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Month: October 2012

Thursday, 11 October 2012

08:06 – The other shoe dropped yesterday when S&P finally downgraded Spain’s sovereign debt by two levels, to one level above junk status. That was actually a gift, although Spain professes to be shocked that it was downgraded at all. But as the markets are perfectly aware, S&P should long ago have downgraded Spain to pure junk status. Italy is next.

And, speaking of wishful thinking, the MSM are reporting that Merkel’s position on Greece has softened and that she will likely approve more time and perhaps more money for Greece. I note that Merkel said absolutely nothing about granting Greece more time, let alone more money. She was too polite to say so, but Merkel along with the rest of Germany has already written off Greece. Any actions she takes now will be aimed at minimizing the adverse impact of Greece on Germany, not on helping Greece. German taxpayers are already on the hook for roughly a trillion euros of bad PIIGS debt. Enough is enough.

I’m one of those rare people who are being pursued by both major parties: an undecided swing-state voter. Not that there’s any chance at all that I’d vote for Obama. The last four years of Obama have been catastrophic; the country might not survive another four years with him as president. Romney isn’t much better, but he is marginally so in some respects. So, the question is, do I vote for Gary Johnson, who would actually be a good president but has zero chance of winning, or do I vote for Romney, who’d be only marginally better than Obama but has a good chance of winning? I really would hate to see Obama carry North Carolina by one vote.

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Wednesday, 10 October 2012

08:15 – Beginning 1 January, the Catholic church loses its tax exemption in Italy. It’s about time for something similar to happen here in the US, not just to the Catholic church, but to all churches and non-profits. There’s no good reason why churches and non-profits shouldn’t be paying property taxes and other taxes just like the rest of us. The problem, of course, is our First Amendment. Here’s the relevant portion:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

That’s all it says. The first clause refers to “established” (official, state-supported) religions. The Founders meant that Congress could not force states to give up their state-supported religions, if they had one, nor could Congress establish a state-supported religion at the federal level. The second clause meant that Congress must allow people to worship (or not worship) as they chose. That’s it.

Now, strict separationists might argue that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and they have a point. But the reality is that making churches subject to the same property and other taxes that we all pay, at the same levels that we all pay, in no way violates the Constitution. I could even argue that the tax-exempt status of churches forces me to subsidize them through my property taxes, which is a clear violation of the Constitution. Why should I have to pay higher property taxes to provide them with government services that they should be paying for themselves? Why should churches get a free ride?

09:57 – Interesting article on CNN: Are we throwing away ‘expired’ medications too soon?

The short answer is yes. Much too soon. Pharma companies would argue that they have no way of controlling storage conditions and that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Of course, what they’re really doing is covering their collective asses. The reality is that most drugs stored at room temperature out of direct sunlight are probably still perfectly good after at least five to ten times the shelf life on the label. Storing them in the refrigerator or freezer increases the shelf life of most drugs dramatically.

The rule of thumb in chemistry is that a 10C change in temperature doubles or halves the reaction rate. In comparison to typical room temperature of 20C, most home freezers operate at about -30C. Call it five doublings, or a factor of 32. So, a bottle of, say, amoxicillin tablets that has a one-year expiration date should in fact be good for at least 32 years if stored in the freezer. When you consider that that amoxicillin stored at room temperature would probably maintain the vast majority of its potency for more like five to ten years, that means storing it in the freezer extends its shelf life to something on the order of 150 to 300 years.

In the interests of avoiding the monetary and other costs of discarding perfectly good drugs, it seems reasonable to me that manufacturers should extend their published shelf-lives to something more reasonable. Obviously, there’s an issue here: the only certain way to determine actual shelf lives is to wait and see. You can do accelerated aging tests at elevated temperatures, but those are not perfect substitutes for waiting one year per year at normal storage temperatures. You can also do tightly-controlled drug assays at reduced temperatures. For example, store numerous very accurately-weighed specimens at -30C and then assay a statistically-significant sample of those specimens every six months for five years. That should give a reasonably reliable trend line, although again it’s not a perfect substitute for wait-and-see.

But one way or another, we should do something about this problem. Many drugs are in short supply, some of them critically so. It’s sickening to think of how much of many of those drugs has been discarded due simply to an arbitrary use-by date on the labels. Nor am I happy about the amount of antibiotics that end up in our waste water and environment. If you want bacteria to develop resistance to an antibiotic, there’s no better way than to have that antibiotic present pervasively at low levels in the environment.

