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Category: science kits

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

09:30 – I need to decide what to do with our Netflix subscription. Right now, we’re paying $10/month for unlimited streaming and one disc at a time. As of our anniversary date on 26 September, that jumps to $16/month if I do nothing. I’ll probably bump it to $20/month for unlimited streaming and two discs at a time.

Netflix really miscalculated when they introduced the $10/month plan, which was $8/month for streaming and $2/month for the one disc at a time. I think they assumed that most people on that plan would watch nearly all streaming, and get an occasional disc to fill in gaps. What we did, and what I suspect most people on that plan did, was the opposite: watch DVDs as much as possible and fill in with streaming. As a result, Netflix was sending us about eight discs a month for that $2, or $0.25 per disc. Given that Netflix had to pay postage both ways, and considering DVD acquisition costs and handling expenses, Netflix was probably losing at least $10/month on us, and probably a similar amount on many of their $10/month customers. That obviously couldn’t go on, so Netflix put a stop to it.

Netflix has been pushing streaming heavily for obvious reasons. Delivering an hour of streaming costs them maybe $0.05, including content and transmission costs, while delivering an hour of content on disc costs them an order of magnitude more. If I were Netflix, I’d continue to increase prices, both for streaming and discs. Streaming, so they can afford to buy more streaming content. Discs, because they want to discourage people from renting discs. Additional revenue will allow Netflix to expand their streaming options dramatically. And price increases won’t lose them many customers. What, after all, are the alternatives?

While they’re at it, I think Netflix should introduce a separately-priced streaming channel or channels for live sports. Netsportz? Assuming that only 20% of their members sign up at, say, $20/month, that’s still more than $100 million/month in revenue. They could buy a lot of live sports for $100 million a month. And, of course, a lot more than 20% of their membership would probably sign up for an all-sports Netflix channel, and they’d probably be willing to pay more than $20/month.

Work on the biology lab book and kits continues. We have quite a few chemistry kits in stock now and components to build a bunch more, so we can forget about chemistry kits until stock gets low. I’m prototyping a biology kit now. There are lots of decisions to make. Some of them seem minor, but have implications. For example, do I include a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes, which are inexpensive but cannot be reused, or do I include two (or three or four) glass Petri dishes, which are fragile, much more expensive, and require autoclaving, but can be reused indefinitely? The problem is, which is the better choice depends on the person who’s buying the kit. For many homeschoolers, the plastic Petri dishes would be better. They’re cheaper, more convenient, and pre-sterilized. For others, who might do a lot of culturing, the glass Petri dishes are the better choice. I’m inclined to think that the latter group are in a small minority, so right now I’m leaning toward the plastic dishes. What I may do is offer an optional separate culturing kit with glass Petri dishes, several types of agar, and so on.

11:07 – In case you’re wondering what happened to the title in today’s entry, WordPress screwed me again. I’d entered a title and most of the text, at which point Colin started bugging me to go out. So I clicked the Save Draft icon. WordPress, instead of saving, blew me all the way out to the login screen. I logged in, and found my entry was truncated in the middle of the second paragraph. So I used Firefox’s back button to return to what I’d entered. I finished the entry and posted it. I *know* that entry had the title, because I looked before I clicked the Publish button. But for some reason WordPress kept the entry but lost the title.

Unfortunately, that’s nothing unusual for WordPress, which is extremely unstable, at least on my hosting service. I frequently get error messages when I try to save a post, and even more frequently when I’m using the Tools section of the dashboard to backup my site from the server to my local machine. I use WordPress only because my new hosting service offered a one-click install, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a better system available.

My decision on the Petri dishes was made for me. I have two or three vendors from whom I can buy them. All of them ship in packs of 10. Presumably, those factory packs are well protected against breakage, but I have no desire to try to package individual Petri dishes. I sure don’t want to allocate the cost of 10 Petri dishes to each kit. Even if they were free, that’d be too many Petri dishes and too much room in the package. So I’ll go with a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes. I may or may not create a separate dedicated culturing kit. If I do, it’ll include a factory pack of 10 glass Petri dishes. I will probably list the kit contents as six Petri dishes, with a note that we actually include 10, but allow for 40% breakage. That way, if someone does get all 10 unbroken, they get more than they expected.

