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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 12 May 2008
Latest
Update: Sunday, 18 May 2008 09:04 -0500 |
11:55
-
We picked up Chinese for dinner and met Barbara's parents, sister, and
brother-in-law at their house for Mother's Day dinner. Barbara's
sister, Frances, had told me Friday evening that their PC wouldn't boot
after she'd shut it down when the severe storms came through. I hauled
it back last night and took a look at it this morning. The hard drive
is deader than King Tut.
This is really strange, because this is
the fourth dead hard drive they've had, on two different systems. The
first one was a Western Digital in their HP system, so I wasn't
surprised when it failed. I replaced it with a Seagate, and the whole
system later failed, including the hard drive. I concluded that it had
taken a lightning hit, so I discarded it and gave them a new system.
The hard drive in that one failed a few months ago. I replaced it, and
it just failed again.
So I installed a new Seagate Barracuda 160
GB SATA drive and a new SATA cable this morning, booted up the Ubuntu
8.04 CD, and started it installing. I got involved in something else
and didn't look at it again for an hour or so. When I did, there was an
error message on the screen saying that there was an error formatting
the drive. Hmmm.
So I swapped the cable to the second SATA port
and tried again. Same problem. So I pulled the new hard drive and
installed yet another new Seagate Barracuda 160 GB SATA drive and yet
another new cable, this time on the first SATA port. This time it's
formatting fine. I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but I
don't like it.
I'll burn the system in all day today and
overnight to see what happens. If there are any glitches at all, I'll
try replacing the power supply, although that doesn't seem a likely
cause. I've already replaced the memory. There was one 512 MB stick in
there, which I replaced with a 1 GB stick. We'll see what happens.
I rejoined Netflix last night. There were quite a few movies and
programs that Barbara wants that have become available on DVD since I
dropped our membership at the end of last year, so I decided to rejoin
for a few months and grab them. We'll start with the four most recent
episodes of Midsomer Murders and maybe the first season of Jericho and
move on from there.
I noticed that the first Amazon review of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments
is now up. That reminded me to check to make sure that the review
copies had gone out to subscribers who requested them. When I asked
Sara at O'Reilly, she said they should be going out today. They would
have gone out earlier, but O'Reilly grabbed literally every available
copy to take to Maker Faire. All or nearly all of those copies sold, so
they're just getting replacement copies in to ship to people who
requested review copies.
Here it is almost noon, and I haven't
even gotten started on anything I planned to do today. Basically,
that's the forensics book all week. I've really missed working on it
for the last few weeks, between getting the chemistry book out the
door, doing the taxes, preparing for and attending Maker Faire,
returning to spend several days getting the chem book website running
and the other admin tasks that absolutely needed done now that the book
is in bookstores, and so on. I intend to devote some serious time to
the forensics book, starting now.
But of course there's yet another priority task. O'Reilly is going to want a new version of Building the Perfect PC
from me, so I need to get started on a proposal for that, get the
contract negotiated and so on. It looks like I may have a new co-author
for the new edition, and he'll be a familiar name. I simply don't have
time to devote full attention to two books, both of which are high
priorities, so the new Building the Perfect PC
edition will have a third name as co-author, along with Barbara and me.
More about that when I get things nailed down, which I hope to do in
the next week or two. (And, no, it's not Pournelle.)
08:34
-
Barbara and I often comment that we watch a lot of British TV, but as I
was setting up our queue yesterday I realized how true that was. Of the
47 discs currently in our queue, only six (the first season of Jericho)
are not British programs, although some (the Masterpiece titles) are
joint US/UK productions. Somehow we'd missed Kavanagh Q.C. which stars
the superb John Thaw, so I remedied that.
We
ordered the Smithsonian Mega Science Kit for Shane, our neighbor who
turns 5 on 31 May. Shane is very bright and very interested in science.
His mom, Mimi, told Barbara she planned to use Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments
to get him started doing chemistry experiments. I told Mimi that,
even though she planned to work with Shane, the book was a little
too advanced for even a very bright 5-year-old. That's when I told her
we'd get Shane the Smithsonian Mega Science Kit, which is listed for
ages 10 and up. That should be about right for him.