Now, obviously, there are exceptions. Some drugs can’t be frozen at all, and the slopes of the reaction rate line will differ from drug to drug. But for the vast majority of drugs, refrigerating or freezing them in storage is a good solution. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to use amoxicillin that had been frozen for 20 years or more. In fact, I’ve done it. I have a bunch of it as well as other antibiotics in the downstairs freezer. The expiration dates on most of them are in 2013, which means they’ll really expire in about 2113. But pharmacies don’t have to go to that extreme. They should install freezers for drug storage. The drug companies can continue to label their drugs with one-year expiration dates, but the regulations that govern pharmacies should explicitly permit them to store drugs frozen for at least five to ten times the nominal expiration data, unless the drug manufacturer explicitly lists a particular drug as not being suitable for freezing to extend its shelf life. And the drugs companies should have to show credible evidence that this is the case.

16:54 – Among other things, I’m making up a lot of stains for the biology kits. My vote for the stainiest of these is crystal violet. The kits include Hucker’s Crystal Violet, which is essentially a 1% (0.01) aqueous solution of crystal violet with 0.8% m/v of ammonium oxalate. That solution is nearly opaque in a one-liter soda bottle. I’d guess that it would impart a noticeable violet cast to water at a concentration of 0.0000001 or less. Fortunately, the stuff really is water soluble, and it pretty much washes off my skin with just soap and water. It’d probably even wash out of clothing.

19:14 – I was just walking Colin when I saw/heard something I don’t see/hear every day. A full-blown race car driving down our street. At first, I thought it was the replica I mentioned here. But it wasn’t. That one was bright yellow and mostly enclosed. The one I saw tonight was a much more open frame vehicle. I don’t pay much attention to car racing but it reminded me of an Indy car.

It certainly wasn’t the car I saw parked on our street a year or so ago. That one was a replica Can-Am car with a 2-liter 4-cylinder Honda engine. The one tonight had a serious engine. I heard it coming a block away, even though it was cruising very slowly. The headlights were bright, so I couldn’t see the car itself until it came flush with me. I thought it was a Corvette until it passed me slowly. The frame was pretty open, although there were headlights and taillights mounted. I couldn’t see if there was a license plate or not, but from the lights I assume it was street legal. The exhaust tone, even at near-idle was very deep and loud, and it wasn’t because the guy had a bad muffler.

Granted, we’re in the middle of NASCAR/Winston Cup territory, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see a NASCAR racecar on a flatbed in the neighborhood. But I can’t figure out why I keep seeing different types of race cars on our street. I’m expecting to see a Stanley Steamer any day now. It did, after all, hold the speed record for steamers until a couple years ago.

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Tuesday, 9 October 2012

08:54 – More lab work today, but I should finish making up most of the solutions we need for the new batch of biology kits. Then I’ll start filling bottles.

12:58 – Angela Merkel has apparently survived her trip to Greece, although many were concerned about her safety visiting a country that has compared her with Adolph Hitler. Love Merkel or hate her, one has to admit that she is a brave woman. The Greeks laid on a personal security detail for her that included 7,000 cops, water cannon, and at least one helicopter. Of course, they’ll probably expect Germany to pay for that, just as they expect Germany to pay for everything else.

I now have all but a few of the solutions made up for the new batch of biology kits. The main ones still missing are the ones I’m lacking a chemical to make up. Everything I need is currently on order, and I still have enough spares to put together several biology kits if we need them before the chemicals show up.

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Monday, 8 October 2012

08:47 – I switched over this morning from air conditioning to heating. It was under 68F (20C) in the house, and the high today is to be only 50F (10C), with lows tonight in the low 40’s (~ 5C). This cool snap is to last only a few days. We’ll soon be back to needing neither heating nor air conditioning.

Barbara was stunned when she read in the newspaper this morning that one of her co-workers died in a house fire over the weekend. She said today would be tough at work. The woman who died was well-known and well-liked throughout the firm.

Today is a federal holiday, so USPS won’t be delivering. I’ll batch up the kits ordered yesterday, today, and tomorrow morning, and ship them all tomorrow. Today, I’ll spend some time in the lab making up solutions for the biology kits. As I’ve mentioned before, my natural tendency is to use the oh-my-god-we’re-out inventory method. So yesterday I checked inventory against the chemical makeup instructions and found I was out of Eosin Y and Crystal Violet. I just ordered enough of both to make up two liters of each stain.

