07:49 – The euro game of smoke and mirrors continues. There was concern that Greece would be unable to pay off more than €3 billion in bonds that are coming due this month, thereby forcing Greece to default (again), but Greece was able to get off a €4.1 billion bond auction last week of three-month t-bills. The problem is, it really is all smoke and mirrors. The bonds Greece has to pay off this month are held by the ECB. The t-bills that Greece sold last week were bought by Greek banks, which borrowed the money to buy the t-bills from–you guessed it–the ECB. In effect, the ECB provided Greece with a bridge loan to carry Greece just long enough to get the next installment of the bailout, which is by no means guaranteed. Talk about the Walking Dead.
We continue to build and ship science kits.
15:33 – I’m re-ordering components for the science kits, and as always our costs are going up. I just had to post a notice on the biology kit page that we’re increasing the price of that kit from $170 to $185 as of 1 October. I hate doing that, but we simply can’t absorb these increases. The current price of the kits is based on components ordered and paid for back in February, and the costs have increased significantly in the last six months. Sometimes dramatically. One component, fortunately not one of the more expensive ones, has more than doubled in price since February. The government keeps reporting that inflation is low, but that’s sure not my experience.
Meanwhile, I’m about to make up three of the nastier solutions that are in the forensic science kit. All three of them are essentially pure concentrated sulfuric acid, with 1% of something added: diphenylamine (diphenylamine reagent), ammonium metavanadate (Mandelin reagent), or formalin (Marquis reagent). If you’ve ever worked with concentrated sulfuric acid, you know that it’s a dense, oily, viscous liquid. So I’m considering how to fill the bottles for the kits.
One method I considered and ruled out was to buy an auto-burette, which is basically an automated bottle filler. Each press of the pump dispenses the volume you’ve set on the device. Using it is quick and easy, and it’d be worth while if I were filling 500 bottles at a time, or even 200. The problem is, there’s a significant amount of time and effort required for set-up, tear-down, and clean-up. Using an auto-burette to fill 30 or 60 bottles at a time actually takes more time and effort than doing it manually.
I could just fill the bottles manually from a beaker, but concentrated sulfuric acid is difficult to pour into a narrow-mouth bottle without spilling it. The kits will include only 5 mL of diphenylamine reagent and 10 mL each of Mandelin and Marquis reagents, but we’re using 30 mL bottles for all three of them because the 30 mL bottles have wider mouths than the 15 mL and smaller bottles. The solutions are so thick and viscous that it’s almost impossible to pour them into the 15 mL and smaller bottles.
But before I decide to pour from a beaker, I think I’m going to try using a 10 mL serological pipette with either a pipette bulb or a pipette pump. It’s not that I’m worried about getting too much liquid in the bottles; rather I’m concerned about dispensing too little. It’s pretty tough to judge 10 mL let alone 5 mL in a 30 mL bottle. I could dispense by weight, but weighing each bottle to make sure it meets a minimum weight is a pain in the petunia. With the pipette and pump or bulb, it should go pretty quickly. Just suck up liquid from a beaker until it’s above the 5 mL or 10 mL index line, as appropriate, and then let it run into the bottle. The only thing that concerns me is the viscosity. The liquid may take too long to run out of the pipette. Oh, well. The only way to find out is to try it.