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Category: biology

Friday, 28 October 2011

08:48 – One thing that’s always struck me as strange about Netflix practices is that they don’t allow non-members to browse or search their catalog. One would think they’d want non-members to be able to see what they’re missing.

I just downgraded our plan from streaming + two discs to streaming-only, which took effect Wednesday. With the exception of the final disc of series four of Sons of Anarchy, there was nothing left in our disc queue that we cared that much about seeing, so I planned to go streaming-only for a few months to give Netflix a chance to add more discs that we wanted to watch and then bump up our membership to include discs. But, as of yesterday, I can no longer see anything that has to do with discs. Our disc queue is now invisible, although I understand that Netflix keeps it archived for two years. Not that that matters, since I did a screen capture of it before I changed to streaming-only.

But I can no longer search for discs, nor do search results even include series or seasons that are available only on disc. For example, series one and two of Sons of Anarchy are available on disc or streaming, but series three is disc-only. When I search for Sons of Anarchy now, all I see are the two seasons that are available streaming. Not even an indication that series three is available on-disc.

Given that Netflix is trying very hard to force people toward streaming, I wonder if the converse is true. If I had a disc-only plan, would they let me see what’s available streaming even though I couldn’t watch it? It seems to make sense for them to do that.

Actually, Netflix has made things easier for me. Rather than keeping an eye on new disc-only material, I’ll just wait six months or so and then upgrade our plan to include discs. There certainly ought to be at least a month’s worth of new discs we want to watch by then. Not that we’ll have to wait six months to see the last two episodes of Sons of Anarchy S3. Our friends Paul and Mary subscribe to both discs and streaming, and they tend to let discs sit around for extended periods. I asked Mary the other day if she’d mind getting SoA S3D4 for me, and she readily agreed.

Work on the biology book continues. Right now, I’m working on a lab session on culturing drug-resistant bacteria. Once I finish that session, I think I’ll jump over to a different group for a change of pace, maybe the genetics group or the life processes group. Or maybe even one of the survey groups. I’m also down perilously low in chemistry kit inventory, so soon I’ll have to set aside a day or so to build more chemistry kits.

14:55 – Well, that didn’t take long. In the first real test of the “solutions” reached at the EU crisis conclave Thursday morning, Italy has failed miserably on today’s bond sale. The yield was catastrophic, 6.06%, and Italy was unable to sell all of the bonds it offered. To knowledgeable observers, that’s sufficient evidence to declare the latest crisis summit a complete and utter failure. Not only did the non-actions taken at the summit not reverse the collapse of EU finances, they appear not to have even slowed things down. Contagion continues, unabated.

Of course, none of this crisis kabuki really had anything to do with Greece and not much more to do with the euro or the EU. What it’s really about is an attempt to shore things up until Merkozy can get past the next elections–not that either of them has much chance of being re-elected–and, even more importantly, the continuing push by the EU elite for “more Europe”. They’re actually loving this financial/debt/liquidity crisis, because it supports their long-term anti-democratic plans to consolidate Europe as a single political entity, ruled by them. Fortunately, I believe the FANG nations will refuse to go along with their cunning plan, leaving eurocrats holding the empty bag of the southern-tier nations only. Let them see what they can do with that motley collection.

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Saturday, 15 October 2011

11:43 – This guy makes a pretty good argument on why he expects Greece to default on 28 October. Of course, the Greek government hasn’t yet gotten its grubby little hands on the final bailout payment, so that may give them pause. But it’s not like the EU/ECB/IMF are actually handing over suitcases full of euros, so the reality is that the Greek government really doesn’t get its hands on bailout payments anyway.

As things stand, the Greek government has no intention of ever repaying any of the money it owes other than in the sense of paying back a little bit to get a lot more. And everyone else is fully aware of this. If the EU/ECB/IMF actually does pay the last tranche, it’s only to prop up Greece for a few weeks longer, buying time for them to do what they can to prevent the inevitable Greek default from starting the row of dominoes falling. At this point, that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion, with Portugal and Ireland toppling soon after Greece, followed soon after by Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and, eventually, Germany itself. I just hope the UK, US, Canada, and other first-world economies can minimize the damage to themselves.