Fortunately, our filling method means we always have a few left over. For example, the kits include 15 mL each of the Hucker’s Crystal Violet stain and the Eosin Y stain. I make up one liter of each of those at a time, and label 60 bottles for each. We actually get about 66 bottles from a liter, so we typically have six bottles left unlabeled. After we’ve filled bottles, I print the extra labels we need and label the extra bottles. So as of now I have half a dozen bottles of each of those stains still in stock. That means I can make up half a dozen biology kits pretty quickly if we run out before the next batch of 30 is ready.

10:57 – That worked out well. As Barbara and her sister clear out their parents’ old home, Barbara is bringing home stuff her parents don’t want but that she wants or thinks I might want. Saturday, she brought me something I didn’t know existed: a 2-liter polypropylene measuring cup. I’m using that today to make up stuff I need two liters of, including Benedict’s reagent, Barfoed’s reagent, biuret reagent, and so on.

Ordinarily, I just make up stuff that I need in 2-liter quantities in 2-liter soda bottles. (I’ve established where the 2-liter index line falls on soda bottles, so they function as pretty accurate 2-liter “volumetric flasks”–easily within 1% accuracy.) But the problem with soda bottles is that they are made of PET, which some of the solutions I make up will damage. Some, like 6 M sodium hydroxide, damage PET instantly, literally. If I pour 6 M NaOH into a PET bottle, the bottle instantly turns from clear to cloudy white, as the strong base solution starts de-polymerizing the plastic. Having a reasonably accurate 2-liter PP measuring container makes things a lot easier. I’d have bought one (or several) long ago if I’d known they existed.

11:46 – Hmmm. Coyotes may soon be hanging out in your backyard

I’m not worried about Colin. At 70 or 75 pounds (32 to 34 kilos), he’d tear even a large male coyote to pieces. And coyotes are afraid of him because his ears make him look wolf-like. And between the two of us, even a pack of coyotes is going to shy away.

Nor do I worry about black bears. They’re smart, essentially super-dogs. Any bear we see around here is much more likely to run for it than attack or stand and fight.

But if I see a mountain lion roaming around this neighborhood, I’ll shoot it. I don’t care what the law says. Mountain lions, like all cats, are stupid. They don’t have enough sense to fear people and their fire-sticks. Coyotes, being Canidae, and bears, being honorary Canidae, do.

13:07 – How smart are Border Collies? Pretty damned smart. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all day today, working in my lab making up solutions for the new batch of biology kits. Colin completely ignores my trips up and down the stairs, lying on the sofa and watching me the whole time.

Until an hour or so ago, when I headed downstairs to drive over and pick up the newspaper for some friends who are out of town. There was absolutely no difference between that and the other trips I’d made downstairs, but somehow Colin knew I was going to leave the house, so he started barking like crazy. I did nothing to indicate that I was leaving the house. I didn’t check the front door to make sure it was locked (it always is during the day), rattle my car keys, or anything else. So how did he know this trip downstairs was different? I wouldn’t have known.

Crap. I just realized how he knew. I wear my glasses when I’m working on the computer and when I drive, but not when I’m working in the lab. When I headed downstairs to leave the house, I was wearing my glasses. Geez. That’s pretty subtle for a human, let alone a dog.

PS. It’s even more subtle than I thought. I just realized that I wear my glasses when I’m going to leave the house. When I’m running up and down stairs to and from the lab, I’m wearing splash goggles. Geez.

16:06 – If my first love is organic chemistry, coordination chemistry isn’t far behind. I was just down in the lab making up two liters of biuret reagent. I started by dissolving 23.6 grams of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate in a liter of DI water. (Well, actually, I made up 94.5 mL of 1 M copper(II) sulfate to one liter, which amounts to the same thing.) I then added 33.0 grams of potassium sodium tartrate to the copper sulfate solution with stirring. The solution immediately turned from bright blue to greenish blue and became cloudy. Oops. That was insoluble copper(II) tartrate precipitating out. No worries. I then added 7.0 grams of potassium iodide, which turned the slurry distinctly greenish, but still cloudy. That was insoluble copper(II) iodide making its appearance. What a mess. Then I dissolved 128.4 grams of sodium hydroxide in water, made it up to 600 mL, and added that solution with stirring to the pale greenish slurry. As soon as the hydroxide solution hit the copper solution, the mixture turned an intense deep blue color. When I finished stirring, the precipitate was gone and I had a clear deep blue solution. I love coordination compounds.

