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Category: science kits

Friday, 25 November 2011

09:44 – I got 28 sets of the hazardous chemical subassemblies made up yesterday, with about 90 minutes’ work. It was a nice break from writing. Barbara won’t be home until Sunday afternoon, so the remaining work involved in building those 28 kits will have to wait for the following weekend, but we will be ready to start shipping chemistry kits again the week of 4 December.

On the heels of Germany’s disastrous bond auction Wednesday, Italy held an even more disastrous bond auction yesterday, with yields averaging more than 7.2%. It’s now obvious even to the biggest euro proponents that investors–individuals, banks, and foreign governments–are no longer willing to risk their money in euro-denominated instruments. Death of a currency as eurogeddon approaches. If you have any assets in euro-denominated instruments or funds, get out now, today, while you still can. The collapse, when it comes, won’t be gradual. And it will come, sooner rather than later.

13:38 – It really is time for any sane person to get as far away from the euro as possible as quickly as possible. At this point, we’re talking about the euro becoming a smoking pile of rubble within weeks, if not sooner. Don’t be lulled by the idea that Germany might save the euro. In the first place, it won’t because it’s not willing to take on responsibility for the debts of the other eurozone countries. In the second place, even if it were willing to do so, it can’t. Even if Germany were willing to beggar itself to save the euro, it doesn’t have sufficient assets to do so. Nor will Germany form a currency union with Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands. Germany will ultimately have no choice but to revert to the D-mark. All of them, including Merkel, know this, and you can bet that Germany has been frantically printing new D-marks in huge quantities for the last several weeks, if not months.

Euro armageddon: David Cameron fills the sandbags.


15:03 – And I see that S&P just downgraded Belgium from AA+ to AA, which is preposterous. Not that S&P cut Belgium’s rating, but that it left it ridiculously high. The ratings agencies obviously didn’t learn their lesson after the Lehman crisis, during which they were still rating junk derivatives AAA literally days before they crashed. The same is true now for sovereign credit ratings. A credit rating is supposed to reflect the likelihood of a country defaulting on at least some of its debts. On that basis, only the US really deserves the top credit rating, because it will never default. It may inflate the hell out of the dollar, which amounts to the same thing, but it will pay off its debts in dollars, regardless of what those dollars are then actually worth. So, if you assume that the US deserves the highest credit rating among all the world’s countries, although that rating is in fact crap, where should the major EU countries be rated? Well, let me fix that for them, using the descriptions from Wikipedia:

UK: BBB (An obligor has ADEQUATE capacity to meet its financial commitments. However, adverse economic conditions or changing circumstances are more likely to lead to a weakened capacity of the obligor to meet its financial commitments.)

Germany, Finland, the Netherlands: BB (An obligor is LESS VULNERABLE in the near term than other lower-rated obligors. However, it faces major ongoing uncertainties and exposure to adverse business, financial, or economic conditions which could lead to the obligor’s inadequate capacity to meet its financial commitments.)

France, Belgium, Austria: B (An obligor is MORE VULNERABLE than the obligors rated ‘BB’, but the obligor currently has the capacity to meet its financial commitments. Adverse business, financial, or economic conditions will likely impair the obligor’s capacity or willingness to meet its financial commitments.)

Italy, Spain: CC (An obligor is CURRENTLY HIGHLY-VULNERABLE.)

I’m not sure why the three major agencies haven’t assigned these ratings to these countries, because that would reflect reality. It may be that the agencies, as usual, are behind the curve, or it may be that they are coming under immense pressure from the countries in question. Well, there’s no doubt they’re under intense pressure from the EU governments and the EU itself, but I’m not sure that fully explains their failure to assign accurate ratings. Note that, of this group, only the UK with its BBB rating can still be considered “investment grade”, and it’s teetering on the edge. Germany and all of the other nations rated BB or lower are actually “junk grade”. And, as we all know, changing a bond’s rating to junk causes all sorts of unpleasant things to happen, not least of which are mass sell-offs by banks and investment companies that are not allowed to carry junk bonds on their books.

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Thursday, 24 November 2011

09:21 – Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner last night, with Doritos as the second course and ice cream for my evening snack. And people say I don’t eat a balanced diet. I started to watch the second episode of Survivors last night, but it was so well done that I stopped. I really think Barbara would enjoy the series, so I’ll save it until she can watch it with me.

I’m going to spend some time today building chemistry kits. Although the product page says we’re out-of-stock and will begin shipping backordered kits the week of 4 December, I’m still uncomfortable having outstanding orders and no product to fill those orders. I have 28 sets worth of chemicals bottled and ready to package. It’s a couple hours’ work to get those 28 chemical subassemblies packaged up, so I’ll try to get that done today.

