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Category: science kits

Sunday, 8 September 2013

10:31 – The signs of approaching autumn are unmistakable. Overnight lows are down into the low- to mid-60’s (upper teens C) and sometimes even the upper 50’s (14C to 15C). The leaves are still green, but we’re starting to see a lot of leaves on the ground. I’m looking forward to the cooler weather. I suppose I should check the natural gas logs in the den fireplace and use some canned air to blow the dust out of the oxygen sensor. We may be using the gas logs in the evenings before too long.

The economic news continues to be horrible. I saw yesterday that IBM announced that as of the end of this year they’re defaulting on their promise to provide health care for their 100,000 retirees. Now, IBM says that all retirees who are eligible for Medicare must use it. IBM will pay a subsidy for those people to buy third-party Medicare supplement policies. In so doing, IBM has shifted a major portion of the costs for retiree health care onto the federal government. I can’t really blame IBM. As they said, it’s no longer sustainable to keep doing what they had been doing.

And, speaking of horrible economic news, I saw several articles yesterday that were talking about the pathetic inability of our economy to generate real new jobs. I’m not sure what the source of one figure they quoted is, but if it’s true it’s stunning. According to these articles, of the net new jobs generated over the last 12 months, fully 96% of them are part-time jobs. Of course, the federal government tries to put the best face on it, counting any job as a job.

The government needs to start reporting things in terms of a “Standard Job”. I don’t know what the actual figures are, but assume that the average full-time job pays $30,000/year with $10,000/year in benefits. Define that as the Standard Job. If a company creates a new job that pays $7.50 per hour for 20 hours a week 50 weeks/year with no benefits, that’s $7,500/year total, or 0.1875 of a Standard Job. Actually, it’s worse than that because that minimum wage employee is a burden to taxpayers in terms of medical care, foodstamps, subsidized housing, and so on. Again, I don’t have the actual figures at hand, but assuming that that burden on taxpayers is $5,000/year, that job is actually netting $2,500/year, or 0.0625–one sixteenth–of a Standard Job. And so it should be reported. Of course it never will be.

Welcome to the new normal. Part time jobs paying minimum wage or a bit more, for 29 hours or less a week thanks to ObamaCare. And even these jobs are under the technological gun, as companies find ways to automate those jobs out of existence. I don’t know the source of it, but I’ve read that the break-even point for McDonalds is currently about $10/hour. Any more than that, and McDonalds would be better off fully automating their restaurants, with maybe one person on site to maintain the equipment and keep it functioning. Customers will punch in their orders on a touch screen and collect them without human intervention. A modern-day Automat, but without the people behind the wall. And even if that $10/hour figure is too low, it soon won’t be. If there’s one lesson we’ve learned about technology, it’s that it keeps getting better and cheaper every month.

Science kit sales have started to taper off, although they’re still running well ahead of this time last year.

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Friday, 6 September 2013

08:30 – We’re in pretty good shape on chemistry kits again, but our stock of biology kits is dwindling fast. Barbara has already assembled 60 small parts bags for biology kits and labeled containers for another batch of 60 biology kits, but I need to make up the chemicals and fill the bottles before we’ll be ready to assemble 60 more biology kits.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about our next kit, which will probably be earth science for middle school. I want to get that one designed, the lab manual written, and a batch of kits ready to ship in time for summer session 2014. That’s very optimistic in terms of my schedule, but I’m working on it.

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Thursday, 5 September 2013

08:37 – One of the rewards of doing what we do is getting emails like this one.

I just had to write to you right away and say that I am so glad to have found The Home Scientist! I am a homeschool parent, and have been looking for a lab component for my daughter’s chemistry studies next year. I love your book Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, but I was slightly intimidated by the job of choosing labs and especially procuring all the supplies. I just don’t have that much time to give to one of many subjects. So when another homeschooler on a homeschool forum I’m part of mentioned your ck-01, I checked into it and am thrilled.

In our “about us” section you write: “There is a crying need for affordable, rigorous, secular hands-on science lab curricula and science kits for homeschoolers.” This is exactly right on. The lack of such curricula is a continual source of frustration for homeschool parents who may or may not be religious, but who understand that evolution and an old universe that runs according to scientific principles are simply matters of scientific knowledge, not theories up for debate. And who don’t want scripture quotes at the beginning of a chapter on covalent bonding or dichotomous keys. And who don’t have an unlimited budget. And who want real, meaty labs rather than glitzy gee-whiz demonstrations that always seem to either bubble or turn colors.

