Month: February 2012

Sunday, 19 February 2012

09:22 – We’re under a blizzard warning for tonight. Well, a blizzard by our standards. Temperatures in the 20’s (~ -5C), with winds of 25 MPH (40 KPH), and two to four inches (5 to 10 cm) of snow.

We got a lot done yesterday on the biology kits. We now have 60 sets of the solids–thirteen of them–packaged, labeled, and bagged into subassemblies. We also started making up 100 sets of tube subassemblies. Those are six glass test tubes individually packaged inside 50 mL polypropylene centrifuge tubes (for shipping protection), with six 15 mL polypropylene centrifuge tubes, all inside a quart ziplock bag. I’ve made up all six of the stains included in the kit–Eosin Y, Gram’s Iodine, Hucker’s Crystal Violet, Methylene Blue, Safranin O, and Sudan III–and today we’ll bottle and label 60 sets of those.


11:47 – I’ve often complained that one can’t buy real chemistry sets nowadays. The kinds of chemistry sets I grew up with have been extinct for close to 40 years. Until now.

John Farrell Kuhns of H.M.S. Beagle is now offering a real chemistry set, the kind I drooled over back in the 1960’s. The hand-built H.M.S. Beagle Master Chemistry Set echoes a bygone era, when millions of boys hoped to find something just like this under the Christmas tree.

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Saturday, 18 February 2012

10:17 – Along with doing laundry, it’s another lab day for me today, while Barbara labels and fills containers and makes up subassemblies for the biology kits. She’s working upstairs today, filling containers with non-hazardous materials. Tomorrow, we’ll work downstairs, filling containers with hazardous materials. Well, actually, they’re not hazardous, except to our work surfaces and floors. I’m making up several stains today, most of which would indelibly stain counters, tables, and hardwood floors. We’ll fill those containers in the basement.


12:55 – I was doing fine until I made up the last of the stains for the biology kit, Hucker’s crystal violet. When I inverted the container to mix the solution, the cap leaked. So my hands now have pretty (and indelible) purple stains. I wasn’t wearing gloves because this stain is hazardous only in the sense that it, well, stains things. Oh, well. All working chemists get used to having stains on their hands.

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Friday, 17 February 2012

10:13 – Today is a miscellaneous day. I’m going to take a break from writing and get some work done in the lab. I also have a few more purchase orders to get out for the biology kits.

Interestingly, I had to fight off a guy today who wanted to order a biology kit right now. As I pointed out, he had no idea what was in the kit or how much it would cost. He wanted to send me extra money and have me refund the difference when we’d finally set the price. I finally convinced him that we would allocate the very first kit to him and ship it as soon as it became available.


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Thursday, 16 February 2012

07:55 – A comment yesterday got me to thinking. Dave mentioned that if the kits were still available in a dozen years or so, his daughter would be the right age for them.

I replied that we’re in this for the long haul, which is true, but it got me to thinking (again) about what happens if I get run over by a beer truck. As things stand, although Barbara helps with packing, labeling, and other tasks, this is really a one-man operation. I wear all of the hats, from lead scientist to manual writer to IT to purchasing, A/R, and A/P to …. well, you get the idea. The last thing I want to do is grow too fast, which means for at least the next couple of years we’ll be doing things pretty much as we’re doing them now.

But I do want to make sure that if I do get run over by that beer truck, Barbara will be in a position to carry on, either herself or with hired help. I intend to build this business gradually, with the goal being to establish it as a rock-solid enterprise. If for some reason I’m no longer around, I don’t want the business to die. I’ve already made some efforts in that direction. Several months ago, I talked to Mary Chervenak. As Mary is aware, Barbara is not a scientist, so one of the big things she’d need would be a scientific advisor. Mary (and Paul) are ideal for that. They could steer Barbara in the right direction and help her understand sciency things that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to deal with on her own. I’ve also made a start on documenting everything about the business, from usernames and passwords for the website to a procedures manual for making up chemicals to lists of wholesalers, contacts, and account information to business and corporate information.

To be honest, I’m not sure what Barbara would do in that situation. She might just choose to let things drop. But if she does want to continue the business, I want to do everything possible to make it as easy as possible for her to do that. At least until one of my clones is old enough to take over.


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Wednesday, 15 February 2012

08:58 – At least Amazon Prime instant video saves recent searches, so when I pressed the asterisk button on the Roku controller last night the search box came up with Inspector Lewis already listed. Still, it’s pretty obvious that Amazon is trying to make watching free videos difficult. Presumably, they’re paying for those videos by the number of times they’re watched, so it’s in their interest to minimize free views. It’s pretty clear that Netflix has nothing to worry about from Amazon.


I’m still working heads-down on the forensics book re-write. There’s a surprising amount of work involved in re-purposing the text to make it kit-based, mainly because having a customized kit available opens up the options considerably. We’re able to add lab sessions that weren’t practical before because of the cost of purchasing all the necessary items piecemeal. Of course, using the book won’t require buying the kit. Anyone who wants to can still buy all of the stuff piecemeal, but they’ll end up spending a lot more money to do that.