12:39 – Hmmm. I may have screwed Dr. Koonin big time. I noticed his free book on a list from irreaderreview.com. Chances are, not a lot of people who are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology read that list. But I had to go and tell Jerry Coyne, who has a large international readership, nearly all of whom are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology. Then PZ Myers, who has a gigantic international readership–he probably gets more visits in an hour than I get in a week–sees the announcement on Jerry’s site and posts a link on his own site to Dr. Koonin’s free book. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins, who makes PZ look like small potatoes, also sees the announcement on Jerry’s site. I don’t know if he’s posted about it, but if he has, between Coyne, Myers and Dawkins, it’s unlikely that anyone on the planet who has much interest in evolutionary/molecular biology is unaware that Koonin’s book is available for free.

I just checked Amazon, and Koonin’s book is now in the Top Ten. Not the Top Ten biology books or even the Top Ten science books. The Top Ten among all books on Amazon. That means Koonin’s book is probably “selling” thousands of copies per day. And everyone on the planet who has any interest in the subject probably has a free copy by now, leaving Koonin’s remaining market as only people who are not interested in his book.

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Sunday, 4 September 2011

09:22 – I just read an article on FoxNews about the importance of religion in the GOP presidential campaign. According to the article, more than 70% of Republicans and more than 50% of Democrats considered it at least somewhat important that a candidate have “extremely strong” religious beliefs. I guess that explains how buffoons like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman, both of whom would like nothing more than to remake the US into a theocracy, can be taken seriously as candidates. On the other hand, re-electing Obama might be even worse. Moderates like Ron Paul (a Lutheran/Episcopalian/Baptist) and Jon Huntsman (a semi-lapsed Mormon) have no chance, with the media ignoring both of them as a matter of policy. And, of course, admitted atheists have no chance of being elected to any office, let alone the presidency. (Yes, I know Obama is an atheist, but he won’t admit it; even Democrats won’t vote for an atheist.)

What all this tells me is that, once again, there won’t be any major party candidate worth voting for in 2012. No surprise there. I think the last time we had a major-party candidate worth voting for was when Thomas Jefferson ran.

I’ve read several articles about negotiations between Netflix and Starz falling through. When that hit the news, Netflix stock dropped something like 10%. I can’t see that it’s a big deal. In 2008, Netflix negotiated a contract with Starz for about $30 million per year. That contract expires in February 2012. Netflix offered to increase its annual payment by a factor of ten, but $300 million a year wasn’t enough for Starz. They wanted Netflix to charge a premium for access to their content, and that Netflix absolutely refused to do. Good for Netflix.

All of the articles focused on Netflix losing Starz content, but what none mentioned was that Starz gave up $300 million a year, which it has no prospect of getting elsewhere. Netflix, on the other hand, now has $300 million a year available to buy streaming rights from other content providers. As Netflix said, in 2008 Starz was a major provider of Netflix’s streaming content. Now, not so much. Starz is down well below 10% of what Netflix streaming customers watch, and headed for 5%. Netflix can do an awful lot to replace that 5% with $300 million a year. And, of course, nearly all of what Starz was providing streaming is available on DVD, so Netflix can simply buy the DVDs for its customers. We’re not going to miss out on anything. And, if Netflix really wants to stick it to the studios, it can simply stop giving them a 30-day window after the DVD is released before that DVD is available from Netflix.

Barbara and I are spending some time over the long weekend assembling more chemistry kits.

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Saturday, 3 September 2011

09:16 – There was little good news last week on the euro crisis. Even the euro cheerleaders are starting to get depressed.

