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Month: September 2011

Saturday, 10 September 2011

10:05 – Happy Anniversary to us. Barbara and I were married 28 years ago today. I tried to convince her that the traditional 28th anniversary gift was science equipment, but she’s not buying it.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been married for 28 years. Barbara was 28 years old when we married, so we’ve been married for literally half her life. I was 30 years old, so I have to wait a couple more years to meet that milestone. Fortunately, Barbara is a woman of great restraint, or she’d probably have killed me by now. (I still sometimes introduce her as “This is Barbara, my first wife.”) XOR has also caused some discussions over the years: Barbara: “Do you want peas or corn?” Me: “Yes.” I finally convinced her that I wasn’t being obnoxious and that really is the way my thought processes work.

Fortunately, unlike most women, Barbara has a sense of humor. She ignores me when we’re watching a video and I comment, “I like her dress” (exposed cleavage), “I really like her dress” (topless), or “I really like her dress” (full frontal nudity). In fact, she considers turnabout fair play. When we were watching Rome or something, there was a shot with male full frontal nudity. Barbara, of course, commented, “I really like his dress.”

Also unlike most women, Barbara understood from the start that women must take men as they find them. There’s no point to trying to change or train us, except in the most trivial ways. (Putting the toilet seat down comes to mind.) Our personalities are set in stone well before we’re out of diapers. We’re unchangeable and untrainable. Basically, women are civilized and men are barbarians, but it takes a very smart woman to realize that and tolerate it. In effect, we men are pets that are quite aggravating on a regular basis.

I’m sure most of my regular readers wonder how Barbara has been able to tolerate me for 28 years. I know I do.

I mixed up some copper(II) sulfate for Barbara this morning, about 30 mL of 1 M solution to 1.5 L of water. Barbara sprayed the shrubs affected by the fungi. I was kind of disappointed in the results. I was hoping to hear high-pitched tiny little cries and watch the fungi drop off the leaves. Instead, they just sat there. I was surprised to see that a 0.02 M solution of copper(II) sulfate is still noticeably blue. I expected maybe a slight blue tint, but it was visible as distinctly blue through the translucent sprayer bottle.

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Friday, 9 September 2011

08:42 – Well, the copy finally finished at 10:00 p.m. last night, after 13 hours of writing 300,000+ files totaling about 1,300 GB. I’ll probably do the same thing again to a second new 2 TB Barracuda drive and then pull both of the old 1.5 TB drives. Of course, that leaves me with a system drive that’s older than either of those drives. Barracuda drives are extremely reliable, but these guys are well past retirement age in dog years.

Jerry Coyne just posted an interesting article about science versus religion, Adam and Eve: theologians squirm and sputter. The whole of Christianity is based on the Adam and Eve myth and original sin. Without that, Christianity has no basis whatsoever. And yet science tells us, indisputably, that Adam and Eve never existed. It is amusing to watch accommodationists try to reconcile religious myth with the cold, hard light of science.

We’ll be using a lot of dropper bottles for the biology kits, so I ordered a couple hundred dozen from one of my wholesalers in 15 mL and 30 mL capacities. These bottles are Chinese-made, and they’re fine except for one thing. They arrive with the dropper tips and caps installed, which means that Barbara and I have to disassemble them all before filling and labeling them, and then turn around and reinstall the dropper tips and caps. Doing that for a few bottles is no big deal. Doing it for thousands involves some work.

We’ll also need 30 mL wide-mouth bottles, which none of my current wholesalers offer. So I contacted a bottle supplier about the wide-mouth bottles and decided as long as I was at it to see what they had to offer in the way of dropper bottles. Their bottles are US-made, which is good, and they come in bulk with the dropper tips and caps in separate plastic bags. The problem is, bottles, even Chinese bottles, aren’t cheap, and the US-made ones cost 30% to 40% more than the Chinese-made ones. Still, I was willing to consider paying more for the US-made bottles. Until the samples arrived.