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Tuesday, 22 November 2011

11:38 – I’ve started placing orders for the biology kits. This morning, I placed orders for several thousand bottles and a couple kilograms each of agar and dextrose.

I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. I’m about to start a new group. I’m not sure if I’ll do the group on fungi or plants next.

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Monday, 21 November 2011

10:53 – Over the weekend, Barbara and I got a good start on making up a batch of 28 chemistry kits. The chemical bottles have to be divided into groups to comply with hazardous material shipping regulations. We finished up Group D, which contains the 26 unregulated chemicals. Those don’t require the caps to be taped or shrink-wrapped. All 26 of them simply go into a plastic bag–one of the kind used in supermarkets–which is then tied off.

Groups A (five strong acids), B (three strong bases), and C (four flammable liquids) each require the caps to be taped or otherwise sealed, and each group has to go into its own sealed plastic bag. Then one each of bags A, B, C, and D go into yet another plastic bag with a large scoop of vermiculite (to absorb leaks). Doing all that qualifies the kit to ship under section 173.4 (small quantity exemption), which means the kits can ship via USPS Priority Mail (air) rather than having to go ORMD Parcel Post (ground).

Barbara is getting ready to leave Wednesday on a Thanksgiving trip with her parents. She returns late Sunday. Colin and I are planning wild women and parties while she’s gone.

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Sunday, 20 November 2011

09:56 – I just did a purchase order for bulk quantities of various bottles and caps, totaling about 13,000 pieces. Tomorrow I’ll call the vendor and go through the order line-item by line-item to make sure that all the bottles and caps I’m ordering are compatible with each other. The good news is that the order is large enough to get free shipping. The bad news is that it may also be large enough that instead of shipping UPS ground they’ll use LTL truck delivery. Oh, well. Our neighbors won’t be surprised to see a guy show up in a tractor-trailer and start unloading pallets.

Clearing out my spam, both email and here, I again wondered why we don’t have better tools to block this crap. Yes, I know botnets generate most spam, and many of their member machines are located in the US, but even so. I get tons of spam that originates in eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and so on. Why does my hosting service not make it easy to specify exactly which TLDs and IP ranges I want to block or to allow? Yes, I know all the arguments about Balkanizing the Internet. I don’t care. I don’t want traffic from the Balkans, or indeed most of the rest of the world.

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Thursday, 17 November 2011

08:44 – Apparently, some people took one of my comments yesterday to mean that I was planning to abandon Linux for Windows. I’m not. What I may do is buy a low-end PC with Windows on it to do some stuff that requires Windows.

For example, right now I’m driving to the post office to mail kits. The USPS has a web site where I could print labels with postage and have the mailman pick up the kits at our home. That’d save me a lot of trips to the post office, but the problem is that I’ve never gotten that site to work properly on our Linux boxes. When I try to use it, it goes off into an endless loop. I think the problem is the version of Adobe Reader rather than Linux per se, but of course that still means it doesn’t work on Linux. And there are a few other Windows-only applications that might be useful for the business. I am and always have been practical about operating systems. They’re not a religious issue for me. If I need Windows, I’ll use Windows. If I need OS X, I’ll buy a Mac. I prefer to use Linux simply because it’s secure and doesn’t lock me in to a corporate walled garden, as the alternatives do.

And, speaking of kits, we just sold the last chemistry kit in stock. We had to increase prices on the new batch by $10 per kit. We’ll be assembling three dozen of those over the next couple of weeks. We’re still accepting orders for kits to be shipped the week of December 4th. With Christmas and the winter semester approaching, this new batch probably won’t last long, so I also need to get orders placed for the components we need to build another batch.

09:49 – Old memories. I used to do a lot of darkroom work, including processing color film, which was a big deal to do in a home darkroom back in the 60’s. There were kits available: E3 and later E4 for processing Ektachrome color slides, and other kits for processing color negatives and color prints. I ran through all of those, but was looking for a new challenge. So I decided to process Kodachrome at home.

Kodachrome is (was) utterly different from standard color films and papers. Those were called “substantive”, which meant they had the color couplers built into the emulsion layers. There was just one development step, during which an organic chemical in the developer reacted with each of the three color couplers to form the three dyes needed to make up the color image. Kodachrome, on the other hand, was actually a black and white film. No color couplers. Instead, it had three separate black and white emulsion layers, each sensitive to only part of the color spectrum. During processing (which, IIRC, involved more than 30 separate steps) the film was first developed in an ordinary black-and-white developer and then exposed individually to monochromatic light to fog the unexposed silver halides in each emulsion layer. After each layer was fogged to reverse it, it was developed with a specific developer that produced the appropriate dye for that layer. The final layer was fogged with white light and then color-developed. There were numerous intermediate steps.