Even Goldman Sachs Now Expects A Tremendous Financial Collapse

Incidentally, when I mentioned this article to Barbara, I pronounced “Sachs” as “socks”. She said she’d thought it was pronounced “sax”. I told her I really didn’t know, but as a German name I thought it should be pronounced “socks”. That’s nothing unusual. People look at me funny when I pronounce Bayer (as in aspirin) to rhyme with “buyer” or Julius Caesar with the J as a Y, the C as a K, the ae as a long eye, and the last syllable beginning with a hard ess rather than a zee.

We had a strong thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. Apparently, a tree fell over on a power line or something, because we were without power from about 1615 to 2045. Like all of our young Border Collies, Colin doesn’t pay much attention to thunderstorms. Except yesterday he did, because we had a couple of very close, very loud strikes. Those scared him, but once things returned to a dull roar he was back to normal.

I’m doing laundry this morning, and we’re working on assembling two or three dozen more chemistry kits. We can’t get too far ahead of ourselves, because we don’t have room to store all that much finished inventory. Once I get more shelves up, we’ll probably still assemble them two or three dozen at a time, because I have to leave room for biology kits, and eventually forensics kits, AP chemistry kits, and so on. All of which require not just room to store finished goods inventory, but also room for component inventory.

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Thursday, 1 September 2011

08:24 – Thanks to everyone who comment on Colin’s image. Several people even sent me modified versions with adjustments to color balance and brightness. The image was shot in open shade, so the cool color balance is accurate. The image is straight out of the camera, with no adjustments other than cropping

As to Colin’s ears, yes, they always stick up like that. Some of the neighbors call Colin “Hat Dog”, because he usually keeps the inner edges of his ears pressed together, resulting in what looks like a triangular peaked cap. As you might expect, Colin’s hearing is superb. (The US government invited Colin to join the distant early-warning line, but he declined.) It’s funny watching him in the evening, lying on his side on the den floor, napping. One ear sticks straight up. Whenever he hears a sound, the ear rotates to localize the sound.

If you own any euro-denominated instruments, now would be a good time to dump them. Next Wednesday, the German Federal Constitutional Court rules on whether Germany contributing to the EFSF and euro bailouts violates the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, the founding document of the EU, and potentially even more damaging to the euro, whether Merkel’s actions so far violate the German constitution. Given that the Maastricht Treaty explicitly prohibits EU nations from assuming debts of other EU nations, the first decision should be a slam-dunk, which in itself would be enough to destroy the euro. If the court also decides that Merkel’s actions have been in violation of the German constitution, it’s really game over.

Meanwhile, a credible rumor has it that Greece has hired a US law firm in preparation for leaving the eurozone and defaulting on its debts. Greek officials strongly deny this rumor, but what else could they say? Given that the second Greek bailout now looks almost certain to fail to gain approval, particularly with Finland’s unrelenting demands for collateral now proving an insuperable obstacle to the bailout going forward, the Greeks are left with few alternatives.

We’ve finished building a batch of chemistry kits that should hold us at least through the middle of this month, if not all the way through the month. That means I need to get purchase orders issued for the components to build more kits. While I’m at it, I’ll order enough components to build a small batch of the biology kits. The contents of that kit are semi-finalized, although there may be minor additions as I continue to work on the biology book.

09:34 – If you’re at all interested in self-publishing a novel, you should read this article on Joe Konrath’s blog. In it, he gives away the secret that has allowed him to sell hundreds of thousands of ebooks.

Well, I guess I can give the secret away here as well. It’s persistence. At the beginning of one summer when I was in junior high school, I decided to learn to play tennis. I took my racket and a can of balls to the tennis courts, where I found a bunch of kids my age and older hacking around. They looked terrible. There was no resemblance to the tennis players I’d seen on TV. None of them could hit a backhand to save his life. Their serves looked spastic. I decided there was no way that I’d step on a court until I was a lot better than they were.