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Sunday, 7 October 2012

11:00 – Autumn weather has really arrived in Winston-Salem. Our highs for the next few days are to be in the mid-50’s (~13C), with lows in the low 40’s (~5C). Now if only we’d have a hard freeze to kill all the mosquitoes.

Barbara is cleaning house this morning, after which we’ll work on biology kits. She still has a couple sets of bottles and a bunch of sets of envelopes to label, and I have solutions to make up.

12:02 – It sucks to be a Greek in Greece right now, and it’s going to get a lot worse quickly. The ECB’s Asmussen has just rejected Greek pleas for more time, which, as Asmussen correctly points out, is actually a request for more money. Time is, after all, money.

As Greece said earlier this week, it runs out of money next month. Not just money to repay outstanding loans and bonds. Greece runs out of money, period. That means no money to pay government salaries, including those of the police and military. No money to pay pensions. No money to provide even basic health services. No money to import desperately-needed food and drugs. No money, period. And no one is willing to lend them any more. At this point, Greece is already a failed state. Its last hope was the €31.5 billion bailout tranche, which has been held up for months and looks almost certain to be a chimera.

For years now, Greece has pretended to be attempting to comply with the Troika’s terms, while in fact simply ignoring them. For years now, the Troika has been pretending to be convinced that the Greek government is actually trying to comply with their terms, while being aware the whole time that Greece has never made any attempt to do so and has no intention of doing so. I’ve known all along that Greece and Greeks would eventually pay the price for 30 years of partying on borrowed money. When something can’t go on, it eventually stops.

For years now, everyone has been completely aware that Greece was going to crash eventually. And the truth is that no one really cared about Greece and Greeks then, and no one really cares now. All the EU ever cared about was preventing the crash of Greece from crashing the euro itself. The general feeling is that Greece and Greeks are going to get what they deserved all along, and they’re going to get it good and hard. If that €31.5 billion tranche isn’t granted, which I don’t expect it to be, expect to see Greece descend into complete chaos beginning late this year. By January, I expect to see Red Cross and UN humanitarian relief teams thick on the ground in Greece. Greece will become a fourth-world country by then. And, even if that tranche is somehow miraculously granted, that puts off the collapse only for a few months. Greece is going down, big-time.

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Saturday, 6 October 2012

09:00 – I see that Obama apparently ordered his minions to declare a surprising decline in unemployment to aid his campaign. Looking at the actual report makes it clear that these numbers have been massaged and spun to make Obama look good. In reality they are, as everyone expected, worse month-on-month and year-on-year. Of course, Obama is counting on the fact that the media won’t bother to look behind the headline number. The real number, the one that matters, is non-government, non-farm employment, which you’ll never see reported because it makes clear just how bad things are and that they’re getting worse with every report.

We’re working hard on a new batch of biology kits, but I’m afraid we’re going to run dry before the new batch is ready. We’re also down to about half a dozen chemistry kits, although we have another 15 of those that just need to be boxed up. Barbara is getting ready to head over to parents’ house, where the clean-up continues. They’re getting a bunch of stuff ready to be picked up Monday by Good Will. Once that’s finished they can start throwing a lot of stuff away, and then finally get started on cleaning the house itself. I’ll be working on more biology kit stuff.

11:45 – Not even close: The craziest things found in the refrigerator

They really need to visit our house. Compared to some of the stuff Barbara has stumbled on in our refrigerators, these folks are complete amateurs. Okay, I’ll grant you that the sheep’s brain would get an honorable mention here.

13:36 – This guy nails it: Obama did not ‘underperform’: we saw the real man

I almost sprayed Coke out my nose when I read the claim of Obama as an “intellectual giant”. Intellectual midget, more like. Although we’ve had some reasonably bright presidents, there’s been exactly one US president with a valid claim to that title: Tom Jefferson. None of the others have come remotely close.

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Friday, 5 October 2012

08:21 – Barbara took today off work to get some stuff done around the house and yard. This afternoon, she’ll start labeling a thousand or so containers for the new batch of biology kits. I’ll be making up solutions to fill the bottles.