Interestingly,
there appear to be at least two different versions of this kit. The
part numbers are the same, but the cover art is different, as are the
sizes and weights of the box. Here's one and here's the other. The contents also appear to be different. I ordered the second one, from Target, and I hope that's the one they send.
Smithsonian
formerly offered a couple of introductory chemistry sets, the
Chem-Works Microchemistry Kit and the MicroChem XM 5000. Unfortunately,
both of those have been discontinued. Fortunately, the manuals are
available for download for the Chem-Works [PDF] and XM 5000 [PDF] kits, as are the kit contents for the Chem-Works and XM 5000
kits. I downloaded them for Mimi. She can use them, along with stuff I
supply from my own lab, to do the experiments in either or both of
those kits.
As usual, I have more to do than time to do it. Today or tomorrow morning, I have a radio interview with Planetary Radio.
By Wednesday, I have to make up a list of talking points for Laura at
the Rosen Group, which is doing the promotion for the chem lab book.
She'll provide those talking points to radio interviewers to give them
some idea of what to talk about during interviews.
And I also
need to get some supplementary lab sessions written up for
the HomeChemLab.com subscriber-only newsletter. The first issue of
that comes out in June, and then every month thereafter. I want to get
at least several issues stubbed out ahead of time so that all I need to
do each month is write up the topical stuff. That means doing and
writing up at least a couple of supplemental lab sessions for each
issue ahead of time.
So, today and maybe part of tomorrow is
devoted to creating the talking points list, with the rest of the week
devoted to getting a head start on the supplemental lab sessions.
16:23
-
I just realized I hadn't posted yet today. I figured I'd better get
something up or people would assume something had happened to me.
I
got the talking points list completed yesterday morning, and submitted
it to Laura, who's handling PR for the book. She'd also arranged an
interview with Mat Kaplan of Planetary Radio, which I did last night. I
spent most of today working on the supplemental lab sessions. I did
take a short break because I needed to take my editor's spare cell
phone to the UPS store and send it back to him. While I was out, I ran
by the library and picked up a copy of Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Childhood, by Oliver Sacks.
I'm
on a 3:2 schedule now, spending three weekdays per week on the
forensics book and two on the supplemental labs. I generally only work
three to six hours per day on weekends, doing whatever I need to do to
get where I wanted to be by the end of the week. Once I have some of
these supplemental labs accumulated, I'll go back to devoting full time
to the forensics book.
10:46
-
One of my readers sent me this image. The first thing I noticed was the
trivalent hydrogen at the upper left, and then the pentavalent carbon.
I told him this was the most screwed-up non-molecule I'd ever seen. I
sent it to Paul and Mary for their comments.
The other day I mentioned
the Smithsonian chemistry kits, which have been discontinued but for
which the manuals can still be downloaded in PDF form. I regret the
loss of those kits. The Chem-Works kit, which sold for less than $50,
was a good introduction to chemistry, and the $80 XM 5000 kit
was the only inexpensive kit available that focused on
quantitative procedures, albeit rather primitive ones.
Here's a
list of the contents of the Chem-Works kit. Other than the chemicals,
most of this stuff can be found around the home, and what can't can be
purchased inexpensively from any lab supplies vendor. (The galvanometer
kit, for example, is really just a cheap compass, and you can
substitute paper clips for the spring clips.)
