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Category: science kits

Saturday, 16 May 2015

08:16 – We’re building subassemblies for science kits today, along with laundry and all the other usual Saturday tasks. It’s only a couple of months until the flood of orders starts, and we need to have lots of finished kits ready to ship. I also need to get purchase orders issued for stuff with long lead times.

11:16 – Back from a Sam’s Club run. We didn’t get much, but I did pick up a can of Lipton’s iced tea powder. I also grabbed a #10 can of White House Apple Sauce, just to try. We eat a fair amount of applesauce, and we’ve been buying Mott’s in 64-oz. PET plastic jars at Costco. I decided to give this stuff a try. It’s a bit less expensive per ounce in the #10 cans, but the real issue is that I much prefer #10 metal cans to PET jars for storage. If we like it, I’ll add a few cases to our pantry, but not until we’ve moved. At this point, I’m in replacement-only mode because I don’t want to have any more to move than necessary.

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Friday, 15 May 2014

07:44 – More science kit stuff today. I need to get everything lined up so that we’ll have what we need to build a bunch more subassemblies for kits this weekend.

Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I started researching gardening issues for the book, or more likely for volume two of the book. Interestingly, the seeds I already stock for science kits–lima beans, onions, and carrots–are all heirloom varieties that are suitable for a long-term food plan.
  • I started compiling recipes to test, all of which use only shelf-stable ingredients. Barbara doesn’t believe I can cook, so this should be interesting.
  • I spent a fair amount of time preparing for our move up to Jefferson/West Jefferson area in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with a real estate agent in West Jefferson, discussing what we’re looking for. She sent me dozens of listings to look at, and at some point soon we’ll make another day trip up there to look at homes.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Thursday, 14 May 2015

08:46 – Yesterday was the first time in a couple months that we shipped four science kits in one day. So far today, only one, a chemistry kit. We’re getting low stock on those, so we’d better make up another two or three dozen this weekend.

Barbara was surprised when she got home yesterday to find that I’d gone though almost an entire gallon of iced tea. Actually, I’d have finished the pitcher, but I figured I’d better leave a little bit for her. She said there was no way she was going to make a gallon pitcher of iced tea every evening. I told her that the next time we went to Sam’s Club or Costco I’d pick up a can or two of Lipton iced tea mix.

I’m off to make up more chemicals.

12:34 – I was just making up 4 liters each of 0.1M barium nitrate, calcium nitrate, and lead acetate when I realized that I was getting low on all three of those salts. I was going to reorder, but I think I’ll just make them all up right here in the sink. I have a kilo each of RG barium, calcium, and lead carbonates, and plenty of concentrated RG acetic and nitric acids. Add a carbonate to acetic or nitric acid and the carbon dioxide bubbles off, just as it does if you add baking soda to vinegar, and you end up with a solution of the pure acetate or nitrate.

Incidentally, solutions of any of these three salts are an interesting illustration of equilibrium and Le Châtelier’s Principle. Any water exposed to air sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming carbonate anions in solution. If you then add a salt whose cation forms very insoluble carbonates (like barium, calcium, lead, or strontium), the carbonates precipitate out. If the solution continues to be exposed to air, it sucks more carbon dioxide out of the air, forming more insoluble carbonates. Eventually, you end up with essentially all of the solvated cations precipitating out as the carbonate salts, leaving almost none in solution.

The best way to deal with this is to boil the water originally to drive off dissolved gases, including carbon dioxide. You then acidify the water with the relevant acid to prevent carbon dioxide from dissolving and forming carbonate anions. The cations stay in solution, although the solution commonly has a slight cloudiness from the tiny amounts of carbonate solids still present as colloidal particles.

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Wednesday, 13 May 2015

08:03 – We just got our first-ever order from Vanuatu, for two chemistry kits. I think that now makes it a total of 27 countries that we’ve shipped kits to. Of course, almost all of our international shipments go to Canada, Australia, and the UK, but it’s interesting to keep a running total of countries.

I see that that asshole Obama has declared war on Fox News. Perhaps he can shut them down by executive order. Or maybe not, since even his own party in congress is revolting against his high-handedness.

More kit stuff today.

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Tuesday, 12 May 2015

08:09 – I turn 62 years old next month. Barbara asked me last night if I intended to apply for Social Security. I told her that would be crazy. I’ll wait at least until 66, when I’m eligible for full benefits, and probably until age 70. If I applied now, I’d get literally nothing because the government would deduct $1 from my monthly check for every $2 I had in outside income above $15,720.

Not that I ever intend to depend on Social Security. It won’t surprise me if I end up getting nothing at all. By the time I reach full retirement age of 66 four years from now, I expect they’ll be applying earnings limits even for those of us who are eligible for full benefits. If I do get something, I’ll consider it a supplement that can disappear at any time.

11:57 – I’m filling bottles and making up solutions. I just made up 4 liters of 1 molar sodium carbonate, and as always I’m struck by how very complex something apparently as simple as a solid dissolving in water can be. There are kinetic and thermodynamic issues any time you put a solid into solution. Most solids are both more soluble and faster-dissolving in warm water than cold, but there are exceptions in both cases. And, although it seems intuitive that a very soluble solid should dissolve faster than a sparingly-soluble solid, that’s far from being true. Some very soluble solids (on both a grams/liter and moles/liter basis) take a long, long time to dissolve, while some much less soluble solids dissolve much faster.

