Category: science kits

09:04 – It was brought home again to me yesterday that different people use the same word to mean different things. The first time I remember particularly noticing this was when I worked summers during college on a road crew. We were using a high-lift (front-end loader) to fill a 10-ton dump truck with aggregate for road fill. These were chunks of rock that averaged bigger than your fist, and the foreman referred to them as “gravel”. I’d always thought of gravel as pea-size pieces, but as it turned out the foreman was using the word correctly.

One of the items I need for the AP chemistry kits I’m doing for the state virtual school distance-learning program was spec’d as “calcium carbonate (marble chips), 2 g vial”. I decided to provide a full 30 mL wide-mouth bottle because they’re much quicker to fill than a vial and the material is cheap, so I ordered 2.5 kilos of “marble chips” from one of my regular vendors. But those “chips” are actually what I’d call “chunks”, averaging maybe 3 cm. I’m not about to stand there with a sledge-hammer breaking rocks so I’ll just buy some smaller marble chips locally, which is what I should have done in the first place.

I also made up a batch of pH 7.0 buffer yesterday, for calibrating pH meters. A 100 mL bottle of this is another of the items I need for the virtual school order. This stuff is available commercially, but a small bottle typically costs $7 to $15. That’s because the commercial stuff is intended for calibrating high-end pH meters, those with accuracy of 0.01 pH or even 0.001 pH. It’s made with extreme precision and each batch is assayed to give precise pH values at various temperatures. The students will be using inexpensive pH meters with accuracy of 0.2 pH. I haven’t calibrated the batch I made up, but I’ll shoot for something in the pH 6.98 to 7.02 range at 21C.

08:55 – Time-Warner Cable just raised the stakes in its month-long dispute with CBS. TWC now offers a free set of rabbit ears to any TWC subscriber in areas that are affected by the CBS blackout.

I really wish that TWC, Comcast, and the other cable TV companies would start playing hardball with the networks and affiliates, whose demands for high payments to allow the cable TV companies to carry their free OTA signals is nothing but a money grab. The cable TV companies should simply tell ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC that in future they will pay zero to carry those signals. If the networks and affiliates don’t agree, fine. The cable TV companies will simply drop their signals. Given that something like 85% of the population watches those signals on cable TV, will the networks and affiliates really be willing to risk losing 85% of their audiences? I don’t think so. As to subscribers, TWC has the right answer. Give them a free set of rabbit ears.

We’re still building and shipping science kits, anything from two or three a day to five or six a day. We’ve already exceeded last year’s total sales, with more than a week left in August. Not to mention September through December, which last year accounted for about 48% of the total year’s sales. We’re getting low on the subassemblies we need to build more chemistry and biology kits, so this weekend we’ll do a batch of 60 or 90 biology small parts bags and 120 chemistry small parts bags.

09:41 – I shipped the first half of the virtual school AP Chemistry kit order this morning, a week before the promised ship date. That was 40 kits for the lab component of their AP Chemistry A course. Now we need to get 40 AP Chemistry B kits built and shipped. I gave them an estimated ship date for those of 6 September, but we’re going to try to beat that by at least a week as well.

Abby is stopping over today to show me some sketches of ideas for a logo and handout sheet. Of course, Colin will think she’s come to visit him.

12:58 – I download a lot of free Kindle books from Amazon, who frequently sends me emails like this:

Hello Robert B Thompson,

An updated version of your past Kindle purchase of Misplaced Loyalty (Meredith & Hodge Novels) by Marcia Turner is now available.

The updated version contains the following changes:

–Improved formatting for readability.
–Significant editorial changes have been made.

You can receive the improved versions of all your books by opting in to receive book updates automatically. You can do this by going to Manage Your Kindle at http://amazon.com/MYKupdate and clicking on the Manage Your Devices section. You will find the option labeled Automatic Book Update.

Alternatively, you can get the updated version of this book by going to Manage Your Kindle. Find the book in your Kindle Library, click on the “Update Available” link next to the book’s title, and then follow the update prompts. All your devices that have the eBook currently downloaded will be updated automatically the next time they connect to wireless.

