08:46 – I’m back to working heads-down on the forensics book and kit, with occasional breaks to do something down in the lab.
One thing I’m going to do today is convert some of that copper(II) sulfate I bought at Home Depot over the weekend into 1.00 molar copper(II) sulfate solution. The label of the last batch of Root Kill I had showed an assay of 99.8% copper(II) sulfate. I confirmed that gravimetrically. The molar mass of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate is 249.68 grams/mole, so I dissolved 500.44 grams of the Root Kill in just under two liters of water. If the assay was correct, that 500.44 grams of Root Kill should have contained 499.36 grams or 2.00 moles of copper(II) sulfate. I filtered the solution using a weighed piece of filter paper, washed as much as possible of the soluble material out of the filter paper, dried the paper, and reweighed it. The mass difference was 1.13 gram, made up I’m sure of insoluble copper(II) oxide, which confirmed the assay of 99.8% copper(II) sulfate. Bizarrely, that $13 bottle of Root Kill contains 908 grams of what is for all practical purposes reagent-grade copper(II) sulfate. It even includes the CAS number on the label.
Alas, the assay on the new bottles lists the copper(II) sulfate content as “only” 99.0%. I think I’ll trust them and simply use 249.68/.99 = 252.20 grams per liter to make up the 1.00 molar solution today. I suspect that if I repeated the gravimetric tests I’d find that this stuff is in fact 99.0%. I’ll make up several liters. The 1.0 M solution is used as is in the chemistry kits, for which I need two liters per 60 kits. I can also use it to make up various solutions for the biology kits, including Barfoed’s, Benedict’s, and Biuret reagents, so it won’t hurt to have several liters made up. Copper(II) sulfate takes literally a week to dissolve, so having it made up ahead of time may save time later.
Bob wrote: “I think I’ll trust them…”
Famous last words.
No, famous last words in the south are:
“Hey, watch me do this.”
Some interesting analysis of statistically significant measured numerical ability between users of Chrome, Firefox, and IE. http://www.calcudoku.org/papers/
Over a million number puzzles solved by random visitors of different browsers, and Chrome users were between 10 and 30% faster at solving the number puzzles than IE users, with Firefox users inbetween.
Important, no, but interesting.
Ray wrote:
I thought the Southern specific version was “Y’all hold ma beer and watch this” followed by “YEEEEEEEHAAAAAaaaaaa!”?
You know, I always wondered where that bogus “YEE-HAW” came from. The real Rebel Yell is nothing like it. The real one is an ululating, high-pitched sound that resembles a combination of a wolf howl and the Indian war cries in those old movies. And I’m pretty sure it’s derived from the Scots war cries that my ancestors used to scare the shit out of the Sassenachs.
You can still hear the original on just about any Saturday night if you’re in the Southland in the vicinity of a redneck bar. On the other hand, I’ve never heard any self-respecting Southerner utter Yee-haw, except perhaps in jest.
Well, how would you spell a drunken, warbling yell? “Yee-haw” might be as good as the originator could get.
I’ve heard people out West, like Arizona and New Mexico, yell yee-haw when doing something foolish, exciting, or risky (some category overlap, there). However, half of those people were military folk. I don’t know if they were native to the area, had assimilated while posted there, or what.
It’s from the movies. The Wikipedia article on the Rebel Yell cites that as the source for the Yee-haw version.
How about Yee-ha, Yee-aay-eee, wawoo-woohoo or yay-hoo?
Maybe we should go with, “if you claim you heard it, and weren’t scared, you ain’t really heard it!”?
Ah, I should have checked Wikipedia. I see that they have two recording of real Confederate soldiers doing the Rebel Yell. Of course, they were really old at the time the recordings were made, so you have to imagine what it’d be like to face a charge by an entire division of our boys all screaming like this at the top of their lungs. Yeah, I’d say that any bluebelly who heard that and wasn’t scared was either nuts or already dead.
I don’t need to hear that, I’ve seen Braveheart and Kiwis doing the haka.
