08:27 – I’m cranking away on the QC1 galleys of the biology book. I hope to finish that job tomorrow, although it may slide into Thursday.
Things are getting a bit tense in the EU, with Portugal likely to need a bailout soon and Spain announcing that it’s not going to comply with the austerity measures recently agreed. Here’s an image that sums things up pretty well. That’s Spain’s economy minister on the left and the president of the Euro Group on the right.
07:49 – Today I’m supposed to receive the QC1 pass of the biology book, which is a PDF of the way the book will actually look in print. It’s been about six weeks since I last worked on the book, so this read-through counts as “semi-fresh eyes” in terms of catching any remaining mistakes. Obviously, I’m not the best proof-reader, because I wrote the thing, but I expect I’ll still catch a few mistakes. Once I return my corrections/comments, they’ll be incorporated into the master document and I’ll get one final chance with the QC2 pass in a couple weeks.
Barbara and I made up the first batch of 30 small-parts bags for the biology kits yesterday. The only thing still missing is the methyl cellulose, which I hope will arrive this week. This coming weekend, we’ll start assembling finished kits.
10:08 – Well, so much for the Greek default last Friday putting Greek debt on a “sustainable” footing. As of now, those New & Improved Greek bonds announced on Friday have already achieved junk status. The shortest-term of the new Greek bonds, those maturing in 2023, are now selling at prices that reflect 20% yields. The market is pissing all over Greece. Portugal is in the on-deck circle.
Here’s something amusing. For the first time in my life, someone has actually mistaken me for a young-earth creationist. It happened in a thread on the Well-Trained Minds forum where a literal Adam and Eve were being discussed. That kind of segued into a discussion of humans’ most-recent common ancestor. I said that it’s extremely probable that our MRCA lived within the last 5,000 years, probable that our MRCA lived within the last 2,000 years, and possible (although not likely) that our MRCA lived within the last 1,000 years. IOW, there is a small probability (maybe 0.1 or less) that everyone now alive descends from one person who was living 1,000 years ago. Someone took my arguments in favor of a recent MRCA as evidence that I was a YEC. I was rendered momentarily speechless (well, writeless), but I quickly understood how he could make that jump. For the record, no, I am not a YEC. I refer to YECs as “religious nutters”, which is actually being kind to them.
09:31 – Most of the news reports are celebrating Greece’s default as some kind of victory. It’s a “victory”, of course, only in the sense that the Dunkirk evacuation was a victory for Britain. The probability of chaotic default in the near term–possibly as early as next week, and almost certainly by summer–is still extremely high, and even the most optimistic observers don’t believe that this latest action has done anything to put Greece’s debt on a sustainable footing.
Almost no one believes that this default will improve matters for Greek citizens, who are doomed by this agreement to decades of extreme poverty and unimaginable suffering. The only sane action for Greece at this point is to default entirely on all of its debts, including those to the EU and IMF, and exit the euro, which almost certainly means also exiting the EU. Returning to the drachma means Greek citizens are still doomed to extreme poverty and unimaginable suffering, but only for perhaps 10 years rather than the 30 or 40 years under the current agreement. Greece must understand that the EU has already written it off, and simply doesn’t care what that means for Greece or Greeks.
Today will be a routine Saturday. I’ll do laundry, and we’ll work on the biology kits.
09:56 – This weekend, we’ll get started on building the restricted chemicals and small parts subassemblies for the biology kits, 60 sets of each. We may also make up 60 sets of the unrestricted chemicals, although one of those is still missing and will be until the backordered methyl cellulose arrives. The following weekend, assuming the methyl cellulose has arrived, we’ll start assembling full kits, probably two or three dozen to start with. There are already people on the waiting list, and I want to get those orders filled before the book hits the stores.
As expected, Greece has formally defaulted by announcing its intention to enforce the so-called Collective Action Clauses that it retroactively inserted in its debt contracts last month. The bad news for Greece is that, even after triggering the CACs, they’ve still come up at least $4 billion short of the Troika requirements for approving the new bailout. That means that, unless the Troika changes the rules that they’ve repeatedly insisted will not be changed, the new bailout will not be approved. Right now, I’m sure there’s a lot of scrambling going on behind the scenes to somehow get everything approved, but it’s by no means a done deal. Eleven days from now, Greece may or may not have the money it needs to redeem the $18 billion or so of debt that matures that day.