Sodium carbonate is one of those odd solids in that it exhibits retrograde solubility. Maximum solubility occurs at 35.4 C, just under body temperature. At higher and lower temperatures, solubility is lower. But speed of dissolution increases with increasing temperature, so sodium carbonate dissolves faster in hot water, even though its solubility is lower.

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Monday, 11 May 2015

07:59 – We finished watching season three of Longmire on Netflix streaming last night. It wasn’t nearly as good as the earlier seasons. I’m not surprised that A&E canceled it, given the precipitous drop in ratings from seasons one and two. Netflix has picked it up for season four. I hope they hire better writers.

More science kit stuff today, as usual.

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Saturday, 9 May 2014

07:57 – We got a fair amount of science kit stuff done yesterday. More today, along with laundry and other normal Saturday tasks. I also spent some time yesterday working on the prepping book, and plan to do more today.

One thing on my to-do list is to contact one of the freelance layout/design people that O’Reilly has used on our books to take the raw manuscript of this book and turn it into something professional looking. As Dirty Harry said, “a man’s go to know his limitations,” and I know that I’m not a layout/design person.

11:00 – Embarrassing prepper moment. I just emptied a 2 L bottle of Coke and ran downstairs to bring up another 4-pack. We’re out. Not a single bottle of Coke in the house. I thought I had a case of #10 cans of dehydrated Coke in stock, but apparently not. Oh, well. I’ll just make it up right here in the sink. I prefer my own blend, anyway, because it uses sucrose instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

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Friday, 8 May 2015

08:00 – More science kit stuff today.

Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered half a dozen #10 cans of Augason Farms Morning Moos Low-Fat Milk Alternative from Walmart. At 3.5 pounds per can, that’s 21 pounds (~10 kilos) total, or enough to reconstitute about 35 gallons (132 liters) of whole milk equivalent. We already have 42 pounds of non-fat dry milk powder from the LDS Home Storage Center, but that stuff is intended mainly for cooking and baking. You wouldn’t want to drink it straight or use it for hot cocoa or over cereal. We also have 48 12-ounce cans of evaporated milk, each of which reconstitutes to a quart of whole milk, for another 12 gallons of milk equivalent, and several #10 cans each of cheese powder and butter powder and of course lots of vegetable and olive oil for the lipid component. All in all, we’re now in pretty good shape on long-term dairy storage.
  • I spent a fair amount of time researching stuff for our move up to Jefferson/West Jefferson area in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Incidentally, Walmart usually has the best prices on Augason Farms stuff, even at their regular prices, but their sale (rollback) prices are better still. For example, in April they were selling the #10 cans of Augason powdered eggs at $17/can. They’re now back up to $21/can, which is still better than other vendors. If you’re stocking up, it makes sense to wait for them to put the items you want on sale. You can find which Augason Farms products are on sale at any given time at this link.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Wednesday, 6 May 2015

10:12 – Barbara wants to move quickly on relocating, which means we need to schedule a couple more day trips up to Jefferson for research and reconnoitering, followed eventually by a week-long trip as a final check before we make the jump. And I have to plan and stage everything to minimize disruption to the kit business, which is going to mean building and transporting a large number of kits so that we can ship from either location until we finish the move.

That also means I need to replace my 22-year-old Trooper with a 4×4 pickup truck with a trailer hitch. We’ll hire a moving company to move the furniture, but we’ll move a lot of our stuff ourselves as we gradually transition from completely here to completely there.

For the time being, I’ll also stop adding to our stored food. We’re at 2+ person years as it is, and the last thing we’ll need is more stuff to move. Once we’re up there, I’ll make a couple of more big Costco/Sam’s Club/LDS Home Storage Center runs with a trailer to finish stocking up. After that, we can depend on local supermarkets, the Walmart Super Center, the farmers’ market, and so on.

More kit stuff today.


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Tuesday, 5 May 2015

08:42 – I wasn’t feeling very well yesterday, so I took the afternoon off. Among other things, I decided to watch Supervolcano with Shaun Johnston (Grandpa Jack from Heartland) on Netflix streaming. I was expecting it to be pretty cheesy, but it was surprisingly well done. I’m not a geologist, let alone a volcanologist, but there weren’t any big scientific clangers that I noticed. Unusually for such a film, it looks like they tried hard to get the science right, or at least right enough not to be intrusive.

I’m always amused by people who think they’re preparing for such an event. A VEI 8 or 9? Give me a break. In the first place, the probability of such an event is probably less than 0.00001 in any given year. In the second place, how does one go about preparing for an extinction event? The last such event, about 73,000 years ago, almost wiped out H. sapiens. By some credible estimates, the surviving human population was only a few thousand in Iberian caves. A VEI 8 or 9 occurring today would kill billions of people in the first year after the eruption. Even a VEI 7 event like Tambora 200 years ago would kill hundreds of millions of people from starvation resulting from crop failures.

More science kit stuff today.



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