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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 16 November 2009
Latest
Update: Wednesday, 18 November 2009 10:21 -0500 |
16:47
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One day has been pretty much blurring into the next lately, with
only the weather changing. We've gone from a period of about normal
weather--chilly days last week with lows just above freezing--to highs
around 77F/25C over the weekend and today, and back again to cool
weather tomorrow.
As I retrieved the mail from our box only to find mostly catalogs and junk mail, I was reminded of this article,
just one of many about how the US Postal Service is in deep, deep
trouble. The USPS is on life support now. The only things keeping
it going are junk mail and catalogs. Well, those and Netflix, whose
postage bill will probably soon exceed a billion dollars a year. It
seems to me these difficulties indicate a need for two things:
eliminating the USPS monopoly on first-class mail, and passage of a Do
Not Mail law similar to the Do Not Call law. The former would force the
USPS to become competitive or die. The latter would eliminate the
useless transport of billions of pieces of garbage that no one wants
anyway. Of course, it would probably also eliminate the USPS, clearing
the way for more efficient private alternatives. Natural selection is a
bitch.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
07:36
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Barbara is off this morning to get her driver's license renewed. North
Carolina licenses are good for five years, renewable on birthdays that
end in zero or five. With her 30th birthday coming up next month, she's
getting it done a couple of weeks early. She'll have to do the vision
test and the sign test, but that's it.
I'm still writing and shooting images and videos.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
10:21
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It even made the morning newspaper. Costco and Coca-Cola have parted
ways, one suspects only temporarily. Costco says that Coke won't give
it a workable price on its products, and Coke seems unwilling to reduce
its margins to the point where it can offer Costco an acceptable price.
This may seem to be a minor spat between producer and retailer, but I
suspect it goes much deeper than that, with every producer and retailer
fighting out a zero-sum margin game.
I'd hate to be one of
Wal*Mart's suppliers at the best of times, let alone now. Even when
things were good, my impression was that Wal*Mart's goal was to pay its
suppliers just enough for products to keep them out of bankruptcy. Now,
I suspect, Wal*Mart doesn't care much if any of its suppliers goes
belly-up. They can just find another supplier who's willing to give
them unsustainable prices on product in the hope that that revenue will
keep them in business just a while longer. Things must be pretty
desperate on the wholesaler/retailer front, and they're likely to get
worse as the Christmas season comes into full swing.
I've been working on microscope sets for Maker Shed. Until now, the only microscope set the Shed carried was the Thames & Kosmos TK2.
That's a decent set at the under $100 price point, but it's still a toy
microscope. We wanted some better sets, so I put together three
microscope sets, which we imaginatively named the Basic Microscope Set, Intermediate Microscope Set, and Advanced Microscope Set. The sets differ only in which microscope is included; the accessories are the same.
Speaking
of accessories, I've always been annoyed by the accessory selection in
typical microscope sets, which seem to be chosen for cheapness rather
than usefulness. A typical set includes a few prepared slides, which
are usually next to worthless. Prepared slides come in two varieties:
good but too expensive for a set versus cheap but nearly useless. I'll
let you guess which variety comes in most microscope sets. Most sets
include a "cleaning kit", which again is cheap and of very limited use.
(If you keep your microscope covered with a plastic bag, the optics
should remain clean indefinitely.) And you usually get maybe a dozen
slides and a few coverslips, which is barely enough to get started. In
other words, the typical accessory set is pathetic, but has the
advantage from the seller's point of view of being cheap to include and
making an impressive-looking list and product image. I knew we could do
a lot better than that.
When I sat down to make a list of which
accessories to include, I realized that I didn't need to re-invent the
wheel. When I started work on the forensics book, I bought a microscope
(not coincidentally, we carry that same model,
including the objective upgrades, in Maker Shed). When I ordered the
microscope, I also ordered accessories, so all I had to do was check
back to see which accessories I ordered with the microscope.
First
up was slides and coverslips. I actually ordered three gross of slides
(six boxes of 72) and several ounces of different coverslips (at about
100 to the ounce). That's obviously overkill for a set, so I decided to
include one box of 72 slides and an ounce of coverslips. Glass, in both
cases. Yeah, glass breaks, but plastic slides are a pain to use
and plastic coverslips are really poor optically. For slide making, I
included plastic forceps, which are better than metal for handling
coverslips and most specimens, a pack of ten polyethylene
pipettes, and bottle of glycerol for making temporary wet mounts. I was
going to include a bottle of permanent mounting fluid, but the good
stuff is expensive and would needlessly boost the price of the
set. A small bottle of colorless Sally Hansen's Hard As Nails from the
drugstore costs only a couple bucks and works about as well. No one
ever thinks about how they're going to store the permanent slides they
make, so I included a slide storage box. Oh, and because a beginning
microscopist needs lots of interesting things to look at, I included
one of our Microbe Motel
kits, so they can grow their own microorganisms. (Yeah, the name is
cute, but it includes everything you need to culture bacteria and other
microorganisms. Real stuff, not shoddy plastic junk.)
I dithered
about which stains and supplemental reagents, if any, to include. I
have more than 30 biological stains and reagents at my microscope
workstation, but real biostains and reagents are relatively expensive,
so including even a few of them would boost the prices of the sets for
something that some people wouldn't use. Then I was struck by a cunning
plan. I headed for the local strip mall. At Walgreens, I scored
one ounce bottles of iodine tincture and gentian
violet and a pint bottle of ethanol for about $7 total. At the
supermarket, another few bucks got me a box of four food coloring dyes,
two or three of which are actually useful biostains, and a bottle of
distilled white vinegar (acetic acid). And at the pet store next door,
I picked up a small bottle of methylene blue for a couple bucks. So,
for a grand total of about $12, I ended up with a pretty decent starter
set of biological stains and reagents, including everything necessary
to do basic biostaining and even Gram staining. Including all that
stuff in the microscope kits would boost their prices by a lot more
than $12, so I decided it made more sense just to recommend kit buyers
make a quick trip to the local strip mall. My boss probably hates that,
but the kit buyers should love it.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
00:00
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00:00
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Saturday, 21 November
2009
00:00
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00:00
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Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 by
Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.