I actually got recognizable results on my first attempt. Not good, but recognizable. So I wrote Kodak to ask them for some tips. By return mail, I got a very polite letter from Kodak, which basically said as inoffensively as possible that they didn’t believe I was doing what I claimed to be doing. So I mailed the guy back and told him I most certainly was. He then, again very politely, basically asked me to prove it by sending him a Kodachrome slide developed as a negative. So I did that.

It was a couple of weeks before I heard back from him, and when I did he was asking me if I’d like to come up to Rochester for a job interview. I replied, thanking him for his interest, but explaining that my parents thought it would be inappropriate for me to apply for a job with Kodak since I was still in junior high school.

Oh, yeah. The reason I was thinking about this is that we just sold the last kit in stock to a guy who’s a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology–sometimes called Kodak Institute of Technology–where I did graduate work. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, RIT isn’t actually in Rochester, NY. It’s in South Henrietta, NY. I used to have a great t-shirt for the South Henrietta Institute of Technology.

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Tuesday, 15 November 2011

10:00 – There’s still a lot remaining to be done, but I now have Kubuntu 11.10 to the point where I can work with it. Most of the stuff remaining to be done can be done on the fly as I discover missing pieces. For example, I just realized I need to install NVU or something like it to edit HTML pages.

I’m now using LibreOffice instead of OOo, but I don’t see many differences. I did run across one, which may be an artifact of old files created with much earlier versions of OOo. I have a spreadsheet that lists every disc I’ve ever received from Netflix, including the dates received by us, returned, and then received by Netflix. When I open that file in LibreOffice, what I see is a two-year-old version of the data. The file I opened is definitely the current version, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I may unzip it and look at the raw data, but I suspect what LibreOffice is showing me is the last version that was saved with a much earlier version of OOo.

We’re just about out of chemistry kits, so Barbara and I intend to spend some time this weekend building two or three dozen more. We have all the purchased components in hand, but we need to make up and package chemicals, which means we may not be able to ship kits until early December. We’ll continue accepting orders in the meantime, letting customers know that shipment will be delayed for a couple of weeks. This new batch will be priced $10 higher because it’ll be built using some components I ordered at higher cost than the preceding batches. And once we have that batch built, I need to place orders for more components.

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Sunday, 13 November 2011

10:32 – Still working on the biology book. I decided to stop trying to organize the protist stuff and just write labs. I’ll worry later about how to organize everything.

I also spent a couple hours on the chemistry lab kits. We’re down to a handful in stock. Making up the next batch will involve some changes, primarily a shift from using polypropylene centrifuge tubes as chemical containers to using a mix of dropper bottles and wide-mouth pharma packer bottles. That also means reorganizing the work flow and packing groups. We may end up being out-of-stock on the chemistry kits for two or three weeks, but that’s not a big deal at this time of year because orders are slow. I expect they’ll start coming in faster with Christmas and the winter semester fast approaching, so we want to have at least two or three dozen kits in inventory by early next month.

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Friday, 28 October 2011

08:48 – One thing that’s always struck me as strange about Netflix practices is that they don’t allow non-members to browse or search their catalog. One would think they’d want non-members to be able to see what they’re missing.

I just downgraded our plan from streaming + two discs to streaming-only, which took effect Wednesday. With the exception of the final disc of series four of Sons of Anarchy, there was nothing left in our disc queue that we cared that much about seeing, so I planned to go streaming-only for a few months to give Netflix a chance to add more discs that we wanted to watch and then bump up our membership to include discs. But, as of yesterday, I can no longer see anything that has to do with discs. Our disc queue is now invisible, although I understand that Netflix keeps it archived for two years. Not that that matters, since I did a screen capture of it before I changed to streaming-only.

But I can no longer search for discs, nor do search results even include series or seasons that are available only on disc. For example, series one and two of Sons of Anarchy are available on disc or streaming, but series three is disc-only. When I search for Sons of Anarchy now, all I see are the two seasons that are available streaming. Not even an indication that series three is available on-disc.

Given that Netflix is trying very hard to force people toward streaming, I wonder if the converse is true. If I had a disc-only plan, would they let me see what’s available streaming even though I couldn’t watch it? It seems to make sense for them to do that.

Actually, Netflix has made things easier for me. Rather than keeping an eye on new disc-only material, I’ll just wait six months or so and then upgrade our plan to include discs. There certainly ought to be at least a month’s worth of new discs we want to watch by then. Not that we’ll have to wait six months to see the last two episodes of Sons of Anarchy S3. Our friends Paul and Mary subscribe to both discs and streaming, and they tend to let discs sit around for extended periods. I asked Mary the other day if she’d mind getting SoA S3D4 for me, and she readily agreed.

