08:46 – I’m in heads-down mode on the biology book chapters, doing a final pass on them and sending off several a day to the editors. I’m also updating and annotating the bill of materials for the biology kits as I go along.
Some of the BoM changes are pretty trivial. For example, we’ll use ordinary unflavored gelatin in a couple of lab sessions. Until now, I’d included gelatin in the You-Provide list, but yesterday I decided to make it an Included-in-the-kit item. It’s certainly no real hardship to have kit purchasers buy a pack of unflavored gelatin at the supermarket, but including it means there’s just one less thing for them to worry about.
Other BoM changes have implications. For example, one of the lab sessions involves growing lima beans with and without Rhizobium, which is a nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and then comparing growth in the test specimens grown with and without nitrogen. That’s an interesting experiment, but the problem is that I can ship kits with the Rhizobium to 49 states, but not Hawaii. (Apparently, Hawaii is worried about a pestilence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.) So, I had to update the BoM to make two kit versions, one for Hawaii and one for the other 49 states. That raises the issue of what Hawaii residents should do for this lab session. I decided to include a bottle of ammonium nitrate with only those kits shipping to Hawaii. Geez.
You’re a lot nicer than I am, Bob. I’d solve the problem in a different way. Simply append “Kit not available in Hawaii” to all your references to the kit. You’re going to have to have two different SKUs for that? Keeping two SKUs, and making sure you never ship a 49 state kit to Hawaii are going to be far more trouble than the affected sales.
Just ship the dang thing – ain’t nobody gonna notice them little critters.
“If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.” For some things this makes a lot of sense, and idiotic shipping restrictions of individual states is one of them. Why bother? It makes your life complicated, and it is incredibly unlikely that anyone would ever catch such a problem. If it happens, deal with it then.
Actually, I won’t have two SKUs. I’ll just have the one standard one. For any order from Hawaii (which I expect will be one in every 400 to 500 orders), I’ll just pull the Rhizobia and add a bottle of ammonium nitrate.
No, don’t ship the Rhizobia to Hawaii. That would be illegal and ipso facto morally reprehensible. Instead, gently remonstrate with Hawaii about their unreasonable restrictions. I figure you can air-drop a bunch of notes informing them of the wrong-headedness of their position. Of course, a bunch of loose pieces of paper would be lost or destroyed or ignored, so you should give the papers to messengers. What do you think, would 500 rabid possums get enough attention or should you go for 1000?
I am liking this guy SteveF and feel strongly that he and I can work on some really cool projects during the revolution and civil war coming.
Actually, I will be calling on all members of this board for their expertise at various points in The Struggle. I’d call it ‘Unser Kampf’ but that would probably scare somebody off, so will stick to English.
Why mess up Hawaii? Drop them critters over Mordor on the Potomac. And make it 100,000.
I see/hear on the nooz tonight that Santimonious actually won in Iowa and the Nutster is now in a dead heat with Mittens and meanwhile the second Mrs. Nutster is airing the dirty laundry again. Mittens, by the way, was the President of his cult’s Stake in Maffachufetts, and while contributing zillions to the cult, has also stashed more zillions in the Caymans. What a krew!
Why do people with dirty laundry, like Cain and Gingrich, even bother to run? They know they are going to be found out before it is all over. It is all over for Newt. Too much risk that something more will pop up, in the unlikely event of an emergency, er, uh candidacy. So it’s now down to Mittens and Santimonious.
What a choice!
The nooz dolts are making it sound, though, like the Nutster is making a huge surge now, and could blow away Sanctimonious easily, and maybe even beat Mittens.
But the fix is in, and I have long said so, on this board and others, for at least a year now; Mittens is the Annointed One, despite the loathing that RNC nabobs and potentates have for him; money, indeed, talks. And he has boatloads of it.
The media, however, in collusion with the DNC and WH, will hammer on Mittens’ clear distance from, indeed, total indifference to, the Great Unwashed Multitudes, us Mundanes and drones and peasants out here, clearly out of touch. The clown just said that “…$374,000 a year is not a lot of money…” and he makes ten grand bets with the other RINO cretins. Add to that his wacko cult’s belief system, his leadership of it, his gigantic financial contributions to it, and throw in a little bit of family history going back to the not-so-old West, and The Prophet’s minions are gonna have a field day stripping the bark off this poltroon.
Barry has another four, so get ready. Along with his lovely and brilliant wife and their mutual friends, Bill and Bernadine.
Betting? I thought Joseph Smith, Jr.’s followers were strictly prohibited from that.
Mittens is rich, though. But just like the elder Bush and grocery shopping, Mittens is very out-of-touch with what rich is. You would think somebody in his camp would alert him before he makes such egregious errors.
The longtime Republican side of my family informed me today of the Nutster’s marital leaks. That did it for them, and rest assured there are enough out there who think like my relatives, that Newt is finished in their view by today’s revelations. I doubt South Carolinians are so into free love that they will give Newt a pass on it.