In writing our books, we try very hard to keep the costs of doing home science as low as possible. That means using cheap or free items as much as possible, rather than requiring purchased items. But I’m going to make an exception for the series of lab sessions I’m working on now, which are on culturing bacteria. I’ve done these labs in the past. I used environmental bacteria, but then I’m not an inexperienced high-school student. The risks of culturing environment bacteria, particularly at room temperature, are pretty minimal, but not non-existent. A dropped Petri dish, for example, could put large numbers of pathogenic bacteria into the air.

So I decided to specify a purchased culture of bacteria intended for use by students. There are still minor risks involved, but they’re much smaller than those of culturing unknown bacteria. I’m going to specify a mixed broth culture from Carolina Biological Supply. It’s $17 plus shipping, but it contains three types of bacteria that are useful for learning purposes, and it’d be pretty hard to get into trouble with them.

The three bacteria are Bacillus subtilis (Gram+ rod), Micrococcus luteus (Gram+ sphere), and Rhodospirillum rubrum (Gram- spiral), which gives us all three bacterial shapes and both Gram types. They’re also large enough to be visible without an oil-immersion objective, and they form colonies that are easy to discriminate visually from each other. Finally, they’re reasonably robust, pretty easy to culture on standard nutrient agar or in nutrient broth, and grow reasonably well at room temperature.

We’ll use these bacteria over the course of several sessions. We’ll do a standard agar plate culture to grow and identify colonies of each of the three species. We’ll isolate each of the three and grow pure cultures in broth. We’ll then reculture on agar to grow bacterial “lawns” of each of the pure cultures. Finally, we’ll test the susceptibility of each species to various antibiotics. We may also re-culture resistant bacteria repeatedly to produce a resistant strain.

We don’t want anyone to have to re-purchase the mixed culture because the first one died off, so we’ll probably also experiment with re-culturing in refrigerated nutrient broth and/or phosphate-buffered saline to maintain a live culture over the course of several weeks. I haven’t done this with these species, so I’ll order one of these mixed culture tubes from Carolina to run that part of the procedure myself.

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Saturday, 8 October 2011

09:37 – Our friends Mary and Paul dropped by for a visit yesterday evening. I asked them if they were attending the sunrise service this morning. They both use iPhones and iPods, you see, and this morning is the third day. Steve is risen.

Paul has drunk the Kool-Aid more than Mary, I think. He commented that he liked his iPhone, but he really liked his iPod. Where else, he asked, could one get a pocket-size music player? Barbara and I pointed out that she had one connected to her car audio system right now, a Sansa model. Yes, he said, but where can you get music to load on it? Barbara pointed out that she had several thousand tracks converted to MP3 that she’d ripped from her CDs, about a thousand of which were on her Sansa player at the moment. I added that if he wanted to buy music on-line he could visit Amazon, which has a huge selection with often better prices, and has never had copy protection.

I really don’t understand all the eulogizing. Not only did Jobs never do anything to help the advance of personal technology; much of what he did hurt it. He went from selling overpriced, underpowered PCs to selling overpriced music players and tracks to selling overpriced cellphones. Everything he ever did was aimed at pillaging his customers’ wallets and locking them into his “walled garden”. And, no, I haven’t forgotten the Apple ][, which deserves at best an asterisk in PC history.

Laundry this morning, with work interspersed on the biology lab book. Right now, I’m working on the chapter on cells and unicellular organisms. I’m just starting a session on making culturing media and filling Petri dishes and slant tubes with agar gel medium and test tubes with broth medium. We’ll use the Petri dishes in the following session to culture bacteria, after which we’ll isolate selected species and grow pure cultures of them in slant tubes and eventually broth tubes. We’ll then flood Petri dishes with broth culture to grow bacterial “lawns”, which can then be used for antibiotic sensitivity testing.

