08:11 – Barbara called yesterday to let me know that her dad is to be released from the hospital Tuesday morning. Unlike last time, there’s no infection or other problems. It’s just the CHF. Her sister and brother-in-law returned yesterday, as planned. She and her mom are staying. She’ll drive them back tomorrow. I’m not particularly happy about them being stuck down at the beach in the middle of this storm, but at least the main effects of the storm will be farther north. It’s chilly here, and there’s a stiff breeze, but that’s about all we’ve seen so far of the effects of Sandy. There are higher winds and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow, along with heavy snow in the mountains to our west, but that’s nothing compared to what’s expected to our north.
Our supply of science kits continues to dwindle. I’m waiting for some 125 mL polypropylene bottles for the biology kits. Those should arrive today or tomorrow. And I’m labeling bottles for the chemistry kits in every spare moment. We should be able to get a new batch of 30 of those assembled this coming weekend.
Meanwhile, Germany is coming to realize that those “risk-free investments” in what have turned out to be junk sovereign bonds are anything but risk-free. German taxpayers are now on the hook for more than a trillion euros in junk debt. When this realization hits home, there’ll be a firestorm in German politics. All those Mercedes and BMWs that Germany “sold” to the southern tier were actually gifts, along with everything else the southern tier “bought” from Germany. Germans are already seriously pissed; they’re going to be livid.
I periodically get emails ridiculing me for saying that the US is in relatively good shape compared to Europe, and indeed compared to just about anyone else. Yes, we’re in bad shape, but we’re fully capable of growing our way out of it. Europe is moribund, if not in Cheyne-Stokes. Here’s another of the reasons why.
09:47 – Here’s one of the big reasons why I do what I do. These two emails arrived this morning, and are pretty typical of the emails I receive regularly. First up, a young scientist:
On Sunday 28 October 2012 09:13:14 pm you wrote:
Dear Mr. Thompson,
I am Nicholasand I am a huge fan of science , Over the summer I bought your book on chemistry after I took chemistry camp , a few months later I saw your biology book and finaly , I got your forensic book from barnes and noble on the 14th . I really love your books and you are a good author . Before I got your books I found a science store near my house called the Colorado Science company in december . The next day I went there and it looked really cool they had chemicals,microscopes, telescopes and lab supplies.You know its funny I am only 9 years old and I know alot about science.In my room I have a great science desk with a microscope, chemicals, rocks, minerals, books,a piece of american indian pottery,and marine biology specimens. When I am a grownup I want to be an archeologist and a professor of science.
I just wanted you to know that I am a big fan of your books.
Sincerely,
NicholasHi, Nicholas
First, thank you for the kind words. My first love was science, and for the last few years I’ve devoted all of my time to doing what I can to help young people develop their interest in science by hands-on lab work. I’m 50 years older than you are, but I still remember vividly being your age and working at my own science bench. You are at the beginning of a long and wonderful journey.
I applaud your ambition to become a scientist. We need all of the young scientists we can get. Realize that, like most young scientists, your focus may change as you get older. You may indeed become an archaeologist, but you might instead decide to become an organic chemist or a particle physicist or an evolutionary biologist. Or whatever. My point is that it’s important not to focus too much on just your current interest. Make sure along your journey to learn as much as you can about biology, chemistry, physics, and math.
Please keep me posted on your progress.
And a response from Rob in Adelaide, whose original email I posted recently:
On Saturday 27 October 2012 06:27:41 pm you wrote:Dear Bob
Thank you very much indeed for the prompt and thoughtful response. I admire your pragmatic enthusiasm to teach science.
I actually bought “Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments” first and only later noted your website and Home Chemistry Kit. I run an Ophthalmic Science Research lab in the Hanson Institute, Adelaide, so I can fairly easily source the equipment and materials independently. But your Kit certainly looks great and would have been convenient. The image of your kit on the website brought back great memories of a chemistry set I had as a kid, something that started me on a scientific pathway. My 10-year-old daughter saw the photo of the chemistry set and her eyes were wide with excitement!
I will have to start ordering to try and make up something that looks as exciting as your kit: we have an old laundry that I need to turn into a lab for Xmas!
Regards
Rob
Hi, Rob
That’s great!
When I was about your daughter’s age, my dad helped me turn a corner of the basement into my own lab. I wonder if he knew then that he’d started me off on a life of loving and doing science. We need all the young scientists we can get, and it sounds like you’re doing for your daughter what my dad did for me. She’ll look back on this later and realize how lucky she was to have you for her dad.
Best regards.
Bob
13:33 – Although I was under the impression that he died in about 1825, Thomas Bowdler is apparently alive and well. What else to think about this abomination, an “improved” version of Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet? This cretin does more damage to a classic work of fiction than Reader’s Digest Condensed Books ever did to the books they butchered. This jerk can’t even get the aspect ratio of his cover right.