| Quantity |
Item |
|
Quantity |
Item |
| #8 1 Well |
Cobalt Chloride |
|
1 Each |
6" Plastic Ruler |
| #11 1 Bottle |
Copper Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Filter Paper |
| #18 1 Bottle |
Sodium Silicate |
|
1 Package |
Molecule Kit |
| #40 1 Bottle |
Calcium Hydroxide |
|
1 Each |
Safety Goggles |
| #41 1 Well |
Calcium Nitrate |
|
1 Package |
Galvanometer Kit |
| #42 1 Bottle |
CitricAcid |
|
1 Pair |
Spring Clips |
| #44 1 Well |
Ferrous Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Soda Straw |
| #47 1 Well |
Methylene Blue |
|
1 Each |
Magnifier |
| #49 1 Bottle |
Potassium Iodide |
|
1 Each |
Battery Clip 9V |
| #53 1 Bottle |
Sodium Sulfate |
|
2 Each |
1 oz Cup |
| #57 1 Bottle |
Aluminum Ammonium Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Atom Sheet |
| #58 1 Bottle |
Ammonium Chloride |
|
1 Each |
Red LED |
| #64 1 Bottle |
Magnesium Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Microplate |
| #65 1 Well |
Phenolphthalein |
|
8 Each |
Pipette |
| #67 1 Bottle |
Sodium Carbonate |
|
1 Each |
Resistor 1K Ohm |
| #70 1 Well |
Universal Indicator |
|
2 Each |
Plastic Tube with Cap |
| #63 1 Package |
Iron Wire |
|
12 Each |
Toothpick |
| #54 1 Package |
Zinc Wire |
|
2 Each |
PVCoated Wire |
| #38 1 Package |
Aluminum Wire |
|
1 Each |
Instruction Manual |
| #61 1 Package |
Copper Wire |
And here are the contents of the XM 5000 kit. Again, other than the chemicals, most of these items are pretty easy to come by.
| Quantity |
Item |
|
Quantity |
Item |
| #8 1 Bottle |
Cobalt Chloride |
|
1 Each |
6"" Plastic Ruler |
| #11 1 Bottle |
Copper Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Filter Paper |
| #18 1 Bottle |
Sodium Silicate |
|
1 Package |
Molecule Kit |
| #40 1 Bottle |
Calcium Hydroxide |
|
1 Each |
Safety Goggles |
| #41 1 Bottle |
Calcium Nitrate |
|
1 Set |
Balance with Weight Set |
| #42 1 Bottle |
CitricAcid |
|
1 Each |
Plastic Slide |
| #44 1 Bottle |
Ferrous Sulfate |
|
1 Package |
Galvanometer Kit |
| #47 1 Bottle |
Methylene Blue |
|
1 Pair |
Alligator Clips |
| #49 1 Bottle |
Potassium Iodide |
|
1 Each |
Bar Magnet |
| #53 1 Bottle |
Sodium Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Soda Straw |
| #57 1 Bottle |
Aluminum Ammonium Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Magnifier |
| #58 1 Bottle |
Ammonium Chloride |
|
1 Each |
Battery Clip 9V |
| #59 1 Bottle |
Biuret Reagent |
|
2 Each |
1 oz Cup |
| #62 1 Bottle |
Fehling's Solution |
|
1 Each |
Atom Sheet |
| #64 1 Bottle |
Magnesium Sulfate |
|
1 Each |
Crystal Card |
| #65 1 Bottle |
Phenolphthalein |
|
1 Each |
Red LED |
| #67 1 Bottle |
Sodium Carbonate |
|
1 Each |
Microplate |
| #70 1 Bottle |
Universal Indicator |
|
10 Each |
Pipette |
| #50 1 Bottle |
Borax Powder |
|
1 Each |
Resistor 1K Ohm |
| #67A 1 Bottle |
Sodium Carbonate Powder |
|
3 Each |
Plastic Tube with Cap |
| #14 1 Bottle |
Iron Filings |
|
1 Each |
Thermometer |
| #71 1 Bottle |
Zinc Powder |
|
12 Each |
Toothpick |
| #33 1 Bottle |
Marble Chips |
|
1 Each |
Instruction Manual |
| #63 1 Package |
Iron Wire |
|
|
|
| #54 1 Package |
Zinc Wire |
|
|
|
| #38 1 Package |
Aluminum Wire |
|
|
|
| #61 1 Package |
Copper Wire |
|
|
|
The
real problem is the chemicals. You can buy a lot of them locally, but
the problem is that the package sizes are much too large. For example,
I bought two pounds (~ 1 kg) of copper sulfate at Home Depot for
something like $7.50, which is very inexpensive on a per gram basis,
but still that's $7.50 for one chemical. The chemicals in these kits
are supplied, usually in dry form, in tiny bottles to which you have to
add 5 mL of water or alcohol. You end up with 5 mL of a dilute solution
of each chemical, typically 0.1 M.
What I may do is talk to
Elemental Scientific about making up kits that contain about 25 mL of
each of these chemicals, already in solution. I'll have them toss in
some of the other items that are hard to find locally, such as safety
goggles and disposable plastic pipettes, and package it up as a "refill
kit" for the Smithsonian sets. If the manuals aren't already available
via bittorrent, they probably will be before long.