The problem is the dropper tips. The Chinese bottles have dropper tips whose bodies are long plugs that friction-fit the mouth of the bottle. Seating a dropper tip is a simple matter of pressing the tip into the mouth of the bottle until it seats. The dropper tips on the US bottles have much shorter bodies, and snap into place. The problem is that it requires close attention to make sure the tip has actually seated and snapped into place. This would slow down processing significantly, so I decided to stick with the Chinese bottles.

Speaking of processing bottles, I looked into automated methods and concluded that our current manual method is actually better unless and until we reach the point where we need to produce hundreds of kits per month. Working together, Barbara and I can fill, insert dropper tips, cap, and label the bottles at a rate of about 150 bottles per hour. (I fill and insert the dropper tips; Barbara caps and labels.) The only part of that that can be automated at anything approaching a reasonable price is the filling operation, but that still requires individual attention to each bottle as it’s filled, and actually saves almost no time.

10:36 – Barbara saw an article in the paper this morning about using copper sulfate to kill the mildew that’s appeared on some of her shrubs. I buy copper(II) sulfate by the kilogram, so she asked if I could make her up some right here in the sink. Of course, I agreed. The problem is, what concentration?

Apparently, the concentration needed varies. One site mentioned ranges from 2 to 6 pounds per 100 gallons, which translates to something like 909 to 2727 grams per 379 liters, or about 2.4 to 7.2 grams per liter. Or, as I think of it, about 0.01 to 0.03 molar. Since I keep liters of 1.0 M copper(II) sulfate solution in inventory–the stuff takes forever to dissolve–I’ll just compromise on 0.02 M and dilute one part of the stock solution to 49 parts water.

I did wonder whether the high solubility of copper(II) sulfate would be a problem. If Barbara sprays on 0.02 M copper(II) sulfate, it’ll stick around only until the next good rain dissolves it and rinses it off the plants. That’s apparently why people use Bordeaux or Burgundy mixtures, which are solutions of copper(II) sulfate mixed with either calcium hydroxide (lime) or sodium carbonate (washing soda or soda ash) to form insoluble precipitates of either copper hydroxide or copper carbonate. Apparently these are more persistent because they don’t dissolve in rainwater, but I do wonder whether they’d clog up Barbara’s sprayer. What the insoluble copper salts really are is time-release treatments, because even “insoluble” compounds are very slightly soluble in water. So, apparently copper(II) ions kill fungi even in nanomolar or even picomolar concentrations. I think we’ll start with just 0.02 M copper(II) sulfate solution and see if that makes the fungi gag, clutch their tiny little chests, and drop off the plants.

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Thursday, 8 September 2011

09:47 – My main office system started making a bad sound yesterday afternoon. I hoped it was a fan bearing failing, but I feared it was one of the hard drives. This system is a quad-core that we built a few years ago, and it still has the original main hard drive, a 750 GB Seagate Barracuda. It also has two other hard drives that we installed later, both 1.5 TB Barracudas. Those drives were installed before the 1.5 TB Barracuda was officially released, which should give you some idea of the age of this system.

At any rate, it turned out it was one of the hard drives, of course. It was one of the 1.5 TB drives, which I use for on-line backup. Here’s what happened when I unmounted it and ran jfs_fsck on it.

thompson@darwin:~$ sudo jfs_fsck -a /dev/sdb5
jfs_fsck version 1.1.12, 24-Aug-2007
processing started: 9/8/2011 8.58.17
The current device is: /dev/sdb5
ujfs_rw_diskblocks: read 0 of 4096 bytes at offset 32768
ujfs_rw_diskblocks: read 0 of 4096 bytes at offset 61440
Superblock is corrupt and cannot be repaired
since both primary and secondary copies are corrupt.

CANNOT CONTINUE.
thompson@darwin:~$

Fortunately, the entire contents of the failed hard drive are replicated on the other 1.5 TB drive. I didn’t want to tear down this system to replace the drive, so I stuck a new 2 TB Barracuda in an external USB drive frame and formatted it jfs. I’m now copying about a third of a million files totaling about 1,300 GB from the working 1.5 TB drive to the external 2 TB drive. At USB 2.0 speeds of about 25 MB/s, that’s going to take 13 or 14 hours to complete.

