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Month: February 2012

Thursday, 9 February 2012

09:56 – The situation in Greece would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Right now, the Greek government and the Troika are arguing about trivial issues like cutting 15,000 government employees. The Troika surely must know that that’s a drop in the bucket. Even to get a start on solving the problem, Greece needs to cut literally 100 times that number of government employees.

Everyone is fully aware that cutting 15,000 employees won’t even begin to make a start, but the Greek government is also fully aware that cutting even 15,000 government employees is likely to lead to riots and possibly a full-blown revolution. For a decade now, Greeks have gotten used to an unsustainably high standard of living, subsidized by cheap loans that there was never any prospect of them repaying. Now that the tap has run dry, Greece is going to have its standard of living cut in half, it it’s lucky. That’s what happens when, for a decade, a country consumes twice as much as it produces. Eventually, other people get tired of paying for it.

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Wednesday, 8 February 2012

08:22 – I’ve issued purchase orders for the bulk of the components for the first batch of biology kits and another batch of chemistry kits. I still need to issue a bunch of small POs to vendors that supply only one or two of the kit items each.

Once again, the effects of inflation were very noticeable. Since my last batch of orders in November, prices have increased by an average of maybe 6%. Many prices were unchanged and there were even a few reductions, but some prices increased by 15% or more, and the price on one item literally doubled. The main reason for the increases is that vendors issued their 2012 price lists in January, which they’ll generally honor through June or December, depending on the vendor.

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Tuesday, 7 February 2012

09:27 – The biology book is complete and off to the MAKE production crew. We’re finished with it, other than a QC pass or two, where we’ll do a quick check of the PDFs before the book actually goes to the printer. Amazon says the book will be available on 22 April, and I suspect that’s pretty accurate.

I’m off now to finish putting together purchase orders for the biology kits and more chemistry kits. Once I get those issued, it’ll be back to work on the forensics book re-write.

I see that there are Greek riots scheduled for today. Merkel cut Greece loose months ago, and it’s finally coming home to roost. As I predicted months ago, that 30% “haircut” for Greek bondholders turned into 50% and now appears likely to reach 80%, nominally. In fact, as I said, it’s actually going to be a 100% writedown, as Greece rapidly heads toward complete bankruptcy, with Portugal not far behind and Spain and Italy in the on-deck circle. The dominoes are starting to topple.

The fallout from the collapse of the euro isn’t likely to affect the US as deeply as some people seem to fear. US banks have very limited exposure to European debt, and exports to Europe are a fairly minor part of overall US production. Although clearly the exposure varies from state to state, on average US states probably do less than 2% of their business with Europe. Even if that disappears entirely, which it obviously won’t, the impact on US businesses will be relatively minor. The same can’t be said for China, however. China, which is leveraged out the wazoo, exports a large percentage of its overall production to Europe, and that export business is declining fast. That loss is already approaching levels that are catastrophic for China, and it looks like it can only get worse. Expect to see Chinese goods get cheaper as China tries desperately to keep exports up by increasing volumes to the US.

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Monday, 6 February 2012

09:51 – I saw the headline in this morning’s paper, and told Barbara that San Francisco had beaten Boston. She looked at the article later, and said that it was New York that had beaten New England (or vice versa; I don’t put useless information like that into anything but nano-term memory). I figured the Giants had moved from San Francisco to New York and the Patriots from Boston to New England (somewhere else in New England, I guess), but Barbara said she was pretty sure the Giants had been in New York for a long, long time. I told her I was almost sure I remembered them being in San Francisco. So we checked Wikipedia and found that we were both right. There was and still is a team in San Francisco named the Giants. Barbara explained to me that they play with a different-shaped ball. It still seems to me to be a strange thing for adults to concern themselves with.

Brian Jepson sent me a new batch of lab chapters with his comments, so that’s first on the to-do list this morning. Next up is generating purchase orders for components for the biology kits and for more chemistry kits. Once I finish those, it’s back to re-writing the forensics book.

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Sunday, 5 February 2012

09:06 – Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. I’d forgotten what a zoo Costco is on Saturdays. We usually go on Sundays, when it’s much less busy, but Paul and Mary are devoting today to Super Bowlish stuff.

Today we’ll assemble 11 more chemistry kits, which is all we have components for. I also need to put together purchase orders for more components, both for the chemistry kits and for the first 60 biology kits.