The bluebellies mighta been skeered but they just kept coming, and coming, and coming….fully uniformed and equipped, with more artillery, more rifles, more bullets, etc., etc. And the war criminal thugs Grant and Sherman didn’t care how many bluebelly kids it took to overwhelm the poor South.
Well, the rain’s STILL belting down outside. I can’t believe this, when ever pay attention I can hear rain. Well, there was a short pause around lunch time yesterday, and I’m getting pretty sick of it. It’s been going almost non-stop since last Saturday.
This reminds me of something I overheard a work colleague say in the Eighties after only two days of heavy rain: “Another 38 days of this and we’ll be in real trouble.”
A few years ago there was some discussion here about the meaning/s of the words pretty, beautiful and attractive, especially as applied to female Homo Sapiens. Bob said that a woman could be none, one, two or all three of these. So what qualifies a woman for any of these terms?
I’ve always thought that a beautiful woman was a potential beauty contest winner, and that a pretty woman was not beauty contest material but still very attractive. I use pretty and attractive as near synonyms. I can think of many woman who I’d call beautiful or pretty/attractive but cant think of any who are both beautiful and pretty/attractive, nor can I think of a way to distinguish pretty and attractive.
Skeered bluebellies, eh? Tell it to the men of the 20th Maine. Fight until you run out of ammunition, then fix bayonets and charge…
I feel yer pain, Greg; last spring, summer and fall there were about four days total when it did not rain. And it warn’t four consecutive days, neither. It does wear on ya, don’t it? All day…all night…all day again…everything sopping wet…drenched….
…and then we had two historic floods, each of which did tremendous damage to local river valley towns here, and throughout the state, with the last ruined road finally repaired only last month. Washed out bridges, roads, houses, even the new fire department in the town ten miles from us. Seven dead.
At least half of the property I am sitting on here right now was under water, and a new stream appeared near the house where none had been before, big enough and fast enough to float a canoe or rowboat or kayak. Water across the road in both directions during both floods, and me in this house alone, essentially stranded, unless I wanted to jump in a canoe or chance walking through it. I wept in fear and trembling…peed my pants…
…naw, not hardly. We got us several weeks of food and water here, means to cook and eat it, phone, internet, and home media setup to watch all my violent flicks.
And on the news videos that went online, a true flood classic: coffins from one of the cemeteries not far from here, floating downstream…
Ed is referring, no doubt, to Chamberlain’s men at Gettysburg, notably portrayed in the movie of the same name. Yep, fix them bayonets. They busted up the Confederates with that, too. Scary shit seeing a bunch of guys running through the woods at your ass with long shiny bayonets and they don’t seem to care about dying. You can yell that Rebel yell all day but you better have plenty of ammo and be firing as you run backwards…
Ah, what am I saying, glorifying this shit. It ain’t no glory.
OFD wrote:
“…naw, not hardly. We got us several weeks of food and water here, means to cook and eat it, phone, internet, and home media setup to watch all my violent flicks. ”
You can always eat the cats. You’d be keeping yourself alive and ridding the world of noxious pests.
Okay, what do people think of the idea of forcing someone to disclose a passphrase that may incriminate them:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/constitutional-showdown-voided-feds-decrypt-laptop-without-defendants-help.ars
Someone once in another forum suggested using a passphrase that was only mildly self incriminating, like “I ran a red light last January”. This passphrase would protect a file that contained something much more serious. Would that work.
You can say any damn thing, which is better than trying to claim you don’t remember. Give them what sounds like a partial passphrase but you ain’t sure of the last several characters, mighta been this or that, etc.
Appear anxious to cooperate, even fearful…wet yer pants…maybe the buggers will buy it or maybe they’ll give ya the soda pop treatment…
Yes, by my definitions the three are entirely unrelated.
Beauty is forever. A woman who is beautiful at 25 years old is also beautiful at 45, 65, and 85. Beauty has a lot to do with underlying bone structure. Very few winners of “beauty” contests are actually beautiful; some are not even pretty. Pretty is ephemeral, fading with youth. Pretty has more to do with pleasing and regular features. Attractive has little or nothing to do with facial features. It does have to do with body shape (ratio of hips to stomach and boobs, and so on) but that’s something evolution has hard-wired us for; we’re not even aware of it other than subliminally. Attractive also has to do with scent, voice timbre, mannerisms, and so on. Personality, sense of humor, and other intangibles are also important. Perhaps strangest is that there is also increasing evidence that genotype as expressed in phenotype is important. Men really are attracted to women who are good genetic matches, and vice versa.