So I took my racket and can of balls to my former elementary school, which was only a block away. It had a nice vacant parking lot of smooth asphalt abutting the featureless brick wall of the school. I started hitting balls off that backboard. When I returned the next day, I had a yardstick and a small can of black paint with me. I measured off the width of the singles court (27 feet, 8.23 meters) and painted hashmarks on the mortar of the brick wall. The tennis net is 3’6″ at the posts and 3′ at the center line, so I compromised and choose the line of mortar that was about 3’2″ off the ground, which I painted black. That gave me something to aim for.

For the rest of that summer, I made the five-minute walk from my house to the school almost every day to hit balls off that wall. Some days I had only 30 minutes or an hour available for practice. Other days, I’d spend hours hitting balls. Forehands, backhands, and serves. Flat, topspin, and backspin. Cross-court and down the line. I must have hit 100,000 balls without ever setting foot on a tennis court.

Come September and the start of the school year, I decided I was finally ready to play tennis. Not surprisingly, I usually won, even when playing guys who were on the high school tennis team. In tennis, persistence pays off, just as it does in writing.

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Tuesday, 30 August 2011

08:00 – The Pentax K-r DSLR showed up yesterday, along with its kit lens, a spare battery, and a memory card. When I opened the battery and charger, I plugged in the charger and plunked in the battery, only to see the indicator light green. I assumed that meant the battery was fully charged, so I installed it in the camera. It had a very low charge, so I resorted to reading the manual. As it turns out, the charger light is green as long as the battery is charging and goes out when the charge is complete. One interesting thing. The manual recommends not storing the battery completely charged, because that reduces its service life. That’s a new one on me. I thought storing a partially-charged battery was bad, but at least for the Pentax battery that’s the recommended procedure.

I’m still working on the biology book and kit. One thing I want to include is several different antibiotic resistance samples–amoxicillin, cephalexin, erythromycin, penicillin, tetracycline or doxycycline, metronidazole, and so on. The problem is, the things are ridiculous expensive to buy.

For example, Home Science Tools sells a set of eight antibiotic test discs–two each of penicillin, ampicillin, neomycin, and erythromycin–for $3.95. These discs are tiny. They appear to be about 3/16″ (4.8 mm) in diameter, about the size of the discs produced by a notebook 3-hole punch. And you only get two of each for $4.

I could buy antibiotic discs from a wholesaler for maybe $10 per hundred, but that’s still $0.10 each. That starts to add up if I include multiple discs of several different antibiotics. So I decided to make my own and supply them in the biology kit as 2X2″ (5X5 cm) squares, which the user can trim or punch to the desired size. With half-centimeter squares, for example, a 5X5 cm sheet would provide 100 test pieces, each 5X5 mm, or 5 mm circular pieces if they used a hole punch. (Sterility is not a major issue; even bacteria that are resistant to a particular antibiotic are typically resistant only to the levels found in blood plasma, not to the levels present in these test papers.)

I can buy filter paper in 8.5X11″ (21.6X28 cm) sheets, each of which will provide 20 squares, each about 5 cm square. I’ll run each sheet through the laser printer and print the type and concentration of antibiotic in small print repeated at frequent intervals. I’ll then sterilize the sheets with dry heat and absorb an aqueous solution of the relevant antibiotic into each sheet. Of course, the issue then becomes how to determine the concentration. To do that. I’ll weigh a sheet of the filter paper dry, soak it in water, allow it to drain, and reweigh it. Knowing how much water each sheet absorbs will allow me to calculate how concentrated to make the solution to reach a given concentration of antibiotic in a specified area of the filter paper. I love devising cunning plans.

09:35 – Well, no more site traffic stats for me. When I clicked on the site stats link, WordPress told me that the stats plugin now required installing and enabling something called Jet Pack and setting up an account on WordPress so that I could get to my stats in the WordPress cloud. I hate clouds. And site traffic doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care if I average 100 visitors a day or 10,000. I write this journal for myself, not for anyone else.