07:58 – I just got email from our production editor at O’Reilly/MAKE about the schedule for the biology book. Next week, 3/12 through 3/16, is devoted to the QC1 pass. That’s where they send us a PDF of the book in final form so that we can make any last-minute edits. At this point, any such edits should be very minor–correcting typos and so on–and we really hope that no changes are needed that would affect pagination. It generally takes me two or three days to complete this pass. Then, on the 19th through the 21st, I’ll be reviewing the index. For some reason, that’s always difficult for me. I can never think of anything to add. Of course, that’s probably because O’Reilly uses very good indexers. Then, on the 22nd and 23rd, we do the QC2 pass, which is reviewing what we really hope is the final camera-ready PDF. If any changes are needed in this pass, we really, really hope they’re extremely minor. Then we have the final index review on the 27th and 28th, followed by the book going to the printer on 6 April.
UPS showed up yesterday with 2,200 15 mL bottles and the screw caps to fit them. It looks like they’ll work fine, but I’ll do some testing on them to make sure. That means filling several of them with water, capping them and taping the caps, and then tossing a bag of them into the clothes dryer on medium and tumbling them for half an hour or so. If they survive that with no leakage, we’ll assume they’ll also survive shipping without leakage.
Work continues on the re-write of the forensics book to adapt it to a custom kit.
14:50 – Here’s the quote of day, from French President Nicolas Sarkozy: “The economic crisis is still with us, but I think we can say that we have surmounted the financial crisis. The euro is still here. Who would have bet on that four years ago?”
Four years ago? Four years ago, neither Sarkozy nor any of the other eurozone leaders even understood there was a problem. And, until now, they’ve all denied repeatedly that the euro was under existential threat. Now, Sarkozy appears to be saying that for the last four years everyone has believed that the euro was doomed, but now that threat is gone. Geez. As Buffy would say, his logic is not Earth logic.
Meanwhile, regardless of how the Greek debt swap proceeds with the final deadline coming up in about 10 minutes, Greece has already announced it is defaulting. Not “selective default”. Not “partial default”. Not “organized default”. Default default. Greece announced that there are only two choices for its creditors: (a) accept the write-down of 75% in NPV terms, or (b) get nothing. That’s a default by anyone’s definition, no matter what kind of lipstick Greece, the IIF, the ECB, and the IMF try to put on that pig.
And at this point it’s difficult to see how Greece can meet the Troika requirements for approving the new bailout. Even if the Troika chooses to reduce the requirements, and it’s difficult to see how that would be possible politically, the assumptions about who is paying how much are going to bite them in the ass. EU politicians are working on the assumption that the IMF will kick in a third of the required funds, and the IMF has already said it’s not going to do that. The IMF may kick in 10% of the nominal requirements, if that. And the nominal requirements are entirely inadequate. That means the EU is going to have to come up with a lot more money. That, of course, means that Germany is going to have to come up with most of that additional money, and it’s clear that Germany simply isn’t going to do that. So Greece is going down the tubes, one way or another, no matter what happens with the debt swap.
08:18 – Barring a miracle, it looks like Romney will take on Obama in November. Paul never had any real chance, and he knew it. Romney is a horrible choice, but at least he’s not as bad as the contemptible Gingrich. And neither of them are remotely as bad as the Ayatollah Santorum. If I were forced to choose between Obama and Santorum, I’d vote for Obama. What has the American electorate done to deserve only choices like these?
Paul Jones has a new toy. “Bought a Coronado PST in preparation for the transit (and, just ’cause). Here is a shot from this morning. -Paul”
The Coronado PST is a small telescope that’s specialized for Solar observation. It blocks all of the light except the H-α wavelength, revealing details that are otherwise invisible. The transit Paul refers to is the transit of Venus across the Solar disk. Venus transits occur in pairs separated by eight years. The last was on 8 June 2004. We tried to observe that one, but were clouded out despite chasing it across two states. The next is on 6 June this year. Paul hopes to view that one, because the next one won’t occur until he’s 146 years old.
12:21 – Well, for anyone who’s keeping tabs on the Greek “voluntary” debt swap, with only about 24 hours left until the deadline we’re currently at 40.8% of the eligible debt being held by those who have approved the deal. The absolute minimum required is 66%. Less than that, and Greece won’t go ahead with the deal, which means a catastrophic default on 20 March. If holders of between 66% and 90% agree to the deal, Greece will enforce its so-called Collective Action Clauses to force all holders to accept the deal. Once again, that means catastrophic default. Only if more than 90% of debt holders agree will things proceed without the CACs being triggered. It’s unclear at this point what would happen to the < 10% of debt held by hold-outs. In theory, Greece could avoid formal default by paying off those bonds at face value, but the chances of that happening (or of the 90% level being reached) is so close to zero as not to matter. The real bitch is that even if the 90% level is reached, it's still insufficient to meet the terms required for the bailout to proceed. So, no matter what happens, Greece is going to default, one way or another. The next few weeks are going to be exciting.