You should know that you are getting a good reputation, at least among people on the large homeschool forum I use. People talk about how your labs actually work most of the time, about your quick turnaround time on orders, about your communicativeness when they have questions.

I was so pleased when I saw that your lab manual was all there on the internet for me to peruse at length. It felt like you were saying, “We have nothing to hide. Go ahead. Take a good, long look. We think you’ll like it and then you’ll want to buy our product to go with it.” Well, I did, and I do. Hence the order I just placed.

I am glad to read in your “about us” section that you are continuing to write for homeschoolers. I think–I hope–you may find a very grateful market. We’ll keep our eyes on your web site.

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Wednesday, 4 September 2013

11:40 – I haven’t shut down the old system yet, but I’m doing pretty much everything now on the new one. Science kit sales have started to slow down a bit now. We’re shipping four or five a day at this point.

Speaking of shipping, USPS scared me yesterday. The regular guy had the day off, and I expected his replacement to be running very late. Danny usually arrives around 1600 to 1630 on Mondays, so with the holiday I figured the replacement might not get here until 1700 or 1730. As it turned out, it was 1850. Fortunately, I made it to the front door just as the guy was getting back in his truck. I shouted that I had boxes to be picked up. He’d just grabbed the letters from the mailbox, along with my notice poster that says in a huge font: “USPS Priority Mail box awaiting pickup. Please ring bell.” He was getting ready to drive away with our outgoing envelopes and the poster, but without the eight boxes I had ready for pickup. While he was loading my boxes into the back of his truck, another USPS truck pulled up behind him. I didn’t recognize either of the drivers, and I suspect they were both counter guys that had been pressed into service. The Tuesday after a Monday holiday is always all-hands-on-deck.

I’d better get to work on building more kits. We’re down to three of the CK01A chemistry kits and only one of the CK01B kits, and we might well get orders for all of those later today.

17:12 – And, sure enough, we’re now completely out of chemistry kits. Actually, our stock status is now -1 because I got an order from Canada a few minutes ago for a chemistry kit. Fortunately, I also just finished assembling two dozen sets of chemical bags for the chemistry kits, which is everything I need to build another 24 kits on the fly. This’d actually be a lot of fun if it weren’t so exhausting. In the first four days of this month, kit sales are already about 40% of what we sold all of last September.

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Tuesday, 3 September 2013

13:24 – Have I mentioned that I hate Linux only slightly less than I hate Windows and OSX?

I spent quite a few hours over the long holiday weekend migrating from my ancient system, a Core2 Quad Q9650X running Ubuntu 9.04, to my new system, a Core i7 980X running Linux Mint 15. I thought I had all the important stuff, including mail and contacts, moved over successfully. That turned out not to be the case. Oh, the data is moved over, and I can even look at it in the new version of Kontact/Korganizer/Kmail. The problem is, the new version is unusable. For example, I was moving a bunch of mail around and it didn’t appear to be working properly. The mail I moved (as opposed to copied) ended up in the destination folder, but it seemed to remain in the original folder as well. So I finally moved just one message from the Inbox to a subfolder. It appeared in the destination folder and was no longer in the inbox. Then, as I sat there staring at the Inbox, the message magically reappeared. Geez. Kmail is a piece of crap.

I finally decided to bag all my old mail and contacts and just start using a fresh installation of Thunderbird. I left Kmail/Kontact installed, so if necessary I can go back and look at mail or contacts if I need to verify something later. Assuming Kmail hasn’t moved or deleted it, of course. So I’ve now spent an entire morning trying to get my mail functioning again. The real goal, of course, has nothing to do with the software. I just want to be able to process orders and ship kits, which I’m now doing with Thunderbird. Eight so far this morning.

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Sunday, 1 September 2013

10:05 – As expected, August was our biggest month ever for science kit sales, about double August 2012. (I was hoping to triple sales month-on-month, but as Mick Jagger famously sang, you can’t always get what you want.) We passed total 2012 sales in mid-August, so meeting our initial goals of doubling sales year on year should be reachable. If last year is any guide, we should do about half our total 2013 sales in the final four months of the year. September is starting out pretty well, with three kit orders so far this morning.