12:17 – I just assembled enough chemistry kits to fill the orders that have been outstanding since I ran out of kits on Saturday. While I was at it, I built a dozen extra kits and put them on the shelf. Final kit assembly goes much faster now that I have all the components organized and ready to hand. Assembling a dozen kits from subassemblies and individual components now takes less than an hour.

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Monday, 29 August 2011

08:58 – As regular readers know, I’m no friend of either government or religion, which I consider to be twin plagues on humanity. Either on its own is bad enough; the two working together have historically been the single greatest threat to human rights. As you might expect, I’m a strong advocate of the separation of church and state.

So it may surprise you that I’m also a strong advocate of school voucher programs, despite the fact that these vouchers are often used to support religious schools. This morning, I read an article in the paper about a small school voucher program in Indiana, only about 3,000 students, that’s being decried as the apocalypse by public schools. Then, when I flipped to the editorial page, I found an article by George Will about a school choice program in Castle Rock, Colorado.

These stories have the same thread in common. In both cases, opponents have introduced the red herring of church-state separation. In both cases, religion has nothing to do with the issue, other than peripherally. The real issue is that public schools–whose employees are grossly overpaid, grossly underworked, and grossly underperforming–live in fear of having to compete with private alternatives. They understand that, given the choice, parents will opt for superior schools provided by the free market. There go their ridiculously high salaries and benefits, not to mention their job security. They’re fully aware that they can’t compete.

My solution to this problem has always been simple: establish school voucher programs without limitations on the number of students eligible. Make them dollar-for-dollar programs. Parents who wish to enroll their children in private schools receive a voucher in the amount of the average amount spent per student in the public schools, including facilities costs. That amount is deducted from the amount provided to the public schools. And homeschoolers should be eligible to cash these vouchers up to, say, three students worth, to help stay-at-home moms and dads who are educating their own children at home.

If such programs were widely implemented, the results are predictable. Public schools would wither. The only students who would attend public schools would be those whose parents don’t care enough to seek better alternatives for their children. The overall educational level of children would soon show huge gains, since private schools and home schools are demonstrably hugely superior to public schools. The total cost of education would plummet as public schools died and the voucher amount was adjusted downward to reflect reduced costs.

Less obvious, perhaps, is that such programs would also nearly eliminate home schooling in the current sense. Many, probably most, parents who currently home school their own children would not do so if they could instead send their children to schools that they approved of. Traditional private schools, religious and secular, would initially grow by leaps and bounds, but alternative small private schools would also thrive. Most of these alternative private schools would be founded by homeschoolers who really enjoyed what they were doing and were good at it. Instead of educating just their own children, they’d begin educating other children as well, and eventually become actual schools.

Of course, the teachers’ unions and state government education departments will do everything they can to prevent this from happening. We see that now, with artificial restrictions and regulations enforced on home schoolers to prevent the homeschool phenomenon from developing further. In many states, for example, it would be illegal for a homeschool family to hire my friend Paul Jones, a chemistry professor at Wake Forest University, to come in and teach chemistry to their children. Those state laws consider the parents qualified to teach their own children, but do not consider Dr. Jones qualified to teach them. Similarly, many state laws prohibit a homeschool mom or dad from teaching other people’s children, once again to prevent small private alternative schools from flourishing. At the behest of teachers’ unions and other self-interested parties, many states have ridiculous health, environmental, and facilities regulations for any school that teaches students from more than one family. Again, those have nothing to do with the safety of or quality of education for the students themselves. They’re there only to protect entrenched public education interests.

That’s why I’m encouraged every time I read an article about good things happening for home schoolers and the advance of school choice.

Saturday, we shipped the last two chemistry kits we had in stock. We now have another dozen and a half in the final stages of assembly and have gotten started on the next batch of two dozen. We’ll ship outstanding orders tomorrow or Wednesday.