Contrary to the Libertarian views often expressed here, it looks like the copyright and pirate issue is here to stay and not go away. I am not really on top of this like I should be, but my son, knowing how to use Twitter, Reddit, Digg, and a whole bunch of other instant notification stuff, told me that J Edgar’s mafia managed to shut down Megaupload and is extraditing a whole lot of people from New Zealand for further investigation on US federal charges of copyright violations.
Don’t mess with the US of A. Wherever you are (unless you are Al Queda in Pakistan), we will get you, waterboard you, lock up your ass in jail for the rest of your life. Wonder how this will affect the bit torrent sites in Sweden?
Meanwhile, as the MPAA and RIAA get their way (any thought that copyright might be reduced or eliminated is not even a laughing matter anymore), the jobless rate for us non-rich peons is revised further upwards. Can we please focus more on rich people and rich companies and let them have their way with us, and please waterboard the rest of us, so there will be no resistance whatever to the will of the rich? I know catching pirates in New Zealand is at the top of my list of what the US should be doing. Yours, too?
I am out early for a weekend video gig that will allow me no time for the Internet. See you next week!
Some Australian hacker or pirate (I’ve forgotten most of the details) was extradited to the US on one charge, they couldn’t make it stick in court so they charged him with something else. I thought that sort of thing was illegal.
@Miles: I find the whole question of jurisdiction here pretty astounding. Because they rent server space in the US, the courts claim jurisdiction and have them arrested. US jurisdiction should stop at the border: prohibit local US data centers from renting out their servers. That’s as far as it ought to go.
These are not US citizens, who were not in the US. I will be really interested to see if NZ actually extradites them. I am hoping against hope that NZ will flip the US off and tell it to take its
strong-armlong-arm statutes somewhere else.But don’t you know? This is Empire, writ large, and, like the Romans and Brits before us, we will go to the far corners of the earth to seek you out and do what needs to be done, whatever the cost in blood and treasure.
So it kills me when some of my fellow conservatives bitch at me that this is not an empire.
Which means you made a mistake going from libertarian to conservative. About the last good conservative in the original sense was Barry Goldwater.
I have in my book collection a volume of London Court Records from the early 1700s. Not really a collectible book, but it’s a very handsome book, and it looks great on the shelf. I wish more books were bound as good as this one.
But I digress. In this is the report of a murder trial. Seems a British Seaman went and had himself murdered in an opium den in Singapore. The Admiralty sent in the ships, seized the accused, dragged him back to London, tried, convicted and hung him.
Ah. Empire! What’s the point of having all those ships, if you don’t get to use them?
Sadly, the rest of the tome isn’t as interesting, and ranges from business deals gone bad, to unpaid loans.
This Dotcom character seems to be a real sleazeball, and has already been deported from Thailand to Germany for fraud and insider trading, as well as hacking. While I can’t condone the US’s actions against a foreign national, I deplore hackers like him. While I like freedom and free things, I prefer to receive them equally as freely, and not just take them. Hopefully, NZ will stand up and refuse to release him, but then they should charge him themselves for dragging their country into this mess.
Goldwater wasn’t a libertarian?
Funny, one of my earlier memories is of Goldwater giving a campaign speech on TV, standing in front of (or perhaps leaning on) a black grand piano. Assuming this was in 1964, I was three or four at the time – what a strange thing for a little kid to remember.
Goldwater was a libertarian in the same way that Ron Paul is, a small-government conservative who’s willing to live-and-let-live on social issues. Paul, for example, opposes abortion rights and gay marriage, which would ordinarily be enough for me to rule him out. But Paul says (and believes) that these issues are matters for the states. It’s not ideal, but I can live with that.
I was 10 or 11 years old in 1964. I can remember both commercials: “In your heart, you know he’s right” and “In your heart, you know he might”. I strongly supported Goldwater then, and I’d probably do so again if he were running now.
And in Missouri, he could!
[snip] But just like the elder Bush and grocery shopping, [snip]
I’m not really prone to defending George HW Bush, but the problem with the scanner at the grocery wasn’t that he was ‘out of touch with the common man’. It’s that he was of an age where married men simply did no (or almost no) grocery shopping. That sort of thing was housewive’s work, and I doubt very seriously that Walter Mondale (four years younger that GHWB) could have told anyone the price of milk or bread on the spur of the moment, either.
Well, I’m not in that age group, and I would have had no clue as to the price of bread or milk. Barbara does essentially all of the grocery shopping. I’m in a supermarket maybe once every two or three years.
Well, I buy milk and bread, but I don’t really pay attention to the prices. I have to buy it regardless, and not caring about the price helps me suck it up at the till.
I am not a real man, so do most of the grocery shopping and at least half of the cooking here. I am aware of the prices, bigtime.