Meanwhile, we need to do more about getting downstairs organized and some of the stuff that’s currently upstairs moved downstairs. I’m going to pick up one of these shelving units just to make sure it’s suitable. If so, I’ll install more of them. That’ll help with the intermediate goal of getting the finished area downstairs cleared out. Currently, there are stacks of boxes in there with stuff like hundreds of test tube racks, thousands of beakers, etc. That’ll let us move the two 6-foot tables we use for building kits out of the unfinished area and into the finished area. That way, if we want to use the finished area for normal stuff, it’s simply a matter of folding those tables and moving them out of the way.

If (when) we need more space, I think I’ll just buy a car cover for my Trooper and park it at the end of the driveway. That’ll free up enough space to install several more of those shelving units. At one point, I was thinking about getting a shed built at the end of the drive but it’d need to be a large one with power, heating, and cooling, which’d make it an expensive proposition. Eventually, we plan to relocate, probably up to the mountains, where we’ll buy or build a home and a work building. But that’s probably several years off, so in the meantime we need to plan for expansion here.

13:15 – Barbara and I just got back from a run to Home Depot for shelving and some 70-quart plastic storage bins and Costco for some storable food. Home Depot had some of the 4-foot (1.22 meter) shelving units down near floor level and one set up as a display model. They had four of the 5-foot units in stock, but they were on the top shelf. I seriously thought about buying a 4-foot unit instead. The 4-foot units were $99 and the 5-foot ones $129, so the smaller units actually provide more bang for the buck.

Getting the 5-foot unit down was a major production. They closed off that aisle and the adjoining one and brought in, well, not a fork lift, exactly. More of a portable elevator. The operator rode in the movable part up to the ceiling, latched onto the box, and lowered it down to floor level. The unit weighs close to 100 pounds (45 kilos). At checkout, the woman asked if we needed help loading it into our vehicle. Barbara immediately said no, but I was thinking it won’t be too much longer before we’ll need to answer yes to such questions.

At Costco, we picked up three more 17.5-liter cases of bottled water, two dozen cans of tuna, a dozen cans of chicken, a case of soup, two boxes of canned pork & beans, boxes of canned peas, corn, black beans, and probably some stuff I’ve forgotten, along with a 25-pound (11.4 kilo) bag of rice. They didn’t have small cans of fruit, only #10 cans and plastic cups, so we passed on those. Eyeballing it, I’d guess we got two person months of emergency food for $120 or so.

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Thursday, 29 August 2013

12:21 – AEP has this to say about the collapsing BRICS economies: Emerging market rout is too big for the Fed to ignore: The US Federal Reserve has told Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe to drop dead.

It’s not, you know. Too big to ignore, that is. No matter how this plays out, the world’s economy is going to take a big hit. It’s the Fed’s responsibility to minimize the effect on the US economy, and the hell with Brazil, India, China, and the rest. And, although the Fed has made pretty much nothing but mistakes for the last several years, in this case they’re making the best of a horrible situation by winding down so-called Quantitative Easing while there’s still at least a glimmer of a hope that it’s not too late. Too late for the US, that is. It’s already too late for the eurozone, and the BRICS are toast. Brazil is already a walking dead man, with India and China not far behind. They all hoped to avoid the so-called “middle income trap”. None of them managed to do so, and now they’ll pay the price. And a heavy price it’s going to be.

Work continues on building and shipping science kits. This month is shaping up well, at roughly twice the revenue of August 2012. That’s been helped along by a couple of large bulk orders, but even without those we’re doing pretty well.

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Tuesday, 27 August 2013

08:08 – This time of year, it always seems as though I just get well into one task when I need to put that on hold and deal with an emergency somewhere else. This week, I’m trying to get 40 AP chemistry consumables kits built for the second half of the virtual school order so that I can ship those by Friday. But yesterday we shipped five of the CK01A chemistry kits, taking our remaining inventory of those down to a dozen. I really need to get more of those built as well.

11:52 – Reading all the news articles about the pending US attack on Syria reminds me of Airplane! the movie.

Ted Striker: My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow. We’re bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We’re coming in from the north, below their radar.

Elaine Dickinson: When will you be back?

Ted Striker: I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.

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Monday, 26 August 2013

09:20 – Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday.