11:02 – At least some of the MSM are starting to catch on…

Eurozone crisis: ‘I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C!…’ Click, and out

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Sunday, 28 August 2011

12:17 – Irene nailed the North Carolina and Virginia coastal areas pretty badly, but we saw no effects in Winston-Salem other than a stiff breeze and a bit of rain. This storm had the potential to make landfall as a Category 3 or even 4, so most of those in the affected areas are probably feeling pretty lucky that it was “only” a Category 1. Of course, that’s small consolation to those who were killed or injured by this storm, or suffered severe property damage.

I’m still working on the biology kits (and book). We made up subassemblies yesterday for another 18 chemistry kits, which means I need to start getting orders ready for more components. While I’m doing those orders, I’ll add the stuff I need to prototype the biology kit and produce maybe a dozen of them.

I periodically get emails and a few comments about how the Euro crisis is not really serious. Those messages invariably comment on the size of the US debt relative to Euro nation debts. Now, it’s true that the US is highly indebted, but what really counts is how much each country has to pay on that debt. Assuming that Greece, Italy, and the US all had to refinance all of their existing debt tomorrow at the current bond yields, here are some rough numbers with interest payments as a percentage of GDP.

US – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $15 trillion, with GDP around $15 trillion = 1.33% of GDP

Italy – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $3 trillion, with GDP around $2 trillion = 10% of GDP

Greece – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $488 billion, with GDP around $305 billion = 66% of GDP

I’m making some assumptions here that render these percentages meaningless, because the market would not continue to lend money to any of these countries if they attempted to refinance their entire debts at one time. For Italy, I’m assuming yields of about 6.7%. They’re currently right at 5% on 10-year debt, but that’s with the ECB buying Italian bonds like crazy. They can’t do that much longer, and when they stop doing it the yields on Italian bonds will skyrocket. On Greek debt, I’m using the current 2-year yields, which are north of 40%, because few people are crazy enough to lend money to Greece on a 2-year basis, let alone for 10 years. And, of course, these countries don’t need to refinance all of their debt overnight. But Italy and Greece do need to refinance a huge chunk of their current debt over the next few months, and these yields are reasonable in that scenario. In fact, I’d expect to see yields north of 10% if not 15% on Italian debt when the big chunks come due for refinancing, and yields considerably over 50% for Greece. That won’t actually happen, of course, because both Greece and Italy will default first.

Making matters worse, while the US can print as many dollars as it needs to avoid default, that option is not open to Greece or Italy. There are two potential directions this could go. First, Greece and Italy could abandon the euro and return to the drachma and lira, respectively. If that happens, their local currencies will be devalued hugely literally overnight. They won’t be able to buy enough euros to honor their debts, and they will default. Conversely, Germany and the other northern tier countries may abandon the euro and return to their local currencies. If that happens, the countries that remain in the Eurozone will see the value of the euro plummet relative to the northern tier currencies as well as the pound and dollar. The new ECB can print as many euros as it needs to, and it will need a lot to pay off all those debts. Someone who holds a euro-denominated bond for a billion euros will in fact be paid that billion euros. The problem is, those billion euros will be worth probably at most a tenth of what they’re worth now relative to the dollar or pound or Swiss franc. The remaining Eurozone countries become dirt-poor overnight, while the northern tier countries benefit by paying off their euro-denominated debt in euros that are nearly worthless. Of course, the holders of that debt suffer badly, as will holders of any euro-denominated debt. Northern-tier countries see their exports plummet, but those high levels of exports to other EU countries were never anything other than illusory anyway. There’s no point in sending goods to countries that aren’t going to pay for them.

All of this makes me wonder when our politicians are going to wake up to the fact that J. M. Keynes was completely wrong. If they had any sense, they’d be reading F. A. Hayek, who had it completely right all along. Of course, being politicians, by definition they have no sense. And, to a politician, Keynes’ advice to governments to intervene constantly and heavily in markets is much more appealing than Hayek’s advice to keep their damned hands off the markets.