14:29 – Hah! UPS showed up a little while ago with boxes from one of my wholesalers with the stuff I ordered last week. Among them I found five dozen of the 125 mL polypropylene bottles. (I almost strained myself lifting the smallest of the boxes, which contained 90 sets each comprising 72 frosted flat slides, a dozen 3mm thick cavity slides, and a box of coverslips. Talk about a dense little turkey. I suspect that box would be literally bullet-proof. Fifteen to 30 centimeters of densely-packed glass will easily stop a bullet.)
So I labeled 30 bottles and filled them plus an extra three unlabeled. I now have everything I need to build 30 more biology kits. All I need to do is pack everything up.
“Europe is moribund, if not in Cheyne-Stokes. Here’s another of the reasons why.”
Emphasis is own how Greens are foisting bad policy on governments over there. Well, as anti-Siera Club bumper stickers said in the Seventies: “Let the bastards freeze in the cold”.
Here in Canberra we had elections for our territory “parliament”. I’m no anarchist but this is one body I wish would just vanish without trace. The very good thing was that the Greens were all but wiped out. They had four seats (out of 17) going into the election, and have just one now. I’m hoping this will lead to better government, as the Greens have less opportunities to foist their whacky ideas on government and taxpayers.
Glad to hear that Barbara’s dad is going to be out of the hospital tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing those letters, RBT. I got a warm glow from reading; must be 100x stronger for you as the motivation for the letters. They reinforce my thinking that, while the world is likely boned in the medium term, in the long term the species will eke out a win so long as we can keep the fakers and takers away from the makers.
Regarding the article about national economies and natural resources and such (linked above as “Here’s another of the reasons why.”), two things about the article kind of annoyed me. First was the whinging attitude that the US will be able to pull out of our economic doldrums because we’re lucky enough to have the oil shale. Sure, Evans-Pritchard sort of acknowledges that Europe is retreating from any efforts at energy independence, but that didn’t get as much play.
The second thing was the line “The strategic burden will fall on Europe”, which I can only interpret as meaning that, because the US won’t need any MidEast oil, we’ll have no incentive to police the area. Well, cry me a river. Way I see it, the US has been heavily subsidizing Europe’s defense for about seventy years. It’s about time they carried their own weight.
Europe collectively is no longer a world power militarily, and increasingly it’s no longer a world economic power either. As you say, the US has been subsidizing Europe both militarily and economically since WWII. The latter follows from the former, and it has allowed Europe to establish ridiculously generous social welfare programs that it would have been obvious it couldn’t afford if it had been carrying the burden of its own defense.
As I’ve said, the future will be determined by the US and Asia, and increasingly by the US alone. I know people think I was kidding every time I’ve talked about what I see for the geopolitical future, with Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand joining the US, but I really believe that’s ultimately what will happen. None of them is strong enough to survive on its own, and all of them have a great deal in common with the US, not least the language and common heritage. I think the world is going to become an increasingly unfriendly place for small English speaking countries, and the obvious solution is for them to join their futures to the 9oo-pound English-speaking gorilla.
I just got a call from my dad who received a call from a woman who “sounded Indian” telling him his computer had a virus. He was smart enough to not do what she asked, and instead call me. However, I’m wondering how far phishing scams are going to go.
I was at first surprised that scammers would go that far. Then I realized that Card Services is very likely a scammer that robocalls people. It’s not that far a reach from that to hiring people to make phishing phone calls.
It sure sounds like you need to wave a Magik Wand and designate Rob in Oz as your semi-official DownUnder affiliate. He could gather the components, build & ship kits, etc. Then all you have to do is find Julio in Espana to do the same for EU, assuming you can send a package from one EU country to another without much hassle. I’d suggest my #3 niece, but she’s only going to be there for a year.
Anyone is free to do that. The manuals are freely distributable, so anyone could put together kits for them. The problem is, it’s harder than it sounds.
Which is why most people prefer to ride someone else’s work. Cue the bureaucrats and regulators and inspectors and tax men. But remember… You didn’t build that.
My MIL got scammed for $2700.00. I was shocked. Someone called her from a US number claiming to her grandson. He said he was in Mexican jail and needed the money to get bailed out. She asked to talk with him. Whomever did the talking at that point knew enough about her grandson and her to convince her it was indeed him. Even explained that US phone number was a US phone number that was used from the Mexican jail. She wired the money from Walmart and explicitly said that only her grandson could get the money. Yeh, right, like Mexico gives a rats ass about proper identification.
After wiring the money she called her son (the boys father) to tell him. But the grandson was also sitting in the same house. Her son had to travel to San Antonio to make a police report and inform Walmart. Nothing Walmart could do naturally but it was merely to inform them of what happened.
Before sending the money she did not call my wife who would have told her immediately to not send the money. Before sending the money she did not call her son who would have immediately told her to not send the money.