Abortion-on-demand-no-apology and gay marriage are not at the top of the bucket list for genuine conservatives. Of which I am one. Goldwater got weak knees in his dotage and whined about junk like that. Ron Paul is a doctor and knows whereof he speaks of the damage that murdering over a million babies a year has done since the infamous and wretched Roe v. Wade, and which Roe regrets most vociferously and does her level best to fight. Gay marriage is a joke, and of course, contra natura and contra a normal civilized society, all of which have been built on the basis of heterosexual marriage and families procreating children. I do not begrudge gay couples their legal rights, and would insist that they have the same as the rest of us in that regard. They wanna get married, do it in a church, or with a JP or whatever, and I am also against marriage licenses, as if we were all dogs or cats. The State should be out of that business, like most other activities.
I’d also leave all this shit to the states, and if a bunch of folks in the northeast Megalopolis and on the Left Coast wanna have gay marriage, affirmative action race quotas, and worship the twin goddesses Diversity and Democracy, and the dread lords Materialism, Scientism, and Militarism, let them have at it. And other states that have different belief systems, cultures and socio-political agendas should be allowed to do so.
We’re eventually headed for Balkanization anyway, probably long after most of us here are dead and buried.
RBT wrote:
“I can remember both commercials: “In your heart, you know he’s right” and “In your heart, you know he might”. I strongly supported Goldwater then, and I’d probably do so again if he were running now.”
I think the Democrats came up with an ad with the slogan “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”
RBT wrote:
“Well, I’m not in that age group, and I would have had no clue as to the price of bread or milk. Barbara does essentially all of the grocery shopping. I’m in a supermarket maybe once every two or three years.”
I thought that, unlike 99.9% of men, that grocery shopping was a social event for you. “Costco run with Paul and Mary” is one of your standard lines. Plus who’d lift the 50 two litre bottles of coke into the trolley if you weren’t there?
I don’t think of Costco as a supermarket, although I guess we do buy a lot of groceries there. Still, other than under special circumstances, I have no idea what things cost. For example, I think I mentioned peanut butter prices at Costco. That was because I’d just seen something on FoxNews or CNN about peanut prices tripling, causing a rise in the cost of peanut butter. So I did notice how much it cost that time. (We didn’t really stock up on peanut butter, though; I think we have eight 3-pound jars in inventory.)
You exaggerate my Coke consumption, though. On the last several trips, we’ve bought only six four-packs of 2-liter Cokes and four four-packs of 2-liter Sprites, for a total of only 40 2-liter bottles. Of course, we’re making Costco runs much more often than we used to. I used to fill a shopping cart with four-packs of 2-liter Cokes. I think my record was 22 four-packs of 2-liter Cokes. Call it 90 kilos of Coke, counting packaging. That shopping cart was probably never the same. The guy who checked us out asked if we were having a party. I told him no, but that I liked to buy a month’s supply at a time.
I was in high school and was bitten by a dog and thus scarred for life while passing out campaign material for Goldwater. I did not have access to a car at that time, and was in this escapade with a girl and her little brother; she had anytime access to the family’s #3 car, which is why she drove. I was really, really stupid about girls back then. This girl’s parents were straight from my favorite old country, and she spoke German fluently — which I did not know at the time. Found out years later. I could kick myself for not taking advantage of that.
Then the same thing happened in college. I worked on the staff of the university radio station, being paid by a work-scholarship. The girl who functioned as my part-time secretary, was born in Germany to German parents, then moved here where she grew up and became a US citizen. She, too, spoke fluent German (and took German as a foreign language, pretending she did not know it). Again, I did not find out about this until she was married. Sheesh!
RBT wrote:
“I have no idea what things cost.”
I only track prices in general terms because I do most of my grocery shopping at one place: Woolworths. The Coles at the town centre is too hard to access and the other places are either too expensive or have a small range. The Costco in Canberra would be at least a 50 km round trip, plus I’d have to join, so I don’t go there.
At Christmas I stated to my sister, and she agreed, that prices at the major grocery chains in Australia had gone ballistic in the last few years. It used to be possible to get 1.25 litre Pepsi Max and for 79c a bottle on special, and about $1.29 normally. Now it’s normal price is $1.89 and it’s only rarely on special. I can get a 2 litre bottle for $1.99 normal price, which makes the 1.25 litre bottle hardly ever worth buying. My sister thinks they’re charging more to fund their loyalty scheme, but I’d be happy to forgo that.
“You exaggerate my Coke consumption, though.”
I drink quite a lot of cola but from what you’ve said in the past I think your consumption dwarfs mine. I never get more than 50 litres at a time, but I’m sure you’ve mentioned getting much more than that in one go.
Chuck wrote:
“She, too, spoke fluent German (and took German as a foreign language, pretending she did not know it).”
One of my pals did something like this: took Indonesian to year 12 level at high school and then enrolled in Introductory Indonesian at uni. She said she did her assignments in the five minutes before classes began. I don’t see the point of this, it’d be lime ne doing two unit maths in high school and then remedial maths at uni.
*like me