basic solutions, so I’ll do multiple passes with a washing soda (sodium carbonate) solution, followed by a dozen passes of tap water, followed by a couple passes of DI water. The involved cleanup is why I did 200+ bottles in one run.

Next up is turmeric reagent, which is a solution of curcumin in IPA. It’s even more of a bitch to clean up, because it stains everything bright yellow, including even glass. For that one, I’ll start with a couple passes of IPA to get most of the staining gone. Curcumin is slightly soluble in sulfuric acid (about 1%), so I’ll follow the IPA wash with a dilute sulfuric acid wash to dissolve whatever curcumin remains. Several rinses in tap water and then DI water should finish the job.

15:25 – An hour or so ago I was surprised to get a call from Barbara’s mom. She was confused, thinking Barbara would be at home. I told her Barbara was at work and that I’d call her and have her return her mom’s call. So, a few minutes ago, Barbara called to say that her mom is going to be released at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. That throws Barbara’s and Frances’s week into confusion, because the doctor wanted them to have someone with Sankie 24 hours a day. And that doesn’t include Dutch, apparently. So Barbara is going to pick up her mom tomorrow afternoon, take her home, and wait until Frances can get there. I’m not sure what they’ll do after that.

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Wednesday, 6 February 2013

08:06 – Barbara made a flying visit home last night for dinner and a quick visit before heading over to spend the night with her dad. Her mom is no better and probably worse. She’s still in the hospital and seems likely to remain there at least through this week. There’s been no improvement in her mental condition, which may or may not be a result of the IV antibiotic they have her on for the lung infection. She’s still not eating and is sleeping only because they’ve increased the dosage of the drugs they give her in the evening. Barbara, her sister, and her dad are increasingly concerned that Sankie won’t snap out of it this time. My worry is that even if she does get back to normal and they send her home, the stress of trying to deal with Dutch’s condition will put her right back in the hospital within days.

The stress on Barbara and Frances, and of course their dad, is simply unbearable. Barbara and Frances are spelling each other, taking turns spending the night with their dad, but even that doesn’t help much. When Barbara is off-duty, she’s still spending a lot of time on the phone with Frances and the doctors, talking about what’s going on and making decisions about what’s to be done. The same is true for Frances when she’s off-duty. Neither one of them gets any real break.

09:55 – The USPS just announced that it will end Saturday delivery of first-class and lower mail starting in August. They’ll continue Saturday delivery of Express Mail and Priority Mail. Of course, Congress is supposed to have to approve such changes, but it sounds to me as though the USPS is going to do this whether Congress likes it or not.

I think this change is long overdue. USPS says it’ll save them about $2 billion a year, and few people will be adversely affected by the absence of Saturday delivery. In fact, I think it’s long past time for the USPS to tell Congress to go pound sand. USPS is, in theory, a private business, and it should start behaving like one. All of the financial problems the USPS has been having are directly attributable to Congressional meddling. USPS has hundreds if not thousands of post offices and other facilities that should have been closed long ago. They remain open because Congress won’t allow them to close them despite the fact that it make no business sense to keep them open. And Congress won’t allow USPS to close these facilities because voters object. USPS should be operating as an NGO (essentially, a non-profit), with its original goal of delivering the mail while breaking even. In fact, absent governmental meddling, that’s exactly what USPS is doing now.

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Tuesday, 5 February 2013

09:30 – Barbara’s mom and dad are doing about the same. Instead of heading directly over to her parents’ apartment after work today, Barbara’s going to go to the gym and then come home for dinner before heading over to dad-sit.

I filled a few hundred bottles yesterday, using the bottle-top dispenser. That’s basically a pump that sits on top of a reservoir bottle. The body of the pump has a slider that’s calibrated from 2.5 mL to 30 mL in 0.5 mL increments. To fill a bottle, you just place the mouth of the bottle over the dispenser tip, slide the pump body all the way up and then press it all the way down. It takes about five seconds to fill a 15 mL bottle and a bit longer for a 30 mL. The reservoir bottle is one liter (the largest they had), which is enough for 60+ 15 mL bottles or 30+ 30 mL bottles.

I’m doing batches of 60 or 90 bottles at a time, so I sometimes need to refill the reservoir with the same solution during a run. That takes 30 seconds or so. Cleanup during a changeover to a new chemical is faster than I feared it might be. I just rinse the reservoir bottle and dispenser under running tap water, put the supply tube into a beaker of tap water and pump 10 or 12 passes of tap water through the dispenser, and then repeat with a couple passes of distilled water.