I really do need to take the time to get our computer situation straightened out. Right now, Barbara has a 6-core Core i7 system with 6 TB of disk space in her office, which is gross overkill. She has that system, which was to be my new desktop system, because it was the only one ready to hand when her old system started having problems. She uses her system only for email, web browsing, and so on, so I think what I’ll do is build her a new system around an Intel Atom motherboard much like the one I’m currently using in my den system. Or I may just swap my den system into her office and replace it with another Atom system. At that point, I can strip down and discard my current main office system, which is nearing the end of its design life. Heck, I’m still running Ubuntu 9.04 on it, which has been unsupported for a year now. But all of that takes time, which is in very short supply right now.

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Wednesday, 7 September 2011

08:45 – Merkel has gotten the most favorable court decision she could have hoped for. The German court ignored the law and decided not to drive a stake through the heart of the Euro. Although the Maastricht Treaty explicitly forbids the EU itself or any member nation from assuming responsibility for the debts of any other EU nation or nations, the court ruled that bailouts using German taxpayer funds were legal. The court’s only figleaf, and it’s a small one, is that the founding treaty made an exception for member nations providing short-term aid to other EU nations in the event of natural disasters. Treating massive and ongoing fiscal irresponsibility by the weaker EU nations as a “natural disaster” is legally questionable, to say the least, but at least the decision allows the Euro to live for another day. Ordinary German citizens, at least most of them, are disgusted by what they see as the court approving ongoing transfers of their money to wastrel southern-tier EU nations. Merkel’s party has lost the last six elections in a row, and I suspect German voters will show their fury at this decision in the next election.

PZ Myers doesn’t much like homeschooling, but he’s posted a link to an excellent resource for home schoolers: Information falling from the skies! Right into your hands!

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Tuesday, 6 September 2011

09:30 – I need to decide what to do with our Netflix subscription. Right now, we’re paying $10/month for unlimited streaming and one disc at a time. As of our anniversary date on 26 September, that jumps to $16/month if I do nothing. I’ll probably bump it to $20/month for unlimited streaming and two discs at a time.

Netflix really miscalculated when they introduced the $10/month plan, which was $8/month for streaming and $2/month for the one disc at a time. I think they assumed that most people on that plan would watch nearly all streaming, and get an occasional disc to fill in gaps. What we did, and what I suspect most people on that plan did, was the opposite: watch DVDs as much as possible and fill in with streaming. As a result, Netflix was sending us about eight discs a month for that $2, or $0.25 per disc. Given that Netflix had to pay postage both ways, and considering DVD acquisition costs and handling expenses, Netflix was probably losing at least $10/month on us, and probably a similar amount on many of their $10/month customers. That obviously couldn’t go on, so Netflix put a stop to it.

Netflix has been pushing streaming heavily for obvious reasons. Delivering an hour of streaming costs them maybe $0.05, including content and transmission costs, while delivering an hour of content on disc costs them an order of magnitude more. If I were Netflix, I’d continue to increase prices, both for streaming and discs. Streaming, so they can afford to buy more streaming content. Discs, because they want to discourage people from renting discs. Additional revenue will allow Netflix to expand their streaming options dramatically. And price increases won’t lose them many customers. What, after all, are the alternatives?

While they’re at it, I think Netflix should introduce a separately-priced streaming channel or channels for live sports. Netsportz? Assuming that only 20% of their members sign up at, say, $20/month, that’s still more than $100 million/month in revenue. They could buy a lot of live sports for $100 million a month. And, of course, a lot more than 20% of their membership would probably sign up for an all-sports Netflix channel, and they’d probably be willing to pay more than $20/month.

Work on the biology lab book and kits continues. We have quite a few chemistry kits in stock now and components to build a bunch more, so we can forget about chemistry kits until stock gets low. I’m prototyping a biology kit now. There are lots of decisions to make. Some of them seem minor, but have implications. For example, do I include a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes, which are inexpensive but cannot be reused, or do I include two (or three or four) glass Petri dishes, which are fragile, much more expensive, and require autoclaving, but can be reused indefinitely? The problem is, which is the better choice depends on the person who’s buying the kit. For many homeschoolers, the plastic Petri dishes would be better. They’re cheaper, more convenient, and pre-sterilized. For others, who might do a lot of culturing, the glass Petri dishes are the better choice. I’m inclined to think that the latter group are in a small minority, so right now I’m leaning toward the plastic dishes. What I may do is offer an optional separate culturing kit with glass Petri dishes, several types of agar, and so on.