08:38
-
Regarding that image I posted yesterday, if you're a chemist you can't
see the forest for the trees. You immediately notice all the impossible
constructs in the "molecule", such as the trivalent hydrogen at the
upper left. (Hydrogen has only one electron in its shell, and can form
only one single bond to one other atom.) If you're not a chemist, you
immediately notice that the "molecule" spells SEX.
Lab
day today. I always feel a little guilty having a lab day, because even
though it's work it feels like play. Today I need to do trial runs of
several experiments, but first I need to make up quite a few reagents.
I normally make up several reagents at a time in batches, usually 100
mL or 500 mL of each, eight or ten at a time, because it's much more
efficient to make up several reagents at the same time than doing them
one at a time.
To make up one at a time, I have to weigh the
dry chemical or weigh or measure the liquid chemical, dissolve it in
some water, do a quantitative transfer from the mixing vessel to a
volumetric flask, top off the volumetric flask to the mark, and then
transfer the solution to a labeled bottle. That takes a while, because
chemicals don't always dissolve quickly.
When I make up several
reagents at the same time, I set up a row of labeled bottles for the
reagents I'm making up, with an appropriately-sized beaker sitting in
front of each bottle. I put about 80 mL of water in each beaker for
solutions that I'm making up 100 mL of, and 400 mL of water in each
beaker for solutions I'm making up 500 mL of. I then weigh or measure
each chemical one after the other, transferring the chemical to the
appropriate beaker immediately after I weigh it. While it's dissolving,
I'm weighing out the next chemical.
By the time I've done eight
or ten chemicals, the first chemical is fully dissolved, and I can do
the quantitative transfer to the volumetric flask, top it off, and
transfer it to the bottle. I have several volumetric flasks, so I can
rinse the one I've just finished with and allow it to drain while I'm
working on the next chemical.
I can work this way because I have
more glassware and equipment than the average home lab. While an
average home lab might have a few beakers, one each of 10 mL and 100 mL
graduated cylinders, 100 mL and 500 mL volumetric flasks, and 1 mL and
10 mL Mohr pipettes, I have dozens or beakers, half a dozen or more
graduated cylinders in each size, many volumetric flasks, and a dozen
or more Mohr pipettes in each size. Of course, the downside is that
when I'm finished I have a lot more glassware to wash up than most
people do.
09:40
- Paul Jones submits a modified sex molecule. But can he synthesize it? I'm betting not.
From: Paul Jones
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
CC: Mary Chervenak
Date: Fri May 16 08:56:24 2008
Re: molecule
Cleaned
it up a bit. I looked at the molecule sent by your reader and
noted that the errors don't actually make the letters any more clear. I
believe this molecule would be an excellent laser dye. -Paul
13:25
- Here's the setup I used to make up solutions yesterday.
For
my lab inventory, I use the oh-my-god-i'm-out method, and it came back
to bite me yesterday. Notice that (very) partially-full bottle of
distilled water at the rear right. I thought I had another gallon or
two in stock. I didn't, so I was able to make up only a few of the
solutions I planned to get made up yesterday.
If this were a real
lab, I'd have a still that produced distilled water continuously. But a
decent still costs several hundred dollars at a minimum, so I do without.
Usually, that's not a problem, but before I decide to make up a bunch
of solutions next time, I'll make sure I have enough distilled water on
hand.
I momentarily considered using tap water. After all, our
tap water is extremely soft and these are only bench reagents, made up
to only one or two sig figs. In fact, I didn't even use a pipette to
measure the liquid chemicals I did get made up (1 M and 6 M acetic acid
and 1 M and 6 M aqueous ammonia; 500 mL each of the dilute solutions
and 100 mL each of the concentrated ones). I just used a 10 mL
graduated cylinder and did the best I could. Even so, using tap water
just goes against the grain.
Back when I had a darkroom, I even
used distilled water for making up developers and other critical
solutions, although tap water probably would have done as well. And
that was back when I was in my early teens through college, when money
was tight and I had a lot of things I wanted to spend my limited
resources on.