The batch of bottles we’re currently working on is sufficient for 60 more chemistry kits and 30 more biology kits. After we finish this pass, I think I’m going to bump that up to batches of 120 chemistry kits and 60 biology kits. I’m also going to bump up the size of the chemical solutions we make up. Right now, I’m doing one liter at a time of the solutions that go into 15 mL bottles and two liters of the solutions that go into 30 mL bottles. That’s sufficient for 60+ sets of each. Other than solutions with relatively limited shelf lives, after this batch I’m going to start making up four liters at a time of the solutions for 15 mL bottles and eight liters of the solutions for 30 mL bottles, which is sufficient for 250 sets of each.

10:49 – I see that the Catholic hospital in Colorado that had made the unusual argument that a fetus is not a person has now backtracked and is admitting that a fetus is a person under Catholic doctrine. They were being sued for the wrongful death of a pregnant woman and her twin fetuses and had claimed that the two fetuses were not people under Colorado law. Now they’re saying that they were “morally wrong” to claim the fetuses were not people, which presumably means they plan to continue arguing that in the eyes of the law there is only one wrongful death at issue.

And some articles are now claiming that that image of Obama shooting skeet is a fake. Fake or not, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone really believes that Obama is a shooter.

From the image, if he’s shooting skeet it would appear that he’s shooting a sitting clay. (The shotgun is in full recoil, which even with the ported barrel and light skeet loads means it must have been about level when he pulled the trigger.) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that this image is of Obama shooting at skeet, because I doubt he’s ever actually hit one. If indeed this isn’t the only round Obama has ever fired in his life.

So I have a challenge for Mr. Obama. As Barbara, Paul, and Mary can attest, I pretty much suck at shooting clays, at least with a shotgun, so if Obama is actually a skeet shooter my challenge should be trivially easy for him to win. The deal is, Obama gets his shotgun and 25 rounds of skeet shells. He shoots a round and we total how many he breaks. Then I get my Colt Combat Commander and 25 rounds of hardball. I shoot a round and we total how many I break. If Obama breaks more than I do, he gets to claim to be a shooter. What could be fairer than that?

I should say that I actually tried shooting clays with my .45 back 35 years ago or so. I used a box of 50 rounds and IIRC broke half a dozen clays, for a success rate of 12%. Some of the guys I was shooting with did better than that, but they were using higher-velocity rounds.

12:56 – I just got off the phone with PayPal support. I was starting to get concerned about a couple of things. First, the from: line of the payment-received emails that PayPay sends me had changed. Until the end of January or thereabouts, they were in the form:

“jdoe@johndoe.com” <jdoe@johndoe.com>

For the last several days, they’ve been in the form:

John Doe via PayPal <member@paypal.com>

My second concern was a change in withdrawals. I regularly sweep our PayPal balance into our corporate bank account, at least daily and sometimes two or three times a day. Until now, as soon as I did a transfer I’d get an email immediately from PayPal noting the details of the transfer. For the last few days, I haven’t been getting those confirmation emails, so I began to wonder if I’d been hacked.

As it turns out, there’s no problem. Mallory at PayPal support said they’d changed the way they format the from: line on payment-received emails to cut down on fraud attempts. And she said not to worry about the lack of confirmation emails for transfers from PayPal to our bank account. Apparently, they’ve been having some kind of issue getting those emails sent.

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Monday, 4 February 2013

07:32 – Barbara is back on dad-sitting duty this evening and tomorrow evening. Ordinarily, that’d mean Colin and I wouldn’t see her again until Wednesday after work, but she’s decided to come back here after work Tuesday, have dinner, and then head over to her dad’s place to spend the night. The hospital is still running tests and otherwise trying to figure out exactly what’s wrong with her mom, but it seems likely she’ll be in the hospital for at least a few more days.

Barbara got a bunch of bottles labeled over the weekend, so among other things I’ll be filling bottles this week. Despite all the upheaval, we’re still in reasonably good supply on finished inventory of all the science kits, with more abuilding.

08:11 – I see that it’s been confirmed by DNA testing that the skeleton found under that British parking lot is in fact the remains of King Richard III. Furthermore, from the photo in the news article I saw, it appears that King Richard had been decapitated, lending credence to the idea that Richard III was in fact killed accidentally by Lord Edmund Plantagenet and succeeded by King Richard IV.

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