What is amazing is that the people running the scam knew enough about her such as her name, her grandsons name, phone numbers and other tidbits of information that were enough to convince her. She said the person on the phone even had some of the same sayings as the real grandson, knew some history about the past. Boggles the mind.
Expensive lesson learned. She will never again wire money to anyone, for any reason, without contacting her daughter or her son. I hope she sticks to that.
I have a simple solution to phone scams. I don’t pick up the phone.
I screen, and if I recognise the voice I pick up, if I don’t or they don’t speak then I ignore it.
I’ve occasionally had some very good scam e-mails. I wasn’t fooled but they were much better quality than the usual Nigerian stuff.
Sounds like that scam might have been perpetrated by someone close to the family. How else would they have known phrases her grandson used?
In my experience, young people tend to use many of the same phrases. If the grandson was the only person of his cohort she knew well, anyone using current slang may have sounded like him. As to history, does the grandson have a facebook page? Sorry, stupid question. Of course he does.
Interesting teacher’s view of North Carolina schools favoring bureaucracy over education: http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/27/nc-teacher-i-quit/
It’s the same as it’s always been. The good ones leave and the bad ones hang on for dear life.
IBM had a policy of not sacking anyone. they offered voluntary redundancies, the good ones took them and got another job, the duds held on. Eventually IBM just had to sack some people, so they got rid of the duds. No ifs, no buts.
Telephone scams, those come and go in waves here. Haven’t been any in the news for a while, but it’s always the elderly that get targetted, and always by someone claiming to be a relative in trouble. They rely on the fact that the elderly aren’t as quick anymore, and are used to trying to hide this: “Grandma, that’s awful, how can you not recognize my voice!” Add in a few personal details (as RBT points out, easily available on the Internet), and it’s done…
Ray, at least your MIL owned up to it. Here’s hoping she really has learned her lesson, because it’s almost certain that she will be called in a few weeks, by someone else with a completely different racket. There’s a market for the phone numbers of people who have fallen for a scam – they’re worth real money to other scammers. I’ve read reports of elderly people too confused or too embarrassed at having been tricked, who get nailed again, and again…
I read a rather amusing article about the Nigerian email scams. The article claims that the emails are deliberately bad, because they want to lower their false-positive rate. If the emails were more convincing, they would have to invest more time in replying to people who, ultimately, are not going to be stupid enough to fall for the scam.
I really don’t understand how people fall for these scams. My parents, and at another time a neighbor, got Spanish Lottery letters (by mail, which costs them something.) My parents weren’t taken in, and I kept the letter as a souvenir, but my neighbor was really interested. I think I managed to talk sense into him.
Another time a chap at work was taken in. I could hear him talking to the scammers on the phone, he was only a few desks away, so I got the boss and the two of us told him (in a break between phone calls) what was happening. I think we told him in time.
I am in utter disbelief that someone would send money without checking with a single, solitary other family member. And hey, I love my kids, but you went and got yourself into jail and want $3,000 from me to get out? Let me think about this for a few days. A few weeks if it were a grandkid.
My wife would happily dump me in the street if one of our kids needed something. Women are very different from men when it comes to kids. Very, very different. The TV show “Switched at Birth” illustrated this different attitudes toward kids very well this season. The dad is all “you gotta live by the rules or else” and the mom is “you gotta live by the rules, now come give me a hug”.
Still, you are very correct. I would hope that someone would check with other family members before sending money to a far off place to rescue a family member. I would hope.
The person on the phone told her to not check with his father because he was not supposed to be in Mexico and would get in trouble. These people are pros. I am surprised she did not call my wife. My MIL would do just about anything for her grand kids.
They did try to get another $2K out of her so that her grandson could avoid community service. She declined and said he could do community service.
She lives in San Antonio and knows how bad the Mexican jails are towards Americans. She was really convinced. I would have loved to hear the conversation. She even asked to talk with him and whomever they put on the phone sounded just like him.
We think it was someone that her grandson met at one time that was pulling the scam. And he does travel out of the country quite a bit so being in Mexico was plausible.
I think she learned a lesson, expensive for sure, and it will not happen again.
“…hey, I love my kids, but you went and got yourself into jail and want $3,000 from me to get out? Let me think about this for a few days. A few weeks if it were a grandkid.”
Not really. If it’s a jail south of our border or a jail in almost any other country in the world, let alone some of our own really effed-up jails, you do not want your children or grandchildren in them, Chuck. But maybe you were just kidding. Unless your kid or grandkid is the size of me or Robert and as mean and ugly (speaking for myself on that last), they are gonna become bars of soap for whoever decides to make them so.
“My wife would happily dump me in the street if one of our kids needed something.”
Oh yeah, I hear that loud and clear. I would fly out the door so fast it would make my head spin and not a backward glance, either.