As Barbara will tell you, I tend to spread like kudzu. I presently have kit components stacked in the kitchen, den, dining room, library/living room, workroom, my office, the downstairs finished area, and the downstairs unfinished area. My stuff just spreads. And that’s just the science kit stuff. We also keep stored water, probably something like 300 or 400 liters, in 2- and 3-liter soda bottles, crammed into every free space downstairs. So before our Costco run yesterday, I suggested to Barbara that we replace that stored water with bottled water from Costco, which should be more space-efficient to store. She buys it anyway, in cases of 35 500 mL bottles which translates to 17.5 liters per case or 8.5 two-liter soda bottles. So I told her that for every two cases of bottled water we buy we can empty and recycle 17 two-liter bottles. She was delighted. I figure that once we get up to 20 cases of bottled water, all the 2- and 3-liter soda bottles will be gone.

So, just as we got to the checkout line at Costo, they opened another register. Paul and I got in that line with their cart, with Barbara and Mary right behind us with our cart. After Paul and I got checked out, we were standing watching our stuff being loaded back onto our cart and I commented to Paul that although the math told me it was true, those two cases of bottled water just didn’t look like the equivalent of 17 two-liter bottles in terms of cubic. He agreed with me but, as he said, when the math says one thing and your intuition says another, the math is always right. Assuming you do good math.

At dinner, we were talking about allergies. Mary has terrible allergies to dogs, cats, horses, and presumably other mammals. So bad that it’s possible that they’d be life-threatening without antihistamines. She has to get herself all drugged up on antihistamines before she can even ride over to Costco in our SUV. And this season has been horrible for allergies. I go years without taking an allergy pill, but lately I’ve been taking a loratadine (Claritan) every evening because my eyes have been itching and burning so badly. Given the constant rain for the last two or three months, I suspect it’s mold spores.

And Colin has been suffering badly as well. Barbara has been giving him diphenhydramine, which doesn’t seem to help much. I’d been meaning to check on loratadine in canines, and I finally did it after we got home. I turns out that loratadine is generally safe in canines, with a usual dosage of 0.5 mg/kg once a day, so Barbara gave Colin a 10 mg loratadine tablet this morning. That’s a light dose; for his body weight he should be getting 15 to 17 mg, but we wanted to start out easy. She gave it to him about 7:00 this morning. At 8:15 he was still scratching, but we’ll give it a chance.

One thing I didn’t realize is that the effectiveness of different classes of antihistamines varies widely in dogs, even more so than in people. One class or one specific drug may be completely ineffective and another very effective. So, if the loratadine works, great. If not, we’ll try chlorpheniramine maleate or one of the others.

Work on science kits continues. I’m trying to finish up the virtual school AP chemistry kits in the next couple of days. Today, I need to get the batch of pH 7.0 buffer standardized and dry some stuff to constant mass.

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Sunday, 25 August 2013

10:17 – Yesterday we made up 60 small parts bags for the biology kits. Today we’ll make up a batch of small parts bags for the chemistry kits. We’re in better shape on chemistry kits than biology kits, so this coming week I’ll start making up chemicals for another batch of 60 biology kits. We also now have everything we need in stock for the remaining kits for the virtual school AP chemistry order, so I’ll work on those. I’d like to get them shipped by Friday. And I’m also still trying to get migrated over to the new computer, which is now running Linux Mint 15 KDE.

I’ve mentioned that Barbara and I are watching the TV series One Tree Hill. One of the teenage characters, Brooke, has an eye for clothes design. She decides to sell her clothes on-line, and gets a geek friend to set her up an e-commerce site. So I’m watching this developing train wreck, knowing what’s about to happen. Sure enough, they bring up the e-commerce site and orders start flooding in. The only problem is that Brooke is getting ten times as many orders as she can fulfill. “Make it stop!”, she tells her geek friend. That’s a situation I never want to find us in, so I’ve avoided doing any advertising or promotion. Selling 50 or 100 kits a month is one thing. We can deal with that. Selling 50 or 100 kits a week is another thing entirely.

But we are going to start promoting in 2014. I have Abby working on a logo and hand-out sheet. Most homeschool conventions give goody bags to attendees. Conventions typically offer vendors of homeschool products the opportunity to have their hand-out sheets included in those bags for $80 to $100 per thousand. We’ll start small, having maybe 5,000 hand-out sheets printed and getting them distributed at four or five conventions. Our goal for 2014 is to sell 1,000 kits. We’ll see what happens.

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