I’ve thought seriously about recommending that readers avoid culturing environmental bacteria and instead purchase pure cultures of known-harmless bacteria from Carolina Biological Supply or wherever. The issue is that there are a lot of pathogenic bacteria floating around in the wild. Ordinarily, they’re harmless, because our bodies defenses can deal with small numbers of them. But culturing them produces large numbers of them, so one must take care to avoid being exposed to them. With proper technique, the danger is nearly non-existent, but some danger does still exist. We’ll minimize that by using a simple beef or chicken broth and sucrose nutrient mixture and culturing at room temperature rather than body temperature. Those factors favor growth of bacteria that prefer the lower temperature, which is to say not most pathogens.

Of course, we’ll subsequently be using forced selection to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria from those original cultures, and if you don’t want wild pathogens floating around the room, you really don’t want drug-resistant wild pathogens floating free. Of course, we could temper that risk by using antibiotics that are not usually used in humans, such as neomycin, sulfadimethoxine, and so on. We can also take steps to minimize exposure risk, including wearing an N100 mask, misting the area with Lysol spray and so on. On balance, I think I’ll do the lab with environmental bacteria, but warn readers that for complete safety they should purchase a known-harmless culture as their starting point.

Colin is still very much a puppy. Barbara had dinner out yesterday, so I made myself a bowl of tuna shock. Except that I didn’t have any tuna or any shock, so I just put a can of olives (less the can and lid) and a can of Costco chicken chunks (less the can and lid) in a big bowl and then added a large glop of mayonnaise. I’d eaten about a third of it when the doorbell rang. I got up to answer it, first warning Colin not to touch my food. When I got back a moment later, he had his snout in my bowl. Fortunately, he hadn’t eaten much of it, so I finished the rest.

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Friday, 9 September 2011

08:42 – Well, the copy finally finished at 10:00 p.m. last night, after 13 hours of writing 300,000+ files totaling about 1,300 GB. I’ll probably do the same thing again to a second new 2 TB Barracuda drive and then pull both of the old 1.5 TB drives. Of course, that leaves me with a system drive that’s older than either of those drives. Barracuda drives are extremely reliable, but these guys are well past retirement age in dog years.

Jerry Coyne just posted an interesting article about science versus religion, Adam and Eve: theologians squirm and sputter. The whole of Christianity is based on the Adam and Eve myth and original sin. Without that, Christianity has no basis whatsoever. And yet science tells us, indisputably, that Adam and Eve never existed. It is amusing to watch accommodationists try to reconcile religious myth with the cold, hard light of science.

We’ll be using a lot of dropper bottles for the biology kits, so I ordered a couple hundred dozen from one of my wholesalers in 15 mL and 30 mL capacities. These bottles are Chinese-made, and they’re fine except for one thing. They arrive with the dropper tips and caps installed, which means that Barbara and I have to disassemble them all before filling and labeling them, and then turn around and reinstall the dropper tips and caps. Doing that for a few bottles is no big deal. Doing it for thousands involves some work.

We’ll also need 30 mL wide-mouth bottles, which none of my current wholesalers offer. So I contacted a bottle supplier about the wide-mouth bottles and decided as long as I was at it to see what they had to offer in the way of dropper bottles. Their bottles are US-made, which is good, and they come in bulk with the dropper tips and caps in separate plastic bags. The problem is, bottles, even Chinese bottles, aren’t cheap, and the US-made ones cost 30% to 40% more than the Chinese-made ones. Still, I was willing to consider paying more for the US-made bottles. Until the samples arrived.

The problem is the dropper tips. The Chinese bottles have dropper tips whose bodies are long plugs that friction-fit the mouth of the bottle. Seating a dropper tip is a simple matter of pressing the tip into the mouth of the bottle until it seats. The dropper tips on the US bottles have much shorter bodies, and snap into place. The problem is that it requires close attention to make sure the tip has actually seated and snapped into place. This would slow down processing significantly, so I decided to stick with the Chinese bottles.

Speaking of processing bottles, I looked into automated methods and concluded that our current manual method is actually better unless and until we reach the point where we need to produce hundreds of kits per month. Working together, Barbara and I can fill, insert dropper tips, cap, and label the bottles at a rate of about 150 bottles per hour. (I fill and insert the dropper tips; Barbara caps and labels.) The only part of that that can be automated at anything approaching a reasonable price is the filling operation, but that still requires individual attention to each bottle as it’s filled, and actually saves almost no time.