So I decided either to go out and buy a few
gallons of distilled water or just to wait until Barbara made a
supermarket run. I ended up choosing the latter. It's not like I don't
have plenty of other things to be working on, and I did have my fun.
In
addition to the four solutions I mentioned previously, I made up bench
solutions of ammonium acetate, ammonium chloride, ammonium nitrate, and
ammonium oxalate. Only a few more A's to go and I'll be into Barium and the B's.
For the book, I think I made up bench solutions only
of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. Everything else, I
weighed/measured individually for each lab session. In one sense, that
was a very inefficient use of my time, but in another sense it was
actually quite efficient. I could have made up the bench solutions, but
that'd have been a big chunk of my time, and many of my standard bench
solutions weren't used in the book.
I confess that I didn't wear
gloves (although I did wear goggles; I'm not kidding about that being
an absolute requirement). I had this conversation with Paul Jones the
other day, when I mentioned to him that at Maker Faire I did demos
without wearing gloves while handling stuff like concentrated mineral
acids. There, my point was to put my money (my skin, actually) where my
mouth was, because I'd told these folks that most of these hideously
"dangerous" chemicals really weren't a big deal. (There are some that
are a big deal; I generally avoid those, and if I have to work with
them I wear full protective gear.)
Paul commented that he didn't
wear gloves routinely for handling stuff like concentrated mineral
acids. He wears gloves when there's a real danger, such as when
handling very toxic materials, those that penetrate the skin, and so
on. As Paul said, he tends to drop things if he's wearing gloves. I've
followed the same practice forever, and for the same reason, but of
course in the book I had to recommend wearing gloves any time the
reader handles any lab chemical.
This is one of those things
where a knowledgeable adult can make up his or her own mind. Jas will
wear gloves until I'm satisfied that she's mature enough and
knowledgeable enough to make up her own mind. If she's less than 18
years old when that happens, I'll also clear it with Kim.
And, speaking of Jas, here's another shot of Jas
in the lab, looking pensive. (Actually, she's listening to me
pontificate; when Barbara shot this image, I was telling Jas
that from then on she had to wear full shoes or boots in the lab.)
09:04
-
Periodically, there's some discussion on Pournelle's back-channel
mailing list about him converting to IMAP and keeping his email message
store on zidane, the co-hosted server run by Greg Lincoln and Brian
Bilbrey that hosts all of our domains. I haven't converted to IMAP for
one main reason. I want the spam filtering that my local email client
(Kmail) provides.
Zidane does a pretty good job of spam
filtering. Greg and Brian have it set up to use SpamAssassin, several
blackhole lists, IP range blocking, and probably a partridge in a pear
tree. Zidane blocks, I would guess, 99%+ of the spam messages that
arrive at the server. But that still leaves quite a few. This morning,
for example, I downloaded 89 new messages from overnight, of which 42
were spams. My local spam filters caught all 42 of those and put them
in my spam folder. The false-positive and false-negative rates for my
local spam filters are very close to 0%. Only one or two spams a
month make it to my inbox, and perhaps one real message every two or
three months ends up in my spam folder. I don't want to lose that
filtering by going to IMAP.
I did make one change this morning.
I set the threshold on the server spam filters to 3, down from 4. The
range available is 0 through 9, with 9 being almost no filtering, 5
being recommended, and 0 being extremely aggressive. Any message with a
spam rating equal to or high than the number set goes directly to the
bit bucket. The downside to using a lower setting, of course, is that
it increases the likelihood of false positives, which means I won't see
some real emails. So, if you email me and don't hear from me, please
send me a simple message that's not likely to be seen as spam to let me
know about the missed message.
One thing I do wish for is that
my local spam filters could talk to the spam filters on zidane. For
example, when I go through my spam folder deleting messages that are
actually spam, I'd like my email client to communicate with zidane,
perhaps sending zidane the headers from the deleted messages and
telling zidane to henceforth silently delete any message that comes
from the same IP address.
Actually, I wish Greg and Brian would
set up blocking of IP address ranges to send anything that originates
outside the first world to the bit bucket, but they have many domains
hosted on zidane, so I understand why they don't do that. It'd be nice
if the server offered that capability on a domain-by-domain basis, but
apparently it doesn't.
Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 by Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.