Very few women are beautiful, maybe one in a thousand. A minority of women are pretty, to a greater or lesser extent. Many women are attractive, and just about any young woman is attractive to at least some men.
I’ve known women who had zero of those three characteristics; any one of them; any two of them; and (very rarely) all three of them.
Ahh thanks, I was reading a Wikipedia article to the effect that in a trial men were asked to sleep in a t-shirt, and then women were exposed to the t-shirts and asked to assess the attractiveness of the men who’d worn them. (sight unseen.) There was actually a correlation between the women’s picks and a separate assessment of how attractive the men were considered to be, which surprised me.
I’ve mentioned Meredith, the goddess from my Year 11 class who was dating the scruffiest looking guy I’d ever seen to that time. Perhaps he had good genes and Meredith could detect them by smell.
Just sharing my latest toy: A crap “microscope” (more like a handheld 20x magnifier) sold on Amazon is actually more fun than expected. Only $3.50 shipped, and it’s cheap plastic, but it works pretty well, to be honest.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002E0MU70/ref=nosim
Any child in the world would have a blast with it for a few hours, and they’d be learning the whole time.
Regarding beauty verses pretty…
When this sort of question comes up I always think of two sisters I knew 20-25 years ago. The elder was very pretty, and the one I would have killed to get a date with. Even though she was “only” pretty I’m sure she would have had a good chance of winning any beauty contest she entered. The younger was drop dead gorgeous, “beautiful” and a shoo in for the title of Miss World if she’d entered. I liked her as a person but wasn’t keen on her.
On a somewhat different scale, I have always enjoyed categorizing the fairer sex as “girls”, “women” and “ladies” – where any particular person can be a mix of the three. “Girls” being the carefree, have-fun types, “women” being motherly and nurturing, and “ladies” being the dignified, remote objects of adoration. Any female has some attributes of all three; finding the right mixture is the trick…
When my elder neice was little she referred to single women (of practically any age) as a girl and a married woman as a lady.
I tend to avoid using the word girl unless the female is pre-pubescent or I’m with people I know well. A lot of women seem offended. A woman can be any post-pubescent female (but I’d usually call a teenager a young woman). Ladies can be post-pubescent women of any age.
I caused some amusement and/or offence when I was young, like referring to a 50+ woman as a girl and a female phone caller for my mum as “some dame” (I didn’t think to cover the mouthpiece of the phone when answering mum’s question as to who it was.) When I want to rattle a female’s chain I may use terms like “bird”, “chick”, “wimin” and so on. I’d never call a woman a slut unless (1) I meant it, (2) I was out of striking distance.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons that unintentional incest is so common among siblings that are separated young and subsequently meet. If they do not grow up in each others’ company, brothers and sisters are strongly attracted sexually to each other because they “smell right” and “look right”. Conversely, brothers and sisters who do grow up together normally have zero sexual attraction for each other, which again is evolution in action.
The US government is making it more and more difficult to live abroad as a US citizen. I got a notice today from the bank we’ve used for years: they want all sorts of guarantees from me regarding my US tax liability. Meanwhile, I am getting ready to file my 2011 tax return, and I see that the IRS is adding a whole slew of additional reporting requirements. My initial impression is that providing them with this information would violate the local laws here where I live. Great, I’m going to have to hire a lawyer in order to file a stinking tax return.
I don’t know that this phenomenon is limited to Americans living abroad. Every year our tax return gets more and more complicated, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
No, this is very much an American specialty. No other major country taxes non-resident citizens (according to Wikipedia, only Eritrea and the US have “citizenship-based” taxation).
Right. If you are German and working in the US, you don’t report anything. If you are US and working in Germany, you have to report everything, including — when I was there — all foreign accounts which exceeded a balance of US$14,000 in them at any time during the year. The US government wants to know everything about you, control your access to the Internet, and now the US military wants to be able to jail you for life at Guantanamo without a trial.