10:36 – Barbara saw an article in the paper this morning about using copper sulfate to kill the mildew that’s appeared on some of her shrubs. I buy copper(II) sulfate by the kilogram, so she asked if I could make her up some right here in the sink. Of course, I agreed. The problem is, what concentration?

Apparently, the concentration needed varies. One site mentioned ranges from 2 to 6 pounds per 100 gallons, which translates to something like 909 to 2727 grams per 379 liters, or about 2.4 to 7.2 grams per liter. Or, as I think of it, about 0.01 to 0.03 molar. Since I keep liters of 1.0 M copper(II) sulfate solution in inventory–the stuff takes forever to dissolve–I’ll just compromise on 0.02 M and dilute one part of the stock solution to 49 parts water.

I did wonder whether the high solubility of copper(II) sulfate would be a problem. If Barbara sprays on 0.02 M copper(II) sulfate, it’ll stick around only until the next good rain dissolves it and rinses it off the plants. That’s apparently why people use Bordeaux or Burgundy mixtures, which are solutions of copper(II) sulfate mixed with either calcium hydroxide (lime) or sodium carbonate (washing soda or soda ash) to form insoluble precipitates of either copper hydroxide or copper carbonate. Apparently these are more persistent because they don’t dissolve in rainwater, but I do wonder whether they’d clog up Barbara’s sprayer. What the insoluble copper salts really are is time-release treatments, because even “insoluble” compounds are very slightly soluble in water. So, apparently copper(II) ions kill fungi even in nanomolar or even picomolar concentrations. I think we’ll start with just 0.02 M copper(II) sulfate solution and see if that makes the fungi gag, clutch their tiny little chests, and drop off the plants.

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Tuesday, 6 September 2011

09:30 – I need to decide what to do with our Netflix subscription. Right now, we’re paying $10/month for unlimited streaming and one disc at a time. As of our anniversary date on 26 September, that jumps to $16/month if I do nothing. I’ll probably bump it to $20/month for unlimited streaming and two discs at a time.

Netflix really miscalculated when they introduced the $10/month plan, which was $8/month for streaming and $2/month for the one disc at a time. I think they assumed that most people on that plan would watch nearly all streaming, and get an occasional disc to fill in gaps. What we did, and what I suspect most people on that plan did, was the opposite: watch DVDs as much as possible and fill in with streaming. As a result, Netflix was sending us about eight discs a month for that $2, or $0.25 per disc. Given that Netflix had to pay postage both ways, and considering DVD acquisition costs and handling expenses, Netflix was probably losing at least $10/month on us, and probably a similar amount on many of their $10/month customers. That obviously couldn’t go on, so Netflix put a stop to it.

Netflix has been pushing streaming heavily for obvious reasons. Delivering an hour of streaming costs them maybe $0.05, including content and transmission costs, while delivering an hour of content on disc costs them an order of magnitude more. If I were Netflix, I’d continue to increase prices, both for streaming and discs. Streaming, so they can afford to buy more streaming content. Discs, because they want to discourage people from renting discs. Additional revenue will allow Netflix to expand their streaming options dramatically. And price increases won’t lose them many customers. What, after all, are the alternatives?

While they’re at it, I think Netflix should introduce a separately-priced streaming channel or channels for live sports. Netsportz? Assuming that only 20% of their members sign up at, say, $20/month, that’s still more than $100 million/month in revenue. They could buy a lot of live sports for $100 million a month. And, of course, a lot more than 20% of their membership would probably sign up for an all-sports Netflix channel, and they’d probably be willing to pay more than $20/month.

Work on the biology lab book and kits continues. We have quite a few chemistry kits in stock now and components to build a bunch more, so we can forget about chemistry kits until stock gets low. I’m prototyping a biology kit now. There are lots of decisions to make. Some of them seem minor, but have implications. For example, do I include a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes, which are inexpensive but cannot be reused, or do I include two (or three or four) glass Petri dishes, which are fragile, much more expensive, and require autoclaving, but can be reused indefinitely? The problem is, which is the better choice depends on the person who’s buying the kit. For many homeschoolers, the plastic Petri dishes would be better. They’re cheaper, more convenient, and pre-sterilized. For others, who might do a lot of culturing, the glass Petri dishes are the better choice. I’m inclined to think that the latter group are in a small minority, so right now I’m leaning toward the plastic dishes. What I may do is offer an optional separate culturing kit with glass Petri dishes, several types of agar, and so on.