Yesterday, I commented, “Unfortunately, I had no idea if we had any DEET and, if so, where it was. The first thought that crossed my mind, of course, was “I wonder how difficult this stuff is to synthesize.”” A lot of people thought I was kidding, but I was serious. It’s a generational thing.

Our friend Paul Jones is a professor of organic chemistry at Wake Forest University, and is half a generation younger than we are. I suspect that most or all of the time Paul needs a chemical for one of his classes, he just orders it from Sigma or Fisher or Alfa. It didn’t used to be that way. When I started undergraduate chemistry in 1971, the chemistry department ordered a lot of the chemicals they needed, but they also made a lot of them, often liters or kilograms at a time. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for rising junior and senior chemistry majors to have summer jobs at the college. They’d spend the summer doing syntheses. For many of the chemicals, it a lot cheaper to make them rather than buying them, even assuming that they were commercially available. That wasn’t always the case.

I remember talking to one of my chemistry professors, who would have been in his late 50’s at the time. He started off on the “you kids don’t appreciate how easy you have it nowadays” thing. When he was in undergrad chemistry in the 1930’s, he worked summers at the college synthesizing the chemicals they’d need for the following year. He said that about the only thing they bought was common precursors like acids and simple organics. Everything else, they made.

So, yeah, I was serious. My first thought really was, “I wonder how difficult this stuff is to synthesize.”

Speaking of which, I spent some time on the phone yesterday with John Farrell Kuhns, the owner of H.M.S. Beagle, a full-range home science supplies vendor in Kansas City. Among many other goodies, John carries a huge selection of raw chemicals, something like 700+ chemicals at last count. I was telling him that Barbara and I were about to start making up chemicals for a new batch of biology kits, and he commented that sometimes it seemed that he did nothing else all day long except label and fill chemical bottles. Tell me about it.

15:28 – Barbara is labeling bottles while she watches Felicity on Netflix streaming. She started by labeling 15 sets each for the substitute chemicals we ship with the Canadian versions of the chemistry and biology kits, and then got started on 30 sets each of the 15 mL bottles for the US biology kits. She works with a sheet of labels in front of her, a large box of unlabeled bottles on one side of her, and a labeled plastic bag to receive the labeled bottles on the other side of her. She said a few minutes ago that she was running short of the 15 mL bottles, so I went back to the stock room to refill her supply box. When I told her that I’d had to open the next-to-last case of 1,100 of those bottles, she commented that it was time to re-order. Which it will be soon. Those 2,200 bottles are roughly 80 to 100 kits worth, depending on the kit. And as I was refilling her box of unlabeled bottles, it occurred to me that I’d never imagined that I’d ever think that having only 2,200 new 15 mL bottles would constitute a shortage, or that I’d ever be transferring such bottles with a large scoop.

16:03 – So, Barbara is sitting in the den labeling bottles and watching Felicity. For those of you fortunate enough never to have seen this TV series, it’s about a bunch of whiny, obnoxious college students. The women are women, and the men are women too. So, I can hear the audio from my office. The students are sitting in a chemistry lecture, and the professor says, and I quote, “There are three main aspects to stereochemistry: chirality, handedness, and symmetry.” Say what? I shouted in to Barbara that chirality and handedness are synonyms. She thanked me. Thinking perhaps I could help her decipher the plot, such as it is, I then shouted in, “That guy’s not really a chemistry professor; he’s just pretending to be one.” “He’s an actor,” she replied. As though that’s an excuse for reciting garbage lines.

And, speaking of men being men, I saw an article about Zuckerberg the other day that mentioned that he wears the same thing every day, a gray t-shirt, of which he owns about 20 identical ones. He also mentioned that he has one drawer, “like men everywhere.” Ain’t that the truth? I mentioned the article to Barbara, who said she’d already read it and, of course, thought of me.

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Thursday, 4 October 2012

09:21 – The mosquitoes have been horrible this year. They even get indoors, presumably on Colin’s coat. They’re out there lying in wait even at high noon. Early mornings and evenings are even worse.

So yesterday I decided to start using DEET even during the day. Unfortunately, I had no idea if we had any DEET and, if so, where it was. The first thought that crossed my mind, of course, was “I wonder how difficult this stuff is to synthesize.” Not difficult, as it turns out, but it requires a couple precursors that I don’t have in stock. Oh, well.

