Category: science kits

Sunday, 20 October 2013

11:11 – I’m writing up lab sessions for the earth science kit. To meet the end-of-year deadline for a first draft of the manual, I need to complete two or three lab sessions per week from now until the end of the year. I can do two or even three short, simple lab sessions per day, but a longer or more complicated one might take two or three days, or even longer. Still, the goal isn’t to have a finished manual and kit by December 31st. It’s to have a rough draft of the manual and a prototype kit assembled. That should be doable.


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Saturday, 19 October 2013

10:14 – More work on kits this weekend. I’ll have Barbara get started on packaging 30 sets of chemicals for the earth science kits, starting with 30 g bottles of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate, magnesium sulfate heptahydrate, and general-purpose water-soluble fertilizer, not to mention baggies of pea gravel, sand, clay, marble chips, and Plaster of Paris. As a matter of fact, she just left to run errands, including picking up several of those items at Home Depot.


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Friday, 18 October 2013

07:36 – I just ordered 12 cases of dehydrated water to add to our emergency stocks. Restaurant suppliers like Bernard Foods are often overlooked as a good source of emergency storable food. The quality of the products is generally excellent–restaurants can’t afford to alienate customers by using poor-quality foods–and the prices are generally quite reasonable.

We’re now in good shape on science kit inventory, so I’m turning my attention to getting the earth and space science kit designed and prototyped. Mostly, that means designing and testing lab sessions and writing the manual. The goal is to have the prototype completed by the end of the year and the first batch of 30 kits ready to ship by February.


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Thursday, 17 October 2013

07:36 – As expected, the Republicans caved. They got nothing, literally, out of the “deal”. Less than nothing. It may finally be time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.


11:26 – Well, that’s interesting. I just got email from an MIT science professor who had nice things to say about our science kits and books, and encouraged me to enter this science kit competition. Our current science kits are ineligible because they’re already commercially available, but the earth science kit I’m working on now is eligible for submission as a prototype/work-in-progress science kit.

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Wednesday, 16 October 2013

09:16 – You won’t read about it in the MSM, but a lot of people are hoping that the government gridlock will continue, ideally until the next president takes office. As far as I’m concerned, the Republicans’ job at this point is to cut off the oxygen to Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and the rest of that bunch. Don’t give an inch on the budget, the debt limit, or anything else. Force them to spend within their means. If that means the size of the federal government is cut in half, well that’d be a good start.


I’ve just been reading about the case in Florida where a 12-year-old girl killed herself by jumping from a tower in a disused concrete plant, apparently because she was depressed by other girls posting mean things about her on Facebook. As sad as death of any child is, the response of the sheriff was outrageous. He’s charged two other girls, aged 12 and 14, with felonies for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. From the reports, these other girls are despicable little weasels and poor excuses for human beings. But they didn’t kill the victim; she killed herself. And there’s no excuse for the sheriff violating the Constitutional rights of these other girls, or indeed anyone else.


I made up two dozen chemical bags for chemistry kits yesterday. Today, I’ll make up two dozen chemical bags for biology kit. After we get those four dozen kits assembled, it’ll be back to bottling more chemicals and making up more subassemblies. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Friday, 11 October 2013

09:26 – I just put together another couple boxes of stuff to ship off to “our” USMC unit in Afghanistan. They’re due to rotate back to the US in December, so we’ll have to find another unit to send stuff to. I might as well start looking for one now. There’s no reason we can’t overlap.

Inventory of the chemistry and biology kits is getting low, so we need to build another two or three dozen of each. We have most of what we need in terms of subassemblies except chemical bags. The chemicals are already bottled and labeled, so it’s just a matter of assembling the bags.


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Thursday, 10 October 2013

09:41 – I’m still working on the earth science manual. As always recently when I sit down to write, I’ve noticed that my endurance is not what it used to be. Fifteen years ago, even ten, I could do heads-down writing for 10, 12, 14 hours a day for weeks on end. Nowadays, I’m tired after four or five hours, and six or eight is my absolute limit. Oh, I can sit there longer and type words on the screen, but there’s no point. What I can produce for six or eight hours a day is useful output; anything after that is just time wasted because the output is not acceptable. It takes more work to clean it up and fix it than it would take just to start from scratch.

I’m afraid the Republicans are going to cave. They need to remember that the reason they were elected was to stop Obama and the Democrats by any means necessary from destroying the economy and the country. Refusing to pass an increase in the debt limit is a good way to do that, and polls show that a majority of citizens want them to do just that. Force the government to live within its means. Cut spending with a meat-axe, cut taxes, cut the size of government dramatically, and kill ObamaCare. That’s what they were elected to do, and they need to do it. If Obama chooose to default rather than cut spending elsewhere, fine. That’s on him and the Democrats.


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Wednesday, 9 October 2013

08:29 – I turned on the heat this morning for the first time this season. It was 68F (20C) and falling in the house. Barbara likes it that cool, but at 68F I’m shivering. I set the thermostat to 70F, which is still too cool for me, but I can live with it. Barbara doesn’t mind, since she’s away at work all day while I’m working here.

I’m writing up lab sessions for the earth science kit and prototyping the kit itself.


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Tuesday, 8 October 2013

09:39 – I just made a pot of Earl Grey tea. Our highs over the next few days are to be around 18C, with lows around 10C. That’s cool enough to be drinking tea.

The other night I tried to play a YouTube video. It worked fine, except there was no sound. At first, I though it was just me. But then I tried with two different browsers on my system and on Barbara’s. None of them had sound on YouTube, although sound worked fine on everything else. As it turns out, the problem is YouTube’s. They’ve screwed things up, and there are numerous complaints about it all over the web. Each time I start a new video, the sound level in the YouTube player is turned down to zero. It’s easy enough to fix for that video, but the fix is not persistent. YouTube says they’re working on it.

We’re in pretty good shape on kit inventory, so I’m devoting some time to working on the earth science kit manual. I’m going to design it so that it can be used for a middle-school level earth & space science lab course or as a high-school level physical geology and astronomy lab course. I already have samples of rock, mineral, and fossil specimens on the way in, and I hope we’ll be able to ship the first batch of 30 or 60 kits in time for summer session 2014.


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Saturday, 5 October 2013

08:45 – Tropical storm Karen is close to being downgraded to a tropical depression. The rainfall forecast has been decreased to maybe 3 inches (7.5 cm) in coastal areas and less inland. Our local forecast now says there’s a 90% chance of rain Monday, but probably only an inch or so versus two or three times that originally. Barbara has guys coming Tuesday or Wednesday to plug and seed the yard, so they should have a nice damp yard to work on.

Kit sales have slowed noticeably. In the last seven calendar days we’ve shipped only 11 kits. If that rate holds up, we’ll ship maybe 50 kits this month. November will probably be slower still, but we should have a big jump in December. The good thing about the slowdown is that it gives me a bit of time to work on designing and prototyping new kits and writing manuals for them.


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