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Saturday, 27 August 2011

11:11 – Irene has made landfall on the North Carolina coast, fortunately as a Category 1. We’ve seen almost no effects from Irene here in Winston-Salem. It was a bit breezy when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, but we’ve had no rain and aren’t expecting any. Some rain would have been welcome, but not at the expense of the eastern part of the state suffering even more than it is.

I see that New York City has closed its subway system for the first time ever due to weather, and that about 300,000 New York City residents have been ordered to evacuate. Very few NYC residents own automobiles, which makes me wonder how and to where they intend to evacuate these people. Perhaps it’s enough just to move them from low-lying areas to parts of the city that are a bit higher. Let’s hope that Irene continues to weaken. A direct strike on NYC by even a Category 1 hurricane would have disastrous results in terms of both the human and economic toll.

The human toll in particular, because few New Yorkers have experienced a hurricane up close and personal. Most of them probably just think of it as just the sort of storm they’re used to, but on a larger scale. As Mark Twain commented on another subject, the reality of a hurricane compared to normal storms is like the difference between lightning and lightning bugs. Even here in the southeast, where people are experienced with hurricanes, there are numerous idiots who rush to the coast to experience a hurricane. Every time we have a strike, there are at least a few Darwin Awards candidates who end up being injured or killed because they were somewhere they shouldn’t have been, doing something they shouldn’t have been doing.

Paul Jones stopped by yesterday to borrow my Plextor analog-to-digital converter. He has some old personal VHS tapes he wants to transfer to DVD. He asked about the DSLR I’d just ordered, and I mentioned that the AA battery adapter was on back-order so I’d ordered a spare $44 lithium-ion battery. Paul mentioned that he’d ordered three spare batteries when he’d bought his DSLR, and he’d paid only $8 each. My hair stood on end. I mentioned that Chinese DSLR batteries are famous for damaging cameras, if not actually catching fire, and he said he’d had no problems with them in the three years since he’d bought them. Hmmm. This morning, Paul emailed me to say that he was mistaken. It was the IR remote he’d ordered that’d cost $8. The batteries listed for $49 each, but he’d gotten three of them from Amazon for $30 each.

Barbara and I are assembling 18 more chemistry kits today. I’m also going to try to semi-finalize the contents of the kit for the biology book this weekend. At some point, I simply have to declare enough, and stop adding items to the biology kit. One of the primary goals, after all, is to keep the kit affordable. For example, I’m going to include a bottle of sterile pre-made nutrient agar in the kit. Home Science Tools sells the same item for, IIRC, $7, which is reasonable. But I’m going to remove one of the lab sessions I’ve already written, on coliform testing of water, because that lab session would also require either EMB (eosin/methylene blue) agar or MacConkey agar as well as TSI (tri-sugar/iron) agar. Allocating $21 of the kit price to these three agars is too much, so I’ll have to settle for including just the nutrient agar.

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Friday, 26 August 2011

09:30 – Colin loves sticks, and we always try to keep a “good stick” on hand. That is, one that’s solid wood and maybe a cm or two in diameter by 30 or 40 cm long. Yesterday, I let Colin off leash while I rolled the yard cart from the curb to the back yard and rolled the trash cart up to the curb. He ran around our and our neighbors’ back yards while I was doing that, and when he returned he didn’t have his good stick. So, while I was taking him for a walk, I looked for another good stick. I found what looked like an ideal candidate, but when I picked it up it was rotten and weighed next to nothing.

Which got me to thinking about Steve Jobs, who has just retired as CEO of Apple. Even with Jobs’ retirement, the value of Apple’s outstanding stock is still greater than the cumulative value of Europe’s 91 large banks. Like the stick I rejected, Europe’s banks appear solid but are actually rotten and lightweight.