When Barbara got home, I asked her if we had any DEET. She said to look on top of the filing cabinet in the basement. Of course. Where else would we keep our DEET? As it turned out, we had two spray cans of deep-woods OFF, one relatively new and the other looked to be antique. The change in contents over the years between those two can is interesting. The old can lists the contents as “Active Ingredients. 25.00%: N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, 19.00%, other isomers, 1.00%, 2,3,4-5-bis(2-butylene)-tetrahydro-2-furaldehyde, 1.00%, N-octyl bicycloheptane dicarboximide, 4.00%. Inert Ingredients. 75.00%.” The new can lists the contents as “Active Ingredient: DEET ….. 25%, Inert Ingredients ….. 75%.”

Apparently, they’ve both simplified their formula and gotten less precise about measuring what they put into it. And what’s this 25% crap? Whatever happened to 100% DEET? You’d think that “DEEP WOODS OFF!” would contain a manly percentage of DEET rather than the girlish 25%. What would Tim the Toolman Taylor say about this dilute stuff masquerading as a serious mosquito repellent?

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Wednesday, 3 October 2012

08:47 – The prepared microscope slides I ordered for the LK01 Life Science Kit arrived Monday. As I was unboxing and checking off items on the packing list, I was struck by a cunning plan. Although these slides are intended for the Life Science kit, there’s no reason they couldn’t be used as a core slide set by people using the BK01 Biology Kit. So I sent the following email to people who’d purchased the biology kit:

We spent several hundred dollars buying the prepared microscope slides that we used to shoot the images in Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments, so we know how expensive it can be to obtain the prepared slides you need for a biology course. That’s why we included a disc of high-resolution copies of the images from the book with the BK01 Biology Kit. And, although those images are useful, they’re not a complete substitute for using actual slides.

We’ve had many emails from people who’ve bought the BK01 Biology Kit, asking us if there is a source for a core set of prepared slides that would at least hit the high points. After a great deal of looking around, we concluded that the slide sets available were either too expensive, had a poor selection of subjects, or were of very poor quality. So we decided to put together our own set of core prepared slides, with the goal of picking a dozen or so key slides that we could offer at a reasonable price. We finally settled on the following 15 slides:

□ Amoeba (wm)
□ Anthers, lily (cs)
□ Bone, compact (cs)
□ Egg, horse ascaris (sec)
□ Euglena (wm)
□ Frog Liver (sec)
□ Hydra, budding (wm)
□ Leaf, lilac (cs)
□ Lichen (sec)
□ Mitosis, Onion Root Tip (ls)
□ Muscle, involuntary smooth (cs/ls)
□ Muscle, skeletal (cs/ls)
□ Neurons, multi-polar motor (wm)
□ Paramecium (wm)
□ Stems, Monocot and Dicot (cs)

These slides are from the same manufacturer who produced the slides we used for the images in Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments.They are of decent quality, although they’re by no means the best available. (We’d love to offer those top-quality slides, but they’d cost anything from $8 to $20 each, so we’d have to price a set of 15 slides at $150 or so rather than the $52 we sell this set for.)

One of the reasons we hesitated to offer a prepared slide set is that our wholesalers typically stock few or no prepared slides. They’re special-order items, and it can take anything from several weeks to six months from the time we order the slides until they actually arrive.

We ordered 30 sets of these individual slides some time ago, and they arrived yesterday. We’ll be assembling the sets over the next few days, and will be ready to ship sets by the first of next week. We wanted to give those of you who’ve already ordered the BK01 Biology Kit the first opportunity to order a slide set or sets.

If you’d like to order a set, visit the BK01 Biology Kit home page:

If the demand exceeds the supply of 30 sets we currently have available, we’ll ship the first 30 orders we receive. If you order a set and are not among the first 30 buyers, at your option we’ll either refund your payment or put your order on our backorder list, to be shipped as soon as we’re able to build more sets.

The set price includes USPS Priority Mail shipping. Unfortunately, we can ship these sets only to US addresses, at least for the time being. No Canadian orders.

So now Barbara and I need to make up a batch of 30 of the prepared slides sets. We’re already taking orders for them, and I’m telling people that the sets will ship Monday. Meanwhile, our inventory of biology kits is getting low enough that it’s becoming critical. Since we started shipping kits more than a year ago, we’ve had to backorder kits only once, and that for only a couple days. If we don’t get on the ball, we’re likely to have to backorder biology kits, and I hate doing that.