Amazon is missing the point. I don’t want an option to auto-update titles like this; I want the option to auto-delete them from my Amazon library, along with everything else by that author. If the author didn’t care enough to get it right in the first place, I have no desire to read an updated version of the book, or indeed anything else by that author. There is no excuse for publishing a book riddled with typos, formatting issues, poor grammar, nonsensical plots, and other errors. If the author is too lazy or too sloppy to get it right prior to pushing the Publish button, why would I waste any time on anything else that author has done?

A few typos, sure. I’d bet there’s never been a book-length manuscript published that didn’t have at least one error. But that’s not what Amazon is talking about here. Many free books, and not a few of the commercially-published ones, are rampant with typos, horrendous formatting problems, and other errors. Several I’ve seen are so bad that it’s almost certain that neither the author nor anyone else ever even bothered to load the book on a Kindle and page through it.

12:57 – Have I mentioned that I hate working with hygroscopic solids? I just finished filling 80 bottles with anhydrous calcium chloride, which is not just hygroscopic but deliquescent. Fortunately, the stuff is prills rather than powder. Prilling reduces surface area enough that I was able to fill bottles without going to extremes to keep the stuff dry. Also fortunately, I’d ordered ten 500 g bottles rather than one 5 kg bottle. That was pure chance; one 5 kg bottle cost more than ten 500 g bottles. But boy am I glad that I got the smaller bottles. I’d forgotten how much of a pain in the ass anhydrous calcium chloride is to work with, at least if you want it to stay anhydrous. As it was, I was able to open a 500 g bottle, quickly fill and cap sixteen 30 mL pharma packer bottles, and then move on to the next batch. I’ve also filled batches of petroleum ether and 95% ethanol, which I now need to label and tape the caps of.

09:18 – This is pretty cool. We started selling science kits in June 2010. In the first 18 days of August, we’ve sold more science kits–units and revenue–than we did in all of 2010. For that matter, to-date August sales exceed our cumulative sales for the first six months of 2011, and for the first three months of this year.

And what’s really cool is that we’re starting to see a fair number of repeat customers, people who bought a biology kit last year and ordered a chemistry kit this year, or vice versa. I think our original plan of building the business slowly and depending on word-of-mouth is working pretty well.

14:36 – I’m still building and shipping science kits. Today marks the start of our busiest 30-day period of the year, from mid-August to mid-September. We’re still in pretty good shape on kits, both in terms of finished-goods inventory and the subassemblies needed to build more kits on-the-fly. Unless something completely unexpected happens we should be able to avoid back-ordering kits.

People who see something I’ve printed may think I’m a tweenage girl. I use blue, black, red, green, and brown Sharpies for routine stuff. One of them died this morning and I was looking for a replacement. I thought about ordering a dozen in mixed colors, but that’d be gratuitous. I have a gross of them sitting on the foyer table that UPS delivered yesterday and a bunch more in an inventory bin downstairs. The only problem is, they’re purple. We use purple Sharpies in the chemistry kits because the purple ink works well for paper chromatography. So I decided to ignore my preference for non-purple colors and just grabbed one of them from stock. I’m practicing dotting my i’s with little hearts.

09:50 – Mid-August and it’s currently 61F (16C) outside, with the highs over the next few days to be in the low- to mid-70’s (~ 22C). That’s more like October or even November weather for us. No let up in the rain, either. We’ve had 3+ inches (7.5 cm) since last Saturday, and the next few days have more rain in the forecast. A cool, wet August is very unusual for us. Usually, we’d be baking, with high temperatures in the 90’s or even triple digits, and worrying about the drought.

I’m still working on science kits. Today, I’m packaging some of the chemicals for that state virtual learning AP Chem order. For some reason, the AP Chem manual specifies a lot of anhydrous chemicals. The problem is, a lot of anhydrous chemicals are hygroscopic, which is to say they suck water out of the air to hydrate themselves. Many are deliquescent, which is to say they’re so hygroscopic that they’ll continue sucking water out of the air until they have enough water to go into solution. You can actually watch this happening with many anhydrates: pour some into a weigh boat on the balance pan, tare the balance, and watch the mass increase as the anhydrate sucks water out of the air. Trying to package these anhydrates while keeping them anhydrous is no fun at all. And it’s a losing battle.