08:44 – This is crunch week for Greece, with Thursday the deadline for the “voluntary” debt-swap, in which it is hoped that private investors will agree to take a so-called voluntary write-down of about 75% in net present value terms. If those private sector investors who hold at least 2/3 of the outstanding debt do not agree to the terms, it’s game over immediately. Greece enters a disorderly default and the whole house of cards collapses. If more than 2/3 agree but not all of them, Greece has announced that it will enforce so-called collective-action clauses, which in effect force the hold-outs to comply against their will. If the CACs are triggered, Greece again defaults, and the whole house of cards collapses.
Germany is convinced, wrongly, that the mechanisms in place will prevent a Greek default from spreading to the rest of the periphery. When Greece defaults, the markets will immediately focus on the remaining weak euro members, starting with Ireland and Portugal and quickly spreading to Spain and Italy and eventually Belgium and France. Once that ball starts rolling down the hill, there’s simply no way to stop it. The other southern-tier euro nations will begin toppling like dominoes. Even if Germany were willing to beggar itself, it couldn’t stop the collapse.
In the Netherlands, politicians are now seriously discussing abandoning the euro and returning to the guilder. You can bet that similar discussions are going on behind the scenes in Germany, Finland, and the other northern-tier nations as well. Short of a miracle of biblical proportions, the euro is toast.
After making up the chemicals for the first batch of 60 biology kits, we’ve started to run short of bottles, particularly the 15 mL ones. I ordered a couple cases of the 15 mL bottles yesterday, this time from a supplier that carries US-made bottles rather than the Chinese-made bottles we had been using. The US bottles are a few cents each more expensive, but they’ll arrive tomorrow. Lead time on the Chinese bottles is 60 to 90 days, which is simply too long a window to allow us to manage inventory efficiently.
Rather than dropper tips and caps for the new bottles, I ordered standard ribbed PE-lined PP screw caps. The dropper tips have only one real advantage, and that’s when a chemical is normally dispensed drop-wise. Otherwise, a standard cap is more convenient. We may end up using a combination of dropper tips and standard caps in later batches of the kits, using the dropper tips for chemicals like pH indicators. Or we may just use standard caps on all of them. Another advantage to using standard caps is that they’re less likely to leak during shipping. We haven’t had a big problem with that, but it has happened a couple of times despite our efforts to secure and seal the caps.
08:58 –Today is the last day of Barbara’s four-day weekend. She’s picking up her sister and parents and heading for some big outlet mall somewhere.
Sunday we ran out of the Scotch Blue masking tape we use to seal chemical bottles. Barbara also needed a new gas grill, so yesterday we headed over to Home Depot to pick those up. While we were there, I browsed the plumbing section in search of Root Kill (99+% copper sulfate pentahydrate) and Crystal Drain Opener (essentially 100% sodium hydroxide). I bought three 2-pound (0.91 kilo) bottles of the copper(II) sulfate, but the drain opener was new and “improved”. Instead of nice white 100% sodium hydroxide crystals, it was an unspecified percentage of sodium hydroxide with other components that weren’t named. I unscrewed the lid on a bottle to look at it and it was a lavender powder. Yuck.
I also needed 97 g of calcium acetate monohydrate to make up the fertilizer concentrate part C for the biology kits. I thought I had that in stock, but I didn’t. So I just made some up by reacting calcium hydroxide with acetic acid. I guess it’s kind of wasteful to use ACS reagent grade acetic acid and calcium hydroxide to make up a fertilizer, but needs must. The result was interesting. I expected a clear, colorless solution of calcium acetate, with the excess calcium hydroxide present as a fine particulate. What I got was a yellowish-brown cloudy solution. Oh, well. I filtered it. It is, after all, fertilizer, so its appearance isn’t really important. What I ended up with was a clear pale yellow solution.
12:25 –Jerry Coyne’s blog is one of my daily reads. He is unabashedly atheist and politically liberal. He is also intellectually honest beyond question. Here’s his latest: Are there human races?
My answer is the same as it’s always been: of course there are. There are clear differences in phenotypes, as well as the underlying differences in genotypes. Denying that human races exist is like denying that dog breeds exist. But many scientists, including biologists, do deny the existence of human races, basing that belief on political considerations rather than scientific ones. The idea that races might exist and that very real differences among them might exist is simply anathema to the politically-liberal mind.