14:17 – The other day I ordered a mouse, keyboard, and display from the Costco web site. The display hasn’t shipped yet, but UPS showed up a few minutes ago with the mouse and keyboard, in separate boxes. The mouse was fine, but the keyboard box was badly damaged, with most of the corners crushed in, one end ripped, and the sides dented in and creased. It looked as though the UPS truck had run over it, literally. I shot some images of the box and then called Costco. They’re shipping a replacement, and said it wasn’t cost effective for me to return the damaged one. Waylon, the rep, said to go ahead and open it, to pitch the keyboard if it was damaged, and if it was okay just to keep it as a spare.

This is yet another reminder of why I don’t use UPS, and would prefer that my vendors didn’t either. Of all the hundreds of kits we’ve shipped, almost all of them have arrived intact. We’ve had, IIRC, two broken thermometers and one broken beaker. Oh, yeah, and one kit delivered to a Florida address just before a tropical storm hit. That kit got so wet that the cardboard box disintegrated, but everything in it survived unscathed. I tend to think of the plastic bags we use for interior packing as protecting against leaks from the chemical bottles, but they also do a decent job of protecting the contents from tropical storms.

Conversely, nearly all of my wholesalers use UPS, and we get a lot of boxes delivered. I’d guess that at least a third of those boxes have visible damage, although it’s often minor, such as a crushed corner or two or perhaps a big rip in one side. I guess my wholesalers have learned what they’re up against because there’s usually no damage to the contents.

That’s one of the main reasons I’m loyal to USPS, although by no means the only one. USPS is also, in my experience, faster than UPS or FedEx for any shipping option that’s even close to the USPS price. For example, I shipped a chemistry kit last Saturday to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. The USPS says Priority Mail normally takes one to three business days in transit, according to the zone. Bethlehem is definitely not in the local zone, and I expected the transit time to be two days. It arrived Monday, in one business day. Same deal on shipments out to the west coast, which are definitely supposed to be three days in transit. Quite often, USPS gets the package to an address in LA, Seattle, and other large west coast cities in just two business days.

USPS also doesn’t dick around with all the surcharges that UPS and FedEx charge. The first time I considered shipping kits to Canada, I looked into using UPS or FedEx. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out how much it would cost to ship a package. I knew how much the package weighed, its dimensions, the origin address, and the destination address. That should be sufficient to get a firm price. It’s not. UPS and FedEx both have all kinds of added fees for different stuff. If they attempt to deliver and can’t, they charge a redelivery fee. They charge different amounts depending on whether the address is residential or business. I was flabbergasted when I looked at the number of different add-on fees I might or might not need to pay, many of which were entirely outside my control. USPS, on the other hand, makes it extremely simple. I use flat-rate boxes and regional-rate boxes. The flat-rate boxes are just that; they cost the same amount regardless of where they’re going, as long as it’s a US address and as long as they’re under a generous weight limit. (For example, the large flat-rate box ships to any US address for $14.62, and can weigh up to 70 pounds; the regional-rate box B, which is what I usually use, has a weight limit of 20 pounds.) Oh, and the boxes are free. With UPS or FedEx, I’d have to buy boxes, which aren’t cheap.

Several people have asked me why I ship via USPS instead of using UPS or FedEx. That’s why.

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Tuesday, 2 October 2012

10:04 – Oddly, given all of the hundreds of science kits we’ve shipped, today was the first time we got an order for a kit to be shipped to an APO address. Shipping it was just like shipping any other kit, with two exceptions. First, the city was “APO” and the state was “AE”, and second I had to fill out a customs declaration, which seems strange. Oh, yeah, and USPS doesn’t give a delivery estimate for Priority Mail APO shipments. Express Mail would be delivered Friday, so I’m guessing that Priority Mail will get the box to the customer sometime next week.

It appears that Spain is likely to request a second bailout this coming weekend. Germany may be a problem, as many of its politicians are loathe to approve a second bailout so close on the heels of the €100 billion they approved for the Spanish bank bailout a couple months ago. At this point, it’s pretty clear even to committed europhiles that Spain is going down the toilet, with Italy likely to follow soon thereafter. Germany is finally waking up to the fact that its taxpayers are already on the hook for as much as €1 trillion, less whatever minor amounts they can recover after the crash. They must realize that providing additional funding in the hopes of delaying the final crash of the euro is simply throwing good money after bad. Germany, Holland, Finland, and now Austria are all sending strong signals that they’ve had enough.

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