What a country!
Go Galt, young man, go Galt.
Brad wrote: “No, this is very much an American specialty. No other major country taxes non-resident citizens (according to Wikipedia, only Eritrea and the US have “citizenship-based” taxation).”
No it’s not. Canada has specific rules about residents, non-residents and taxes.
If you live and work abroad, but have residential ties, or have dependents, such as a spouse or children 18 or younger that remain in Canada, expect to submit a tax return on your worldwide income.
You have to apply to be a non-resident, and pay an exit tax before escaping the CRA’s clutches.
If you don’t submit a return, and come back to Canada to live, or have changed your mind about being a non-resident, then expect to pay taxes on your total worldwide income for the time period you were gone. You can’t escape taxes and retain the benefits of the society you live in. At least, you shouldn’t.
” You can’t escape taxes and retain the benefits of the society you live in. At least, you shouldn’t.”
That is a mouthful. There are taxes and there are taxes. This is a country where only half the citizens pay any taxes at all, and some gigantic corporations pay none because they hire battalions (literally in the case of GE) of former IRS agents to work their magic for them. And there are fair taxes and then there are confiscatory and punitive taxes. In any case, most of us who are wage earners get no say on it at all; it’s all taken automatically from our pay checks at virtual gunpoint and the State, in its infinite wisdom, not only dispenses benefits (which we can also discuss), but also spends our earned money on whatever it sees fit, like foreign war adventures, DOD contractor overruns, Obama’s golf vacations and Moochelle’s triple bacon steakburgers-and-super-size the fries while I lecture your peasant asses on eating your broccoli, and making sure the Wall Street banksters get their accustomed exorbitant and obscene bonuses.
Benefits? What, our crumbling infrastructure? The burials at Arlington? A pittance in our elder years, when many of us will be choosing each month between heating oil and groceries?
These buggers are fast killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
If I live abroad, what benefits do I expect from the place I left? Nothing consequential that costs money that I don’t pay (like still having a bank account, which not only earned no interest while we were gone, but got a $5/mo charge, regardless of balance) — so I was paying my fair share for that account. In Germany, if you leave, you do not pay taxes; you pay taxes when you live there and receive benefits. The small amount of research I have done, indicates that many, if not most, countries do the same. The US, being a very lagging follower these days, instead of a leader, like it once was, has not caught on to this, yet. The world outside of the US, is arranging itself to compete for taxpayers and talent, rather than squeezing them to death, like the US (and apparently Canada) does. That will only make people in the US relatively poorer as time goes on.
And I repeat my assertion made years ago while I was still in Europe: anybody who thinks the quality of life in Europe is not better than in the US, needs to try it for a while before saying that. IMO, except for not being able to buy computers and their parts for a song, life is far better there than in the US — especially the cost of health care, which is completely out-of-control in the US. As Dean Baker often points out, health care in the US costs many times over the European average, and life expectancy in the US is considerably less than in Europe. I can personally attest to the cost angle, having had to partake of health care both here and there. Cost of a doctor visit in Berlin was never more than €30 and often €15 to 20. The minimum I have paid here for a routine doctor visit is $146, and some visits have been considerably more. Cost of an EKG there was €15; cost here, $120. And Baker also claims it is not subsidies that cause the costs to be low; it is not paying doctors more than a little over the average wage, and having hospitals that operate more cost-efficiently and effectively. In fact, I noted here that my doctor daughter in-law would retire to less money than tenured teachers do. Meanwhile, a US doctor I know, just added a Jag to his fold of 3 BMW’s. What a country!
My visits to the GP cost zip, as I am a part time university student and go to the campus health service. If I wasn’t going there I’d expect to pay $50-60 and get $30 back from Medicare. Specialists are a different story. My endocrinologist charges about $140 a visit (15 minutes), I get about half back from Medicare.
This place is going to ruin too, but fortunately not as quickly as the US. Hopefully, in 18 months we’ll have a new government and the lovely Julia can go back to being a soulless lawyer. (Err, sorry about the redundancy.)