11:07 – In case you’re wondering what happened to the title in today’s entry, WordPress screwed me again. I’d entered a title and most of the text, at which point Colin started bugging me to go out. So I clicked the Save Draft icon. WordPress, instead of saving, blew me all the way out to the login screen. I logged in, and found my entry was truncated in the middle of the second paragraph. So I used Firefox’s back button to return to what I’d entered. I finished the entry and posted it. I *know* that entry had the title, because I looked before I clicked the Publish button. But for some reason WordPress kept the entry but lost the title.

Unfortunately, that’s nothing unusual for WordPress, which is extremely unstable, at least on my hosting service. I frequently get error messages when I try to save a post, and even more frequently when I’m using the Tools section of the dashboard to backup my site from the server to my local machine. I use WordPress only because my new hosting service offered a one-click install, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a better system available.

My decision on the Petri dishes was made for me. I have two or three vendors from whom I can buy them. All of them ship in packs of 10. Presumably, those factory packs are well protected against breakage, but I have no desire to try to package individual Petri dishes. I sure don’t want to allocate the cost of 10 Petri dishes to each kit. Even if they were free, that’d be too many Petri dishes and too much room in the package. So I’ll go with a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes. I may or may not create a separate dedicated culturing kit. If I do, it’ll include a factory pack of 10 glass Petri dishes. I will probably list the kit contents as six Petri dishes, with a note that we actually include 10, but allow for 40% breakage. That way, if someone does get all 10 unbroken, they get more than they expected.

12:39 – Hmmm. I may have screwed Dr. Koonin big time. I noticed his free book on a list from irreaderreview.com. Chances are, not a lot of people who are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology read that list. But I had to go and tell Jerry Coyne, who has a large international readership, nearly all of whom are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology. Then PZ Myers, who has a gigantic international readership–he probably gets more visits in an hour than I get in a week–sees the announcement on Jerry’s site and posts a link on his own site to Dr. Koonin’s free book. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins, who makes PZ look like small potatoes, also sees the announcement on Jerry’s site. I don’t know if he’s posted about it, but if he has, between Coyne, Myers and Dawkins, it’s unlikely that anyone on the planet who has much interest in evolutionary/molecular biology is unaware that Koonin’s book is available for free.

I just checked Amazon, and Koonin’s book is now in the Top Ten. Not the Top Ten biology books or even the Top Ten science books. The Top Ten among all books on Amazon. That means Koonin’s book is probably “selling” thousands of copies per day. And everyone on the planet who has any interest in the subject probably has a free copy by now, leaving Koonin’s remaining market as only people who are not interested in his book.

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Monday, 5 September 2011

10:04 – Costco run with Paul and Mary yesterday, followed by dinner. The safety officer for Mary’s company is retiring, and Mary has been appointed to serve that role. As she says, this following a week in which their lab facility experienced an earthquake and a hurricane. Not to mention a plague of locusts.

Colin’s pictures will appear in the biology lab book, in the chapter on genetics and inheritance. This image of Colin at 10 weeks old shows him with full drop ears, a common (and genetically dominant) form.

This image shows Colin at 28 weeks old, by which time his ears have assumed their final fully-erect (prick) form.

I’m using these images to illustrate two ear forms, one dominant and one recessive, and tightly-cropped head shots of these two images in a table to illustrate what puppies a breeding pair of Border Collies with different ear traits can be expected to have. (Colin’s parents are both flip/drop-eared, which means they’re both dominant-recessive with respect to prick ears. If they had eight puppies, which they did, one would expect on average two of those puppies to have prick ears, which was indeed the result.)

16:01 – Geez. I just alerted Jerry Coyne to a free science book deal on Amazon, and almost forgot to tell my own readers about it. The book is Eugene V. Koonin’s The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution. It’s regularly priced at $69.99, print or Kindle, and is currently on sale for $0.00 for Kindle. If you’re interested in this subject, grab while the grabbing is good, because these sales often last 24 hours or less.