Work on the biology book continues. Right now, I’m working on a lab session on culturing drug-resistant bacteria. Once I finish that session, I think I’ll jump over to a different group for a change of pace, maybe the genetics group or the life processes group. Or maybe even one of the survey groups. I’m also down perilously low in chemistry kit inventory, so soon I’ll have to set aside a day or so to build more chemistry kits.

14:55 – Well, that didn’t take long. In the first real test of the “solutions” reached at the EU crisis conclave Thursday morning, Italy has failed miserably on today’s bond sale. The yield was catastrophic, 6.06%, and Italy was unable to sell all of the bonds it offered. To knowledgeable observers, that’s sufficient evidence to declare the latest crisis summit a complete and utter failure. Not only did the non-actions taken at the summit not reverse the collapse of EU finances, they appear not to have even slowed things down. Contagion continues, unabated.

Of course, none of this crisis kabuki really had anything to do with Greece and not much more to do with the euro or the EU. What it’s really about is an attempt to shore things up until Merkozy can get past the next elections–not that either of them has much chance of being re-elected–and, even more importantly, the continuing push by the EU elite for “more Europe”. They’re actually loving this financial/debt/liquidity crisis, because it supports their long-term anti-democratic plans to consolidate Europe as a single political entity, ruled by them. Fortunately, I believe the FANG nations will refuse to go along with their cunning plan, leaving eurocrats holding the empty bag of the southern-tier nations only. Let them see what they can do with that motley collection.

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Saturday, 15 October 2011

11:43 – This guy makes a pretty good argument on why he expects Greece to default on 28 October. Of course, the Greek government hasn’t yet gotten its grubby little hands on the final bailout payment, so that may give them pause. But it’s not like the EU/ECB/IMF are actually handing over suitcases full of euros, so the reality is that the Greek government really doesn’t get its hands on bailout payments anyway.

As things stand, the Greek government has no intention of ever repaying any of the money it owes other than in the sense of paying back a little bit to get a lot more. And everyone else is fully aware of this. If the EU/ECB/IMF actually does pay the last tranche, it’s only to prop up Greece for a few weeks longer, buying time for them to do what they can to prevent the inevitable Greek default from starting the row of dominoes falling. At this point, that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion, with Portugal and Ireland toppling soon after Greece, followed soon after by Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and, eventually, Germany itself. I just hope the UK, US, Canada, and other first-world economies can minimize the damage to themselves.

In writing our books, we try very hard to keep the costs of doing home science as low as possible. That means using cheap or free items as much as possible, rather than requiring purchased items. But I’m going to make an exception for the series of lab sessions I’m working on now, which are on culturing bacteria. I’ve done these labs in the past. I used environmental bacteria, but then I’m not an inexperienced high-school student. The risks of culturing environment bacteria, particularly at room temperature, are pretty minimal, but not non-existent. A dropped Petri dish, for example, could put large numbers of pathogenic bacteria into the air.

So I decided to specify a purchased culture of bacteria intended for use by students. There are still minor risks involved, but they’re much smaller than those of culturing unknown bacteria. I’m going to specify a mixed broth culture from Carolina Biological Supply. It’s $17 plus shipping, but it contains three types of bacteria that are useful for learning purposes, and it’d be pretty hard to get into trouble with them.

The three bacteria are Bacillus subtilis (Gram+ rod), Micrococcus luteus (Gram+ sphere), and Rhodospirillum rubrum (Gram- spiral), which gives us all three bacterial shapes and both Gram types. They’re also large enough to be visible without an oil-immersion objective, and they form colonies that are easy to discriminate visually from each other. Finally, they’re reasonably robust, pretty easy to culture on standard nutrient agar or in nutrient broth, and grow reasonably well at room temperature.

We’ll use these bacteria over the course of several sessions. We’ll do a standard agar plate culture to grow and identify colonies of each of the three species. We’ll isolate each of the three and grow pure cultures in broth. We’ll then reculture on agar to grow bacterial “lawns” of each of the pure cultures. Finally, we’ll test the susceptibility of each species to various antibiotics. We may also re-culture resistant bacteria repeatedly to produce a resistant strain.

We don’t want anyone to have to re-purchase the mixed culture because the first one died off, so we’ll probably also experiment with re-culturing in refrigerated nutrient broth and/or phosphate-buffered saline to maintain a live culture over the course of several weeks. I haven’t done this with these species, so I’ll order one of these mixed culture tubes from Carolina to run that part of the procedure myself.

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