As we were riding to Costco yesterday, I was telling Paul about how I’d been screwed again by research. I was making up 0.5% aqueous eosin Y stain for the biology kits. I weighed out 5.00 g of eosin Y powder and dissolved it in about 900 mL of distilled water. The result was an intensely colored deep red solution, so dense that when I held it up to the fluorescent tube on the ceiling I couldn’t see light through the bottle. Alas, I’d been doing some research and came across a couple of papers from about 1924 that mentioned that making the stain 1% with respect to acetic acid made the resulting stain much more effective, staining cell components a much deeper red.

So I added 10 mL of glacial acetic acid, whereupon the contents of the flask turned a flocculent bright orange. Hmmm. I had to allow the contents of the flask to settle for several days to be certain, but it turns out that a significant amount of the eosin Y had precipitated as flakes. Crap. Just to be sure, I used a drop of that solution on a specimen. Rather than staining cell components a deeper red, it stained them a very, very pale orange.

My first inclination was to locate the grave site of that paper’s author, dig him up, and drive a stake through his heart. In all fairness, though, I’m willing to admit that he almost certainly merely reported what he observed. The eosin Y I bought in late 2011 may well have been very different from the stuff he bought under the name of eosin Y in 1924. Stains are notoriously variable in composition, even now. I think I’ll titrate some of my orange mess with sodium hydroxide. I’m betting that it’ll turn a nice intense red and the flakes will go back into solution as the pH increases.

13:00 – We just finished building 12 more chemistry kits, so we now have 13 in stock. Now I need to go through inventory and figure out what components I need to order for 60 more chemistry kits and 60 biology kits.

That takes care of discrete components, but the other issue I’ve done nothing about so far is raw materials inventory. That is, the kits, both chemistry and biology, contain numerous bottles of chemicals. Some of those are solids, which are easy to calculate. If a kit contains a 25 gram bottle of a particular solid chemical, I know that I need 1.5 kilograms of that chemical to build 60 kits. Allowing for some wastage, that means I need to have two kilograms or four pounds in stock, on order, or in combination.

Solutions are more complicated. For example, the biology kits will contain a 30 mL bottle of Benedict’s reagent. For 60 kits, I need 1,800 mL nominally, so I’d make up 2 liters. Two liters of Benedict’s solution requires 200 g of anhydrous sodium carbonate, 346 g of sodium citrate dihydrate, and 34.6 g of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate, so that’s three separate raw materials to keep track of. And many of the chemicals used in various solutions are used in more than one of the solutions, so there’s not necessarily a one-to-one mapping between a kit solution and the chemicals that make it up.

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Saturday, 4 February 2012

10:55 – Barbara and I are doing inventory this morning. I really hate doing inventory. I prefer to use the OMGWO inventory method, but it does have the one obvious drawback. We can’t use typical inventory software, because it won’t accept reasonable things for “Quantity”, like “lots” or “too many”.

We just shipped what I thought was the next-to-last chemistry kit yesterday and the last kit this morning. Fortunately, I found one more completed kit. We haven’t finished doing inventory yet, but at the moment it looks like we have enough components to assemble 10 more kits, but that’s only because we’re currently showing only 10 test tube brushes in inventory. We may come across a case of those later, which’d mean we’d have enough components to build 11 kits (only 11 test tube clamps and 11 vials of pH test paper). And so on.

What we’ll do eventually is have one inventory bin for each item and maintain an accurate running inventory for each. But that’s a ways off. We do need to get it done, though, because we have biology kits and forensics kits in progress, and some items are common to all kits.

What worries me at the moment is that I’ve been talking to a woman who’s teaching chemistry at a private school and is likely to order several kits soon. I have no idea whether “several” means four or five kits or 15 or 20 kits. So we need to get a handle on inventory quickly as a first priority, generate POs for stuff we’re short of as the second first priority, and build more chemistry kits as the third first priority. Geez. I’m glad the biology book is off to production.

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Friday, 3 February 2012

11:12 – Colin promised yesterday that he wouldn’t do that any more. We’ll see. He was born on 12 February 2011, so in little more than a week he’ll have his first birthday. As an 11-month pup, I’m sure he’s looking forward to that, although I’ve explained to him that turning a year old entails new responsibilities, among them not shitting on the bathroom floor. Barbara says that on the 12th Colin will be an official dog. I’m thinking he’ll be a 12-month pup.

I’m doing my usual serve-and-volley with edits on the biology book. As usual, they’re pretty light. No one has flagged any errors yet, so it’s usually just incorporating suggestions, fixing typos, and so on. Meanwhile, I’ve started work on adapting the forensics lab book we completed three years ago to a kit-based version. I just sent my editor a revised proposal for it. If possible, I’d like to get the revisions complete by mid-May, which means if we move on this it may be an autumn title. One way or another, the forensics kits will be ready in time for autumn semester.