11:07 – In case you’re wondering what happened to the title in today’s entry, WordPress screwed me again. I’d entered a title and most of the text, at which point Colin started bugging me to go out. So I clicked the Save Draft icon. WordPress, instead of saving, blew me all the way out to the login screen. I logged in, and found my entry was truncated in the middle of the second paragraph. So I used Firefox’s back button to return to what I’d entered. I finished the entry and posted it. I *know* that entry had the title, because I looked before I clicked the Publish button. But for some reason WordPress kept the entry but lost the title.

Unfortunately, that’s nothing unusual for WordPress, which is extremely unstable, at least on my hosting service. I frequently get error messages when I try to save a post, and even more frequently when I’m using the Tools section of the dashboard to backup my site from the server to my local machine. I use WordPress only because my new hosting service offered a one-click install, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a better system available.

My decision on the Petri dishes was made for me. I have two or three vendors from whom I can buy them. All of them ship in packs of 10. Presumably, those factory packs are well protected against breakage, but I have no desire to try to package individual Petri dishes. I sure don’t want to allocate the cost of 10 Petri dishes to each kit. Even if they were free, that’d be too many Petri dishes and too much room in the package. So I’ll go with a sleeve of plastic Petri dishes. I may or may not create a separate dedicated culturing kit. If I do, it’ll include a factory pack of 10 glass Petri dishes. I will probably list the kit contents as six Petri dishes, with a note that we actually include 10, but allow for 40% breakage. That way, if someone does get all 10 unbroken, they get more than they expected.

12:39 – Hmmm. I may have screwed Dr. Koonin big time. I noticed his free book on a list from irreaderreview.com. Chances are, not a lot of people who are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology read that list. But I had to go and tell Jerry Coyne, who has a large international readership, nearly all of whom are interested in evolutionary/molecular biology. Then PZ Myers, who has a gigantic international readership–he probably gets more visits in an hour than I get in a week–sees the announcement on Jerry’s site and posts a link on his own site to Dr. Koonin’s free book. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins, who makes PZ look like small potatoes, also sees the announcement on Jerry’s site. I don’t know if he’s posted about it, but if he has, between Coyne, Myers and Dawkins, it’s unlikely that anyone on the planet who has much interest in evolutionary/molecular biology is unaware that Koonin’s book is available for free.

I just checked Amazon, and Koonin’s book is now in the Top Ten. Not the Top Ten biology books or even the Top Ten science books. The Top Ten among all books on Amazon. That means Koonin’s book is probably “selling” thousands of copies per day. And everyone on the planet who has any interest in the subject probably has a free copy by now, leaving Koonin’s remaining market as only people who are not interested in his book.

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Monday, 5 September 2011

10:04 – Costco run with Paul and Mary yesterday, followed by dinner. The safety officer for Mary’s company is retiring, and Mary has been appointed to serve that role. As she says, this following a week in which their lab facility experienced an earthquake and a hurricane. Not to mention a plague of locusts.

Colin’s pictures will appear in the biology lab book, in the chapter on genetics and inheritance. This image of Colin at 10 weeks old shows him with full drop ears, a common (and genetically dominant) form.

This image shows Colin at 28 weeks old, by which time his ears have assumed their final fully-erect (prick) form.

I’m using these images to illustrate two ear forms, one dominant and one recessive, and tightly-cropped head shots of these two images in a table to illustrate what puppies a breeding pair of Border Collies with different ear traits can be expected to have. (Colin’s parents are both flip/drop-eared, which means they’re both dominant-recessive with respect to prick ears. If they had eight puppies, which they did, one would expect on average two of those puppies to have prick ears, which was indeed the result.)

16:01 – Geez. I just alerted Jerry Coyne to a free science book deal on Amazon, and almost forgot to tell my own readers about it. The book is Eugene V. Koonin’s The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution. It’s regularly priced at $69.99, print or Kindle, and is currently on sale for $0.00 for Kindle. If you’re interested in this subject, grab while the grabbing is good, because these sales often last 24 hours or less.