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Sunday, 4 September 2011

09:22 – I just read an article on FoxNews about the importance of religion in the GOP presidential campaign. According to the article, more than 70% of Republicans and more than 50% of Democrats considered it at least somewhat important that a candidate have “extremely strong” religious beliefs. I guess that explains how buffoons like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman, both of whom would like nothing more than to remake the US into a theocracy, can be taken seriously as candidates. On the other hand, re-electing Obama might be even worse. Moderates like Ron Paul (a Lutheran/Episcopalian/Baptist) and Jon Huntsman (a semi-lapsed Mormon) have no chance, with the media ignoring both of them as a matter of policy. And, of course, admitted atheists have no chance of being elected to any office, let alone the presidency. (Yes, I know Obama is an atheist, but he won’t admit it; even Democrats won’t vote for an atheist.)

What all this tells me is that, once again, there won’t be any major party candidate worth voting for in 2012. No surprise there. I think the last time we had a major-party candidate worth voting for was when Thomas Jefferson ran.

I’ve read several articles about negotiations between Netflix and Starz falling through. When that hit the news, Netflix stock dropped something like 10%. I can’t see that it’s a big deal. In 2008, Netflix negotiated a contract with Starz for about $30 million per year. That contract expires in February 2012. Netflix offered to increase its annual payment by a factor of ten, but $300 million a year wasn’t enough for Starz. They wanted Netflix to charge a premium for access to their content, and that Netflix absolutely refused to do. Good for Netflix.

All of the articles focused on Netflix losing Starz content, but what none mentioned was that Starz gave up $300 million a year, which it has no prospect of getting elsewhere. Netflix, on the other hand, now has $300 million a year available to buy streaming rights from other content providers. As Netflix said, in 2008 Starz was a major provider of Netflix’s streaming content. Now, not so much. Starz is down well below 10% of what Netflix streaming customers watch, and headed for 5%. Netflix can do an awful lot to replace that 5% with $300 million a year. And, of course, nearly all of what Starz was providing streaming is available on DVD, so Netflix can simply buy the DVDs for its customers. We’re not going to miss out on anything. And, if Netflix really wants to stick it to the studios, it can simply stop giving them a 30-day window after the DVD is released before that DVD is available from Netflix.

Barbara and I are spending some time over the long weekend assembling more chemistry kits.

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Saturday, 3 September 2011

09:16 – There was little good news last week on the euro crisis. Even the euro cheerleaders are starting to get depressed.

Even Goldman Sachs Now Expects A Tremendous Financial Collapse

Incidentally, when I mentioned this article to Barbara, I pronounced “Sachs” as “socks”. She said she’d thought it was pronounced “sax”. I told her I really didn’t know, but as a German name I thought it should be pronounced “socks”. That’s nothing unusual. People look at me funny when I pronounce Bayer (as in aspirin) to rhyme with “buyer” or Julius Caesar with the J as a Y, the C as a K, the ae as a long eye, and the last syllable beginning with a hard ess rather than a zee.

We had a strong thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. Apparently, a tree fell over on a power line or something, because we were without power from about 1615 to 2045. Like all of our young Border Collies, Colin doesn’t pay much attention to thunderstorms. Except yesterday he did, because we had a couple of very close, very loud strikes. Those scared him, but once things returned to a dull roar he was back to normal.

I’m doing laundry this morning, and we’re working on assembling two or three dozen more chemistry kits. We can’t get too far ahead of ourselves, because we don’t have room to store all that much finished inventory. Once I get more shelves up, we’ll probably still assemble them two or three dozen at a time, because I have to leave room for biology kits, and eventually forensics kits, AP chemistry kits, and so on. All of which require not just room to store finished goods inventory, but also room for component inventory.

