Month: May 2015

09:05 – The Greek situation is coming to a head, and we’re starting to hear rumbles from Portugal. Greece is flat out of money. The only way they were able to make a small loan repayment to the IMF last week was by borrowing the money from the IMF to repay the IMF. But their SDR balance is now exhausted and they have nowhere to turn for additional funds to repay the loans that are coming due this month and next. And every month thereafter. That’s what happens when you borrow hundreds of billions of dollars with no prospect of being able to repay it. The next couple of months are going to be very interesting times, in the Chinese proverb sense. If Greeks think they’ve suffered under so-called “austerity” so far, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Meanwhile, some reports are saying that that shootout between motorcycle gangs in Waco was actually a police shooting. If the reports are true, the 9 dead and 18 wounded were all struck by police bullets rather than by bullets fired by gang members. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

I fired up the dehumidifier in the basement yesterday, and immediately noticed that I’d forgotten to clean the reservoir at the end of last season. The entire interior was covered with a black coating, presumably fungus. So I added a pint of chlorine bleach, which killed the fungus on contact, and let the dehumidifier run until the reservoir was full. Most of the black scum was gone, but not all, so I just rinsed out the reservoir with Lysol liquid and then stuck it in the dishwasher with the dirty dishes and ran it on pots-and-pans cycle with high temperature wash and “sani-rinse” with heated dry. That ought to kill anything that remains alive.

More kit stuff today. We’re down to three chemistry kits, so I’ll get another couple dozen built today.

08:09 – I turn 62 years old next month. Barbara asked me last night if I intended to apply for Social Security. I told her that would be crazy. I’ll wait at least until 66, when I’m eligible for full benefits, and probably until age 70. If I applied now, I’d get literally nothing because the government would deduct $1 from my monthly check for every $2 I had in outside income above $15,720.

Not that I ever intend to depend on Social Security. It won’t surprise me if I end up getting nothing at all. By the time I reach full retirement age of 66 four years from now, I expect they’ll be applying earnings limits even for those of us who are eligible for full benefits. If I do get something, I’ll consider it a supplement that can disappear at any time.

11:57 – I’m filling bottles and making up solutions. I just made up 4 liters of 1 molar sodium carbonate, and as always I’m struck by how very complex something apparently as simple as a solid dissolving in water can be. There are kinetic and thermodynamic issues any time you put a solid into solution. Most solids are both more soluble and faster-dissolving in warm water than cold, but there are exceptions in both cases. And, although it seems intuitive that a very soluble solid should dissolve faster than a sparingly-soluble solid, that’s far from being true. Some very soluble solids (on both a grams/liter and moles/liter basis) take a long, long time to dissolve, while some much less soluble solids dissolve much faster.

Sodium carbonate is one of those odd solids in that it exhibits retrograde solubility. Maximum solubility occurs at 35.4 C, just under body temperature. At higher and lower temperatures, solubility is lower. But speed of dissolution increases with increasing temperature, so sodium carbonate dissolves faster in hot water, even though its solubility is lower.