13:09 – Hmmm. Here’s a fascinating video of a rabbit that thinks it’s a Border Collie. Apparently, the actual Border Collie shown in the video has trained the rabbit to herd sheep. I particularly liked the part around 2:08 where one of the sheep challenges the rabbit, who gives it that steely-eyed Border Collie stare. The sheep decides it’s not worth messing with something as dangerous as a rabbit.

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Tuesday, 14 February 2012

07:58 – UPS showed up yesterday with seven or eight large boxes, so we now have about two thirds of the components needed to build the first batch of biology kits. I have a few more small purchase orders to get out this week for the biology kits, but otherwise I’ll be working heads-down on the forensics book re-write.


I signed up for Amazon Prime yesterday, and last night Barbara and I watched our first Amazon streaming video. It was the first episode of Inspector Lewis Series 4, which Netflix doesn’t have on DVD, let alone streaming.

Pretty clearly, Amazon is doing everything they can to make it difficult for people to watch free streaming videos on their service. Instead, they really, really want you to pay for the video. Incredibly, there is no queue for free streaming titles (although there is a queue for purchased or rented videos). To watch a free video, you have to search for the title each time. For example, after we watched episode one of Lewis with our Roku, we switched back over to Netflix to watch an episode of Scrubs. To watch the second episode of Lewis, I’ll have to search for it again, using the arrow keys and virtual keyboard on the Roku.

Amazon’s attempt to force people to pay for videos that they can watch for free leads to a ridiculous situation. When I clicked on the first episode of Lewis, Amazon gave me a choice. As a Prime member, I could (a) watch the video for free, or (b) pay $2.99 to watch it. Guess which one I chose. At least the default option was to watch it for free. I wonder how many people choose the second option.

I read about people who are dropping Netflix streaming and substituting Amazon Prime streaming, which strikes me as ridiculous. Not only is Amazon’s catalog a tiny fraction of Netflix’s, but Amazon intentionally makes it as hard as possible to find and watch free videos. We’ll be treating Amazon Prime streaming as a supplement to Netflix, but nothing more. If we want to watch something specific and Netflix doesn’t have it, we’ll try Amazon. But that’s about it. And I’m sure that that’s exactly what Amazon hopes we’ll do.

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Monday, 13 February 2012

09:44 – If you needed any more evidence that cats are evil, go read this. Yes, it’s true. Cats are responsible for most of the evils in the world. They carry a hideous infection that is almost impossible to treat and severely affects the functioning of the brains of people who are infected with it. (Most liberals suffer from toxoplasmosis. I am entirely serious about this. If they weren’t infected, they probably wouldn’t be liberals. If you’ve ever wondered how liberals can be so clueless, now you know.)

This is why I won’t let Colin catch cats. If you see a cat, do the world a favor. Shoot it and burn the corpse. Seriously. And don’t let your dog catch one, unless you want your dog to vote for Obama.


The Greek Kabuki theatre continues. Everyone, including Greece, knows that the EU, which is to say Germany, has already written off Greece as unsalvageable. Germany’s only concern right now is to minimize the cost of this mess for Germany. At this point, Germany and the rest of the EU are pretty confident that they have in place what’s necessary to prevent a Greek default from toppling the rest of the southern tier eurozone nations. (They’re wrong, as they’re about to find out.) So, smart money is now betting that Germany will allow Greece to collapse on 20 March, confident that the collapse can be contained to Greece. The only reason this may not happen is that Germany may still decide to buy a little more time to shore up its defenses, although the cost of doing so is extremely high. Greece, of course, is doing what it’s done all along; promising anything to get more loans, with no intention of even attempting to meet its commitments. Germany, of course, knows that Greece will promise anything to get more loans, but has no intention of even trying to comply with the loan conditions.

A year or so ago, I compared Greece to the sheriff in Blazing Saddles, putting his own gun to his head and threatening to shoot himself if everyone didn’t back off. That’s exactly what Greece has been doing for the last year, threatening to commit suicide and drag the rest of the eurozone down with it. But Germany has finally had enough. Merkel’s message to Greece is now, “Go ahead and pull the trigger. We’re better off without you anyway.”


I think I’m going to go ahead and sign up for Amazon Prime. For $79/year, it’s just about a no-brainer. Not only do we buy a lot of stuff from Amazon that we could be getting free 2-day shipping on, but there’s that one free ebook a month and the streaming videos to sweeten the pot. I’ve been checking lately, and a lot of stuff that Netflix has only on DVD, Amazon has streaming.