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Friday, 2 September 2011

09:08 – I keep a small stock of drugs on hand for emergencies, typically 100 capsules or tablets of each. Antibiotics like amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, doxycycline, metronidazole, tetracycline, and so on, as well as diphenhydramine, tramadol, and several other common drugs. In the event of a catastrophe like Katrina, I don’t want any of my family or friends dying for lack of a common drug. I keep them in the freezer at -20C, where they’ll remain usable for probably 20 years or more.

So, the other day I (finally) received my order from Home Science Tools, 25 bottles of 30 g each of potassium iodide. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to stick one of them with my emergency drug stock. If a reactor meltdown occurs and I-131 is released, 30 g of potassium iodide provides 230 adult doses of 130 mg each. I haven’t measured, but I’d guess that a 2-liter soda bottle full to the brim holds 2,300 mL, or close enough not to matter. That means that dissolving the contents of that 30 g bottle of KI in a 2-liter soda bottle full of water provides 230 adult doses of 10 mL each, which happens to be two teaspoons.

Not that Barbara or I or her family has any need of KI, nor do many of our friends. The goal of taking KI after an I-131 release is to saturate one’s body with non-radioactive iodine, to prevent uptake of radioactive I-131 by the thyroid, which ultimately increases the incidence of thyroid cancer. However, thyroid cancers typically take decades to develop, so there’s little point to anyone over 40 years old taking KI.

Jerry Coyne posted yesterday about something I’ve been going on about for years: the incredible rip-off that is academic journal publishing.

Here’s the way it works, at least for science academic publishing. We, the taxpayer, fund science studies. Scientists do the work and write up the results as academic papers. Each paper goes through the peer-review process, in which other scientists–working for free–review, edit, and comment on the paper. The final paper is submitted to an academic publisher, who then copyrights the paper and publishes it, usually both in-print and on-line. The journal then charges very high fees to anyone who wants to read the paper. None of the money the journal charges is returned to the taxpayers, nor to the scientists who did the original work and wrote the paper, nor to the scientists who peer-reviewed the paper.

The companies that own these science journals–notably Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, and Wiley-Blackwell–make massive profits at the expense of the taxpayers and the scientists. The journal publishers contribute next to nothing to the process, and earn profit margins of 30% or more. Not gross margins. Profit margins. As Coyne says, this has to stop.

There are now some open-access academic journal publishers who post their work for free download. The problem with most of those is that they’re paid up-front, charging scientists (which of course means the taxpayers) thousands of dollars to publish a paper. The real answer to this problem is for the US government, Google, or some other large entity to start publishing science papers for free. No charge to publish them, and no charge to read them. I’d go further. Elsevier and the rest have unjustly profited on a huge scale for decades. It’s time for someone like the US government to say enough is enough, and to put all of those old papers to which Elsevier and the others have unjustly claimed copyright into the public domain, where they belong. They were produced with taxpayer funds, and by any reasonable standard they should have been in the public domain all along.

Alaska, where men are tough and women are tougher. This young Alaskan woman let her small dog out to pee one evening, heard a ruckus, and found a large bear in her yard trying to eat her dog. So she did what any Alaskan woman would do: stormed up to the bear and punched it in the snout. The bear, knowing what was good for it, dropped the dog and fled. Woman and dog are fine, and the bear probably learned its lesson.


Which reminds me of the old joke about the young guy sitting in a bar, listening to the old guys talking about what it takes to become a Yuker. The old guys tell him that if he wants to be a real Yuker, he has to kill a polar bear and rape an Eskimo woman. So, a few days later the young guy staggers back into the bar, all torn up. “Okay,” he says, “where’s that Eskimo woman you want me to kill?”

I think I mentioned a few days ago some interesting work that scientists had done on DNA recovered from victims of the Black Death. Abbie Smith speculates convincingly that the Black Death was caused by morons.

I’ve talked before about the strange phenomenon of people’s hands getting smaller. The other night, I happened across this page, which has a graphic illustration (scroll all the way to the bottom) of how to choose the proper grip size for a tennis racket.