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Friday, 12 August 2011

08:56 – Colin turns 6 months old today. He’s a huge puppy, already as large as most adult male Border Collies. Duncan was a big boy, at 75 pounds (34 kilos) and about 4″ (10 cm) taller than other male BCs, but I think Colin will be bigger still.

The US Postal Service is losing $8 billion a year and is now in what amounts to Chapter 11 bankruptcy, or would be if it weren’t a pseudo-government agency. It’s due to make a $5.5 billion payment to its retirement fund next month which it doesn’t have the money to make. The USPS has announced plans to cut 220,000 jobs, or 30% of its workforce, between now and 2015. About 100,000 of those will be by attrition, but the remaining 120,000 will be actual people losing their jobs. It also plans to close thousands of post offices.

That’s actually much too little, much too late, and doing the wrong thing anyway. Service levels will be badly impacted by those cuts, which will in turn further reduce mail volume as mailers shift even more quickly to alternatives. What the USPS needs to do is:

1. Eliminate rural free delivery, which is extremely costly. Establish population-density metrics to determine whether any particular home or business is eligible for free delivery or must pick up its mail at the nearest post office.

2. Negotiate “last mile” delivery agreements with UPS and FedEx, whereby UPS and FedEx deliver packages to USPS distribution centers, and the USPS makes the local deliveries to the recipients. Eventually, eliminate most local deliveries by USPS personnel and negotiate contracts with local businesses for last mile deliveries. That is, the USPS should be making one delivery per neighborhood to a local contractor who actually delivers the mail and packages to homes.

3. Crush the postal unions and reduce pay and benefits to no more than a third of what they are now, for both current employees and retirees. Right now, post office employees are paid at least two to three times more than they’d earn for doing the same job in private industry. Retirement and medical benefits are ridiculously high. All of that needs to stop if the USPS is to have any chance of surviving.

Despite the protests of the Big Three credit-rating agencies and the French government, the market believes that France doesn’t deserve a AAA rating. And they’re absolutely correct. If the USA is only AA+, France should be at least two or three levels below that. Forget S&P and Moody’s and Fitch. If you want a real credit rating, all you need to do is look at what the free market says the credit ratings really are. That’s what the basis points on credit default swaps provide, and it’s instructive to look at CDS prices for the various countries.

Greece ~ 1,800
Portugal ~ 900
Ireland ~ 800
Italy ~ 400
Spain ~ 400
France ~ 150
Austria ~ 140
Germany ~ 90
UK ~ 85
US ~ 55

A basis point is 0.01%. These CDS prices vary constantly, but they represent the actual free-market cost to insure a bond against default. So, for example, the one-year premium to insure $1,000 of Greek bonds against default is $180, while at the other end of the risk spectrum, it costs only $5.50 to insure $1,000 of US debt for one year. That’s why it’s ridiculous for ratings agencies to assign AAA ratings to the UK, Germany, Austria, and France while assigning the US a lower rating. The free market gives the real ratings, and they’re completely out of line with what the ratings agencies are saying. I know which I trust more.

11:22 – This has been a stunning week for medical discoveries that are potentially huge breakthroughs. Earlier in the week, a PLoS paper reported incredible results with a process called DRACO, in which cells that have been infected by a virus (and only those infected cells) can be forced to undergo apoptosis, which kills the infected cells, leaving the viruses without host cells. The really significant thing about DRACO is that it is not virus-specific, like nearly all current antiviral treatments. Any cell that has been infected with any virus (presumably; DRACO was shown to be effective against 17 widely different viruses) is detected and eliminated. And here, Derek Lowe reports on a potential breakthrough that does pretty much the same thing against leukemia, and presumably eventually other cancers.

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Thursday, 28 July 2011

08:40 – Heads-down work all day yesterday on the biology book. Or as heads-down as it gets with a 5-month-old puppy pestering me constantly.

