09:19 – Things are slow at work, so Barbara decided to take today off. Her parents are starting their move this weekend from their house to the retirement facility. For now, they’ll be moving into a guest apartment temporarily while the one they’ll ultimately be in is cleaned and painted. We’ve been accumulating boxes for the move, which is no problem at all here, with science kit component shipments arriving frequently. Barbara just hauled a load over to her parents’ house, where she’ll spend the day helping them get some of their stuff packed up and ready to move tomorrow.
Science kit sales have been erratic. Some days, we sell only one or two science kits, or even none. Other days, we sell five or eight kits. As of now, we’re still in relatively good shape on biology and forensic science kits, but we’re down to half a dozen finished chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we have a dozen more that just need to be boxed up and 30 more after that in progress. The biology kits worry me a bit. We have about 20 of those in stock, but once we run dry we have to start from scratch to build a new batch. That means making up and bottling a bunch of chemicals and so on. So I guess we’d better get started on a new batch of at least 30. I’ll probably make up and bottle sufficient chemicals for 60 kits and leave the extra 30 sets of chemicals in stock when we build a batch of 30 kits. That makes it a lot quicker to build another batch of 30.
I remember the first time we had an order from the same person for both a chemistry kit and a biology kit. That happens relatively frequently, but I thought it might be a while before one person ordered all three of the kits in one order. That happened this morning for the first time. I just thought how I’d have reacted as a teenager or even an adult to have all three of these kits show up at the door. It’d be like Christmas in September.
10:39 – Wow. Drew Peterson convicted of murder on literally zero evidence. I haven’t really followed the case, but my sense of it from what I’ve read is that he probably is guilty. But this prosecution violates what had until now been a sacrosanct principle of criminal law: hearsay evidence is not evidence at all. The state had to pass a special law to allow hearsay to be admitted in Peterson’s trial. Otherwise, the prosecution had no case. Since the beginnings of our legal system, it’s been a fundamental precept that “better 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted”. It is up to the state to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. There is nothing about this case but reasonable doubt, but in its determination to convict this guy no matter what, the prosecution (i.e., the government) managed to get the rules changed. This fundamental violation of legal principles may come back to haunt us. It’s a small step from this to the Star Chamber.