The main problem is that those banks have huge exposure to Eurozone sovereign debt. Due to an accounting oddity, sovereign debt, regardless of its actual solidity, is always considered to be default-proof, and so is carried on balance sheets at nominal value. The reality is very different, of course. A bank that holds, say, €1 billion of Greek sovereign debt even now carries that debt on its balance sheet as a €1 billion asset. Current yields on 2-year Greek debt are getting very close to 50%, which means that debt should be written down on balance sheets to a small fraction of nominal, if not written off entirely. But the banks haven’t done that, for Greek, Portuguese, and Irish debt or any of the other peripheral sovereign debt, let alone “core” Eurozone debt issued by France or Belgium. The ridiculous bank “stress test” done a couple of months ago estimated that Europe’s largest 91 banks would require only about €2.4 billion to meet capitalization requirements. The reality is that they’ll need more like €150 billion to meet even the minimum requirements with rosy assumptions including high EU growth and no sovereign defaults.

Back in the real world, the truth is that all or nearly all of those banks are already bankrupt, and the EU no longer has the ammunition to do anything about that. The ECB is already bent completely out of its intended shape, engaging in legally-questionable if not outright illegal purchases of sovereign bonds and accepting essentially worthless paper as collateral. In effect, the ECB itself is in deep trouble, with its nominal balance sheet having no relation to reality. Making matters worse, as the EU lender of last resort, the ECB is now attempting to do what the banks themselves should be doing. The situation in the EU is so bad now that banks no longer trust each other. Banks with a temporary surplus would ordinarily do overnight loans of those surplus funds to other banks, earning some interest in the process. Instead, those banks are depositing the excess funds with the ECB, earning only tiny amounts of interest on them.

So it’s true. The ECB and Europe’s commercial banks are rotten sticks. Even Colin wouldn’t touch them.

I just got orders for the last two chemistry kits I had already built, so we’ll build another dozen or so kits this weekend. We’re still in pretty good shape in terms of components to build more kits, but once this batch of components runs out it looks like we’ll have to increase the price of the kits by $10 or so to cover increased costs. I hate to do that, because we’re trying to keep the kits as affordable as possible, but anyone who thinks these massive so-called “quantitative easings” don’t affect prices doesn’t understand economics. The true definition of inflation is “an increase in the money supply”, and quantitative easing is simply a weasel phrase for inflating the currency. That shows up sooner or later, usually sooner, in the prices we pay for everything.

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Tuesday, 23 August 2011

08:38 – Urk. I’m down to two of the chemistry kits in stock, which means I need to build another batch today. Fortunately, that doesn’t take long, as long as I have all the components at hand, maybe an hour or so to assemble a dozen kits.

I ran into Melissa while I was walking Colin yesterday. She’s the 20-something young woman who borrowed my Kindle for a few days. She’s a biologist, so our discussions are always interesting. (She reads science papers for recreation; I like that in a girl.) She said her husband was encouraging her to go back to school to get her Ph.D., but she’s not sure she wants to do that. It’d probably take five years to get her Ph.D., followed by a postdoc or two. Even then, job prospects are very uncertain. She’s not interested in joining academia, and there are a lot of Ph.D. biologists waiting tables, driving taxis, or serving coffee at Starbucks.

Time would also be an issue. She has what seems like 17 or 18 preschool children running around, but may actually be only two or three. And, in yet another demonstration of my obliviousness, I didn’t realize until she told me that she’s eight months pregnant. I just thought she’d gained a bit of weight.

What she’s really interested in is not the degree per se. She wants to do the science. I suggested she do it herself. Most or all of the technologies she’d need are already accessible for home scientists. Gel and column electrophoresis, PCR, -80C freezers, ultracentrifuges, and so on are now affordable for home labs. She was stunned when I told her I’d put together an ultracentrifuge capable of 60,000+ G for less than $150. (That’s sufficient to destroy a polypropylene Eppie tube.) She can easily get the same access to the literature that she’d have in a formal Ph.D. program. After a few years of study, for all intents and purposes she’d have her Ph.D. in molecular biology and epidemiology in all but name. And since she doesn’t care about the letters after her name, why go through what she’d need to to get those letters?

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