The front matter and introductory chapters are complete, as are the Group I sessions on Mastering Microscope Skills. Group II, on The Chemistry of Life, is nearly complete. Over-complete, in fact. It currently runs about 55 manuscript pages, and will have to be trimmed back. Group III, on Life Processes, is well in progress, as is Group XIV on Ecology, and I have many other individual lab sessions also in progress that will be assigned to other groups. Things are starting to come together.

Congress and Obama continue the debt dance, with both sides pretending that there are actual budget cuts on the table, when in fact the argument is all about whether the budget and deficit will be increased by a huge amount or by an even huger amount. What they really need to be doing is zero-based budgeting, or at the very least budgeting based on a milestone year. I’d suggest 1990 or even 2000. Start with that and then discuss how much should be cut from the spending levels that year. Alternatively, they might consider setting a spending limit as a percentage of GDP. Currently, spending is about 25%, with revenues at only 15% of GDP. In the first year, they should cut taxes to put revenues at 10% of GDP, with spending at, say, 5% of GDP. In later years, they could reduce those numbers to more reasonable levels, until the federal debt is eliminated and federal revenues and spending are at, say, 0.5% of GDP. And even that would be much too much.

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Monday, 25 July 2011

08:55 – Hmmm. Moody’s has downgraded Greek debt to Ca, which is almost-but-not-quite default. Moody’s notes that the likelihood they’ll further reduce Greece to a C rating, or actual default, is “virtually 100%”. Meanwhile, Spanish bond yields–or was it Italian bond yields?–just climbed past 6%, which is catastrophic.

The purpose of the crisis summit, of course, was not to save Greece, which cannot be saved, but to prevent spread of the “contagion” to Spain and Italy. I may have been optimistic in estimating that they’d delayed the crash by 90 days. It may be more like 30 days. Historically, July and August are when these things tend to happen, and we may have an interesting time of it next month.

Heads-down work on the biology book this week, with a bit of lab work to confirm some of the stuff in the lab sessions. As I write the lab sessions, I have to constantly keep in mind the chemicals needed, and whether it’s practical to include those chemicals in the kits. It’s essential that the kits be legal to ship under the Small Quantity Exemption, but staying within the SQE regulations isn’t as simple as it might seem.

For example, the SQE regulations permit shipping up to one fluid ounce, which they define as 30 mL, of most hazardous chemicals, including nasty stuff like concentrated sulfuric acid. The problem is that the limit isn’t per-container but per shipping package. So, for example, if I include two 15 mL bottles of two biostains that are in a solution of 70% isopropanol, that’s my limit on isopropanol for that package. (It doesn’t matter what the percentage is; I could use 50% isopropanol, and the limit is still 30 mL per package.)

Ah, but in that case I haven’t used any of my ethanol allocation, so I could also include two 15 mL bottles of ethanol-based solutions in the same package, and, for that matter, two more 15 mL bottles of methanol-based solutions and two more 15 mL bottles of butanol-based solutions, because methanol, ethanol, propanol, and butanol all have different UN (hazardous chemical) numbers. For some stains and reagents, the type of alcohol used doesn’t matter much or at all. For others, it matters a lot. For example, some stains are readily soluble in methanol but not propanol, and vice versa. Depending on how things work out, I may end up going to some ridiculous extremes. For example, I might supply a 10 mL of a reagent in a 15 mL bottle, using 99% isopropanol, which would cost me only 10 mL of my 30 mL isopropanol allocation–and direct the reader to add 5 mL of distilled water to that bottle. Geez.

I did make a fortuitous discovery yesterday. The 15 mL PE dropper bottles are a slip fit in the 50 mL PP centrifuge tubes, several of which will be included in the biology kits as specimen containers and for temporary storage of various solutions. The conical caps of the dropper bottles even fit neatly into the conical bottoms of the centrifuge tubes. That makes the centrifuge tubes ideal secondary containers for 15 mL dropper bottles that contain really nasty stuff. Adding a couple of cotton balls or some paper towels will both cushion the dropper bottle and serve as an absorbent if the bottle leaks.