Speaking of Netflix streaming, we just bagged MI-5 (originally Spooks). It was supposed to be excellent, but it’s actually crap. Bad writing, bad acting, bad everything. We suffered through 10 or so episodes, hoping that it would get better, but it was actually getting worse. We bagged it in the middle of an episode last night. The MI-5 crew was attempting to deal with a dirty bomb going off in London. Except that it wasn’t a dirty bomb; it was a nerve gas release. Sitting there listening to the pseudo-scientific crap finally did it for me. Were you aware, for example, that VX nerve gas takes 1 to 2 hours to disable the victim (actually, it’s more like 15 seconds to a minute before loss of consciousness)? Or that the antidote is atropine (true, in combination with 2-PAM and a sedative) injected directly into the heart(!)? Or that 10 kilograms of VX released in London was sufficient to kill everyone in southeast England (actually, if it was distributed as an aerosol it might kill everyone within a few hundred yards downwind, not that a terrorist bomb is likely to produce an aerosol effectively.) I could deal with the scientific bogosity, but that in combination with sloppy writing and the actors chewing the scenery was just too much to tolerate.

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Sunday, 12 February 2012

09:29 – Darwin Day, and Colin turns a year old today. Some would say he’s now officially a dog, but he’s still very much a 12-month puppy. He is showing some signs of calming down a bit, but he’s still doing stuff like eating bedspreads. In fact, he’s gone through two in the last month. One was shredded completely beyond salvage, but the other is now in my Trooper as a tarp for times when we haul straw, mulch, and other messy stuff in the back.

Barbara and I got quite a bit done yesterday on the biology kits. We’re shooting to have the first 60 kits ready by 22 March, one month before the book is published. That leaves us a bit of slack in case something unforeseen crops up. I haven’t costed out the kits yet, but just eyeballing it I think we’ll be able to keep the price in the same general range as the chemistry kits or perhaps a bit higher.


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Saturday, 11 February 2012

09:31 – Barbara emailed the author Stephen Booth to report a slight problem with one of his ebooks that she’d just read on her Kindle. The copyright page credited the book to Alexander McCall Smith rather than Booth. She got a nice reply from Booth, asking her how she’d managed to get that book for the Kindle since it hadn’t been published in the US. (Steve is a popular mystery author in the UK, but has had trouble getting a US publisher.) Barbara was horrified last night when I told her I’d grabbed it off a torrent site.

So, this morning, I replied to Mr. Booth, explaining that we’d purchased his books when we could, including (in the past) ordering them from UK booksellers, waiting weeks for them to arrive, and often paying more in shipping costs than the cost of the books themselves. I told him that Barbara had asked me to get some of his newer titles as Christmas gifts and that I’d tried hard to buy them. Amazon didn’t have the ebook version, nor even any used copies for sale, let alone new copies. So I grabbed them off a torrent site. I also mentioned that if he still owns the US rights to his titles, he should seriously consider self-pubbing them on Amazon.


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Friday, 10 February 2012

10:23 – I took the day off yesterday, the first in several months. I’ve come down with a cold, from what source I don’t know since I seldom leave the house.

On the plus side, everything we need to build the first batch of biology kits is either already here or on the way, with just three exceptions. I need to order some potassium dihydrogen phosphate (used in the nitrogen-free fertilizer concentrate supplied with the kit) and some sodium dodecylsulfate (used in extracting DNA). I also have 120 50mm funnels on backorder until 21 March.

Today, I’ll get those last purchase orders issued and then jump back into the rewrite of the forensics book.


11:44 – I decided to take it easy today as well. It’s hard to do what I do when annoying virus symptoms are distracting me.

I see the Greeks are rioting. I made a comment the other day about them needing to cut 1.5 million government jobs, and someone pointed out in the comments that there were “only” 800,000 government employees in Greece to start with. Actually, no one, including the Greek government, knows how many government employees there are. The commonly quoted numbers between 800,000 and 1,000,000 are almost certainly far lower than reality. The best numbers I had as of last autumn were between 1.2 million and 1.6 million, depending on how one counts them. At any rate, my suggestion was actually to get rid of all of them and start over.

Barbara and I started watching Lillyhammer, Netflix’s first co-production of original programming. It stars Steve van Zandt (familiar as Silvio Dante from the Sopranos and as a member of the E-Street Band) as a New York mafia guy who is relocated by witness protection to Lillehammer, Norway. As we watched the first episode, one of the story arcs made me think about why Europe is moribund. The gangster decides to star a bar/nightclub in Norway, and finds that he has to go through incredible hoops to do so. That’s commonplace in Europe, whereas in the US someone who wants to start a business just starts a business. Here, it’s literally pro forma–fill in a couple of forms and you’re good to go. Is it any wonder that the US is dynamic and Europe moribund? If Obama really wants to get things going, all he has to do is exempt small businesses–say, those with fewer than 100 employees, or better 1,000 employees–from all city, state, and federal regulations and taxes. Make small businesses a protected species. Unemployment would plummet, tax collections would skyrocket, and government outlays for social programs would fall off a cliff.

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