Speaking of kits, I just shipped the next-to-last chemistry kit we had in stock. Ordinarily, we don’t let stock get that low. We have a dozen more kits partially built, so we’ll probably finish those up this weekend. I need to do inventory anyway, so this’ll be an opportunity to get a count on all the components and figure out what to reorder, not just to build more chemistry kits but to build biology kits and a prototype forensics kit as well. After we get biology and forensics out of the way, I also want to do a second edition of the chemistry book, this one written around a kit. Two kits, actually. One for first-year only, and a second kit to supplement that for second-year. A lot of people use the chemistry book for home schooling, and with kits I can make it much more affordable for them to do so, which in turn should increase the number of people using the book for homeschooling.

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Thursday, 2 February

10:04 – Yesterday and today I’ve been incorporating comments from reviewers and posting the “final” versions of the manuscript chapters. We’re through the initial narrative chapters and the first two lab sessions, other than incorporating any late-arriving comments.

I don’t know what we’re going to do about Colin. When he first came home with us, I thought he was going to be easy to house-train. He had accidents, of course, but he seemed to realize that he was expected to urinate and defecate outside. Then he noticed that Barbara and I used the indoor bathrooms, and apparently decided that what was good enough for us was good enough for him. He decided that our hall bathroom was for him. Fortunately, it has a ceramic tile floor.

He no longer urinates indoors, and most of the time he defecates outdoors. But only most. He goes through spells when he reverts to using the hall bathroom. He might go two or three weeks without doing anything indoors, and then defecate in the hall bathroom several times over the next few days. He’s in one of those spells now. It’s particularly aggravating because it almost always happens minutes after we come back in from a walk. Before we come in, I lead him over to the natural area where he’s been trained to go. He’ll stand there just looking down the street. I tell him we’re going to go in the house and if he needs to do something he’d better do it now. Eventually, he trots up to the front door and waits to come in. And then, often within five or ten minutes, he shits on the bathroom floor.

I wouldn’t mind so much if he’d just shit on the floor. That’s easy enough to clean up and sterilize. But the really disgusting part is that he usually eats it. That’s because we made the mistake very early of pointing at a pile on the floor and yelling at him. He’s obviously decided that it’s safer to hide the forensic evidence.

This morning, I took him for a walk just after Barbara left. Five minutes after we came back into the house, he shit on the floor. At least that time he didn’t eat it. As I told Barbara, it may be beyond the capabilities of even a Border Collie to understand if I yell at him for shitting on the floor and then praise him for not eating it, so I just cleaned it up without saying anything to him. Then, about 9:15, I took him for another walk down to the corner. Before we came back in the house, I gave him a good opportunity to do anything he needed to do. Sure enough, five minutes after we came back in, he shit on the floor, but this time he ate it. And people wonder why so many Border Collie pups end up in rescue.

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Wednesday, 1 February 2012

08:49 – Amazon has a bunch of free mystery and thriller ebooks today and tomorrow, if you like that kind of thing. Kindle Review has some picks.

I’ve gone through all the lab sessions to figure out what exactly needs to be in the biology kits. There are 72 items. Well, 72 categories, I suppose. Half a dozen test tubes count as one item, for example. Now I need to generate purchase orders for the components we buy and run labels for and make up the stuff we package ourselves.

I’m also going to spend some time over the next few days running through the manuscript for Illustrated Guide to Home Forensics Experiments with an eye to rewriting it around a kit and adding some lab sessions that weren’t in the original manuscript. There were several lab sessions I left out of the manuscript because it would be too difficult or too expensive for readers to get the necessary materials, but I can solve that problem with a kit.

For example, there are special cross-section slides available that are metal with tiny holes in them. The idea is that you slide a thin metal wire through one of the holes and use it to pull a clump of fibers back through the hole. You then use a scalpel to trim the fibers flush with the top and bottom of the slide, allowing you to view a cross section of the fibers by transmitted light. The problem is, those slides cost a buck or two each, and are sold only in boxes of 100.

Similarly, there are several solutions needed that require only, say, 1 gram of a particular chemical to make up 25 mL of solution. That chemical may be readily available, but only in a 25 gram bottle that costs $25 plus shipping. Since many chemicals are needed, the costs can add up fast, and each reader would end up with lots of unused chemicals. But packaged in a kit, that solution may cost only two or three bucks, counting labor costs, bottle, and so on. That’s why designing the book around a kit opens up so many more possibilities.

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