12:50 – I just noticed that the European Central Bank has stopped buying sovereign bonds. Since the May 2010 bailout, the ECB has been backstopping Greek debt. The ECB is currently estimated to hold something like €45 billion of essentially worthless Greek debt on its balance sheet, and it has obviously decided not to add to that total. That leaves the EFSF (European bailout fund), which has only €440 billion in its coffers, as the bailout lender of last resort. That’s marginally sufficient to cover expected upcoming bailouts for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, but there’s no way the EFSF will be able to do a thing to help Spain and particularly Italy when they show up begging for bailouts. Speculation leading up to the crisis summit last week was that the ESFS reserves would be at least doubled if not tripled. Instead, they were left as is. The result is that traders and analysts are holding their collective breath, because if (when) Spain or Italy collapses there’ll be nothing left in the till to bail them out with.

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Thursday, 14 July 2011

08:55 – I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. Right now, I’m entirely rewriting a lab session on DNA analysis by gel electrophoresis. The original lab session was all for real: real DNA, real restriction enzymes, real agarose gel, real gel electrophoresis setup and power supply, and so on.

The problem was, doing it for real is expensive, time-consuming, and takes a lot of page count to write up. It simply wasn’t worth the costs in terms of money, lab time, and page count for the educational benefits it provided. So I decided to rewrite the lab session to separate dyes rather than DNA fragments on a food-grade agar gel bed, and to use a home-made gel electrophoresis apparatus with 9V batteries instead of a $400 commercial apparatus. The concepts are the same, the learning experience is quite similar, the resulting gels are extremely colorful, and all of the specialty items needed are inexpensive enough to include in the kit.

The gloves have finally come off, with the Democrats and Republicans making it clear that they really, really hate each other’s guts, as if that wasn’t already clear to anyone who was paying attention. The Republicans refuse to budge on increasing taxes–which is bad enough; they should be insisting on reducing them–and want to make actual spending cuts, but only small ones. The Democrats insist on increasing taxes and increasing spending. They’re both our enemies, but the Republicans are slightly less our enemies, at least economically, than the Democrats.

We are currently taxing at a rate of 15% of GDP, and spending at a rate of 25% of GDP. Obama cynically promises $3 trillion in spending “cuts”, all of which are in the future, constitute reductions in proposed spending increases rather than actual cuts, and will never take place, in return for “only” $1 trillion in tax increases, all of which will certainly occur, and sooner rather than later.

The fundamental problem is that the federal government spends an incredible $125 billion per month more than it takes in. That’s more than $400/month for every man, woman, and child in the country. And when you consider that half the population pays zero (or negative) federal income taxes, that means that the average actual taxpayer’s share of federal deficit spending is probably more than $1,000 per month. Every month.

Meanwhile, Obama cynically warns that the government may not be able to pay Social Security recipients if the borrowing limit is not increased, and claims that we won’t be able to pay interest on our debt, thereby damaging our credit and setting off an economic apocalypse. The reality is that the US won’t be able to pay all of its bills, but which bills we choose not to pay are still within the control of the government. So, as usual, the government threatens not to pay the important bills. Sound familiar?

Every time money is tight, government threatens to cut spending on the things people want to spend money on, while leaving untouched the things that people don’t want to spend money on. When municipal budgets are tight, for example, the mayor and city council cut fire and police and garbage service–the things that people really want–while refusing to cut costs in areas that the taxpayers don’t much care about.

Meanwhile, the federal spending categories that should be cut with a meataxe aren’t even mentioned. Why, for example, are we wasting many billions of dollars every month on completely useless items such as the UN, foreign aid, the IMF, NATO, TSA, and so on, not to mention the huge costs of maintaining military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

As someone said, we don’t have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. It’s long past time that we decided how much we can afford to spend, and then prioritize what to spend it on. The problem is that it’s in neither party’s perceived interest to address the problem seriously. The Republicans want Obama and the Democrats to be crushed at the polls in 2012, so passing any kind of increase in the borrowing limit that puts off the crisis is the last thing they want to do. The Democrats can’t afford to make any serious spending cuts, because their core constituency is made up of government employees and union members, both of which will suffer badly if rational steps are taken to address the spending crisis.

This is not going to end well. So far, the war is one of mere words, but it could easily devolve into real class warfare. Both sides perceive this issue as existential. And in a fight for survival, things can get very ugly very fast.

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