Interestingly, no one seriously questions that very real differences exist between the sexes. Men are, on average, larger, stronger, faster, and more aggressive than women. Women are, on average, hardier than men. That’s why, for example, between 105 and 108 baby boys are born for every 100 baby girls. There is also little doubt that men and women think differently. And, even after eliminating social and cultural factors, there’s little doubt that the intelligence of women tends to cluster closer to the mean. That is, a very intelligent person is considerably more likely to be male than female, and an extraordinarily intelligent person is overwhelmingly more likely to be male. Conversely, males are also over-represented at the extremes of stupidity. Or, to put it another way, the standard deviation in IQ among women is significantly smaller than it is among men. Despite those differences, the mean IQ of statistical populations of men and women is identical to within one percent.
Perhaps the hesitance to acknowledge differences among the races is supported by the fact that no one agrees on just what constitutes a human race or how many of them there are. Some authors have argued in favor of only three or four races, while others argue in favor of dozens. There can never be a true number, because the number is determined by how one chooses to define a race. How large must the differences be? Since humans are on a continuum, supporting the idea of a relatively large number of human races minimizes the differences among them. But one thing really is pretty certain: the differences between the sexes make the differences among the races pale into insignificance. Human males of whatever race have more in common with each other than they do with a woman who is part of their nominal racial group.
The problem with the liberal position denying the existence of races is that it results in shoehorning different people into the same mold. Once one recognizes that differences do exist, one can adjust one’s expectations accordingly. From the fact that blacks are over-represented in the NBA, it does not follow that the NBA is a racist anti-white organization. Nor does it follow from the fact that whites and particularly Asians are over-represented and blacks under-represented in high school AP classes and university STEM programs that these organizations discriminate against blacks. It’s long past time that we abandoned the inherently-racist position that equal opportunity implies equal outcomes. Some people are simply better at some things than other people are. It’s time to recognize that fact.
08:15 – The biology kits include glycerol (glycerin), and I just realized that the only unopened bottle I have in inventory is only a pint (473 mL), which isn’t nearly enough for 60 kits. I got that bottle at Costco some time ago, but they no longer carry it. I’d intended to run over to Walgreens or CVS, but their glycerol is quite expensive. So I checked Amazon, where I ordered a half gallon (1.9 L) of 99.7% food-grade “vegetable kosher glycerin, USP” for $27. Kosher? I guess they killed the vegetable oil with a ritual knife before they saponified it.
The latest Greek deal is already starting to unravel, just a day after it was agreed. As a condition for participating, the IMF is insisting that the EU “firewall” be boosted. Germany refuses to do that, because doing so to the extent required by the IMF would increase its already-huge liability by 50%, a step that German voters would not tolerate. Without IMF participation, the rest of the EU, which is to say Germany, would have to increase their own participation to cover the absence of IMF funding, which again is a step that German voters would not tolerate.
The math just doesn’t work for this deal. The current numbers were calculated under ridiculously rosy assumptions about the Greek economy. A top-secret study commissioned by the EU was leaked during the negotiations, and makes it clear that the planned €130 billion bailout is nowhere near adequate. Under that study’s assumptions, which are themselves extremely optimistic, Greece will require about twice that much, €245 billion. Although the press is calling those assumptions “worst case”, in fact they’re nowhere near worst-case. They’re not even anywhere near realistic-case. Realistically, the EU is looking at a transfer of at least €400 billion and probably €500 billion to €600 billion between now and 2020 to keep Greece even marginally solvent.
07:56 – The EU summit turned out exactly as I predicted. They kicked the can a bit farther down the road, putting off Greece’s inevitable collapse for a few more weeks, if they’re lucky. Greece in turn agreed to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the eurocracy, abandoning its sovereignty. Ironically, it was also announced yesterday that the old drachma ceases to be legal tender as of 1 March. One would have thought they’d have kept it around a while longer. It might come in useful. Or perhaps they’re just doing a central collection of all outstanding drachma-denominated notes and coins, expecting to reissue them shortly.
I’m told that no one in Europe wants to be holding Greek-branded euros, and that those of Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy are also looked upon as of questionable value. In a real-world demonstration of Gresham’s Law, everyone is getting rid of southern-tier euros as fast as they can and attempting to replace them with German, Dutch, and Finnish euros. And who can blame them? The expectation is that when Greece leaves the euro, Greek euros will be the new drachma until Greece can afford to print real new drachmas. And the same will occur as the other southern-tier nations leave the euro. Frankly, I expect the opposite to happen; the poorer nations, including Belgium and France, will end up using increasingly worthless euros, while Germany and the other richer nations return to their own former currencies. Or, if they’re foolish, to a new shared currency, but one shared only among the richer northern-tier nations.
One thing is certain, though. The results of the latest euro summit bought them weeks if they’re lucky, and only days if they’re not.