So, I measured my hand. Sure enough, the yardstick told me that my proper grip size was right on the line between 4-3/4″ and 4-7/8″, which according to that article is one or two sizes larger than a man with a “really big hand” needs. I don’t think of myself as having particularly large hands. I can just barely palm an NBA basketball, or at least I could before I started to get arthritis in my hands. If you have a ruler handy, measure your own hand and see what your proper grip size is. My guess is that if you’re a guy with small hands it’ll be 4-1/2″ (11.43 cm); if you’re a guy with average-size hands, it’ll be 4-5/8″ (11.75 cm); and if you’re a guy with larger than average hands, it’ll be 4-3/4″ (12.07 cm) or more.

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Thursday, 1 September 2011

08:24 – Thanks to everyone who comment on Colin’s image. Several people even sent me modified versions with adjustments to color balance and brightness. The image was shot in open shade, so the cool color balance is accurate. The image is straight out of the camera, with no adjustments other than cropping

As to Colin’s ears, yes, they always stick up like that. Some of the neighbors call Colin “Hat Dog”, because he usually keeps the inner edges of his ears pressed together, resulting in what looks like a triangular peaked cap. As you might expect, Colin’s hearing is superb. (The US government invited Colin to join the distant early-warning line, but he declined.) It’s funny watching him in the evening, lying on his side on the den floor, napping. One ear sticks straight up. Whenever he hears a sound, the ear rotates to localize the sound.

If you own any euro-denominated instruments, now would be a good time to dump them. Next Wednesday, the German Federal Constitutional Court rules on whether Germany contributing to the EFSF and euro bailouts violates the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, the founding document of the EU, and potentially even more damaging to the euro, whether Merkel’s actions so far violate the German constitution. Given that the Maastricht Treaty explicitly prohibits EU nations from assuming debts of other EU nations, the first decision should be a slam-dunk, which in itself would be enough to destroy the euro. If the court also decides that Merkel’s actions have been in violation of the German constitution, it’s really game over.

Meanwhile, a credible rumor has it that Greece has hired a US law firm in preparation for leaving the eurozone and defaulting on its debts. Greek officials strongly deny this rumor, but what else could they say? Given that the second Greek bailout now looks almost certain to fail to gain approval, particularly with Finland’s unrelenting demands for collateral now proving an insuperable obstacle to the bailout going forward, the Greeks are left with few alternatives.

We’ve finished building a batch of chemistry kits that should hold us at least through the middle of this month, if not all the way through the month. That means I need to get purchase orders issued for the components to build more kits. While I’m at it, I’ll order enough components to build a small batch of the biology kits. The contents of that kit are semi-finalized, although there may be minor additions as I continue to work on the biology book.

09:34 – If you’re at all interested in self-publishing a novel, you should read this article on Joe Konrath’s blog. In it, he gives away the secret that has allowed him to sell hundreds of thousands of ebooks.

Well, I guess I can give the secret away here as well. It’s persistence. At the beginning of one summer when I was in junior high school, I decided to learn to play tennis. I took my racket and a can of balls to the tennis courts, where I found a bunch of kids my age and older hacking around. They looked terrible. There was no resemblance to the tennis players I’d seen on TV. None of them could hit a backhand to save his life. Their serves looked spastic. I decided there was no way that I’d step on a court until I was a lot better than they were.

So I took my racket and can of balls to my former elementary school, which was only a block away. It had a nice vacant parking lot of smooth asphalt abutting the featureless brick wall of the school. I started hitting balls off that backboard. When I returned the next day, I had a yardstick and a small can of black paint with me. I measured off the width of the singles court (27 feet, 8.23 meters) and painted hashmarks on the mortar of the brick wall. The tennis net is 3’6″ at the posts and 3′ at the center line, so I compromised and choose the line of mortar that was about 3’2″ off the ground, which I painted black. That gave me something to aim for.

For the rest of that summer, I made the five-minute walk from my house to the school almost every day to hit balls off that wall. Some days I had only 30 minutes or an hour available for practice. Other days, I’d spend hours hitting balls. Forehands, backhands, and serves. Flat, topspin, and backspin. Cross-court and down the line. I must have hit 100,000 balls without ever setting foot on a tennis court.

Come September and the start of the school year, I decided I was finally ready to play tennis. Not surprisingly, I usually won, even when playing guys who were on the high school tennis team. In tennis, persistence pays off, just as it does in writing.

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