Category: writing

10:23 – I took the day off yesterday, the first in several months. I’ve come down with a cold, from what source I don’t know since I seldom leave the house.

On the plus side, everything we need to build the first batch of biology kits is either already here or on the way, with just three exceptions. I need to order some potassium dihydrogen phosphate (used in the nitrogen-free fertilizer concentrate supplied with the kit) and some sodium dodecylsulfate (used in extracting DNA). I also have 120 50mm funnels on backorder until 21 March.

Today, I’ll get those last purchase orders issued and then jump back into the rewrite of the forensics book.

11:44 – I decided to take it easy today as well. It’s hard to do what I do when annoying virus symptoms are distracting me.

I see the Greeks are rioting. I made a comment the other day about them needing to cut 1.5 million government jobs, and someone pointed out in the comments that there were “only” 800,000 government employees in Greece to start with. Actually, no one, including the Greek government, knows how many government employees there are. The commonly quoted numbers between 800,000 and 1,000,000 are almost certainly far lower than reality. The best numbers I had as of last autumn were between 1.2 million and 1.6 million, depending on how one counts them. At any rate, my suggestion was actually to get rid of all of them and start over.

Barbara and I started watching Lillyhammer, Netflix’s first co-production of original programming. It stars Steve van Zandt (familiar as Silvio Dante from the Sopranos and as a member of the E-Street Band) as a New York mafia guy who is relocated by witness protection to Lillehammer, Norway. As we watched the first episode, one of the story arcs made me think about why Europe is moribund. The gangster decides to star a bar/nightclub in Norway, and finds that he has to go through incredible hoops to do so. That’s commonplace in Europe, whereas in the US someone who wants to start a business just starts a business. Here, it’s literally pro forma–fill in a couple of forms and you’re good to go. Is it any wonder that the US is dynamic and Europe moribund? If Obama really wants to get things going, all he has to do is exempt small businesses–say, those with fewer than 100 employees, or better 1,000 employees–from all city, state, and federal regulations and taxes. Make small businesses a protected species. Unemployment would plummet, tax collections would skyrocket, and government outlays for social programs would fall off a cliff.

09:51 – I saw the headline in this morning’s paper, and told Barbara that San Francisco had beaten Boston. She looked at the article later, and said that it was New York that had beaten New England (or vice versa; I don’t put useless information like that into anything but nano-term memory). I figured the Giants had moved from San Francisco to New York and the Patriots from Boston to New England (somewhere else in New England, I guess), but Barbara said she was pretty sure the Giants had been in New York for a long, long time. I told her I was almost sure I remembered them being in San Francisco. So we checked Wikipedia and found that we were both right. There was and still is a team in San Francisco named the Giants. Barbara explained to me that they play with a different-shaped ball. It still seems to me to be a strange thing for adults to concern themselves with.

Brian Jepson sent me a new batch of lab chapters with his comments, so that’s first on the to-do list this morning. Next up is generating purchase orders for components for the biology kits and for more chemistry kits. Once I finish those, it’s back to re-writing the forensics book.

10:28 – The book is complete and off to the editors. For the next few weeks, I’ll be working with the editors and layout/design folks, answering queries, incorporating edits, and otherwise cleaning up before the book actually goes to print. I also have some book-related stuff to do. For example, we included a link to a biology landing page on thehomescientist.com website, which has to be created, along with all of the pages that it links to.

Starting today, I’m going through the manuscript. Each lab session has a list of items required, separated into groups of those included in the kit and those the reader supplies. I have to consolidate those lists so that I can come up with a final BoM for the kits. I’ll also consolidate the user-supplied item lists so that readers will have a single list of items they’ll need to acquire.

I’d thought about including a basic set of ten or so prepared slides as a standard part of the kits. I decided against that, mainly because some readers may already have prepared slide sets, and it makes no sense to duplicate. Instead, I’ll do what I originally planned, and make a core slide set an optional item, or indeed possibly a separate SKU. The slide set may or may not be available initially with the kits. Obviously, there are many sources for prepared slides.

The other reason I need to get the kit BoM finalized is so that I can do some price and cost calculations. At this point, I don’t have a firm idea how much the kits will cost to build or how much we’ll need to charge for them. My original goal was $175 or less with shipping but not including prepared slides, and I’d like to keep it to $160 or less if possible. There are many variables to consider, not least the physical size of the kit. If it’ll all fit into a USPS Priority Mail large flat-rate box, for example, I know my shipping costs will be about $15 per kit, regardless of weight or distance. If it won’t fit, I’ll have to buy regular boxes at maybe a buck or so each delivered and pay PM weight/distance rates, which’ll vary according to how much the kit ends up weighing and how far it’s going. In that case, assuming the kit weighs 10 pounds, my average shipping cost is going to be a good bit higher. I could use parcel post, which would cut the shipping cost significantly, but at the expense of typical 7 to 10 business day delivery time rather than the 1 to 3 days with PM. I suspect most kit buyers aren’t going to want to wait.

08:51 – We should finish the manuscript today, with two days to spare. Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading over to her parents’ house for lunch. We’ll shoot the final images this afternoon.

While I was doing laundry yesterday I had a few minutes to spare so I decided to make up the eosin Y stain for the biology kits. Eosin Y stain sold by most lab supply vendors can be anything from 0.2% to 1% eosin in either water or alcohol. Normally, the only other component is a preservative to prevent mold growth, usually a pinch of thymol or a few drops of chloroform per liter. But I’d been doing some research, and it seems that acidifying the stain with 1% or so acetic acid gives much better results.

So I dissolved 5 grams of eosin Y in nearly a liter of distilled water. It formed a very dark red solution that was so intensely-colored it was opaque even holding the bottle up to a strong light. I added 10 mL of glacial acetic acid and was surprised to see a distinct color change to almost orange. I’ll have to do a comparison test with the acidified eosin Y against neutral aqueous and alcoholic eosin Y before I use this for kits, but I suspect it’ll work very well.

10:41 – All of the chapters are complete and off to the editors except the Introduction, which is in progress now. This weekend, we need to shoot some images to replace placeholders in the text. We also need to build the gel electrophoresis apparatus and run a gel or two.

Monday, I start going through the manuscript chapters to build a list of what’s to be included in the biology kit, including amounts. Once I have that, I can start generating purchase orders for the materials and start actually making up chemicals, printing labels, filling and labeling bottles, and so on.

I’ve also decided to offer two options with the biology kit. First, a simple hand microtome. Second, a core set of maybe 20 to 25 prepared microscope slides. For those, I’ll focus on slides that are particularly important, hard to find elsewhere (particularly in standard sets), and difficult to prepare yourself (sections, special staining, and so on rather than simple whole mounts of common things). I’ll also focus on double- and triple-purpose slides. For example, a lot of slide sets include cross-sections of monocot and dicot roots, stems, and leaves, along with slides showing skeletal, smooth, and cardiac muscle. That’s nine separate slides, but I can do the same thing with only four slides: monocot and dicot roots on one slide, monocot and dicot stems on one slide, monocot and dicot leaves on one slide, and three types of muscle on one slide. The individual combined slides are usually a bit more expensive than single-specimen slides, but nowhere near twice as much.

One of the wholesalers I’ll probably buy some of those slides from packages them in boxes of 50 of the same slide, so I’ll put 50 sets together initially. I have no idea what percentage of people who order the biology kit will want the optional prepared slides, but I suspect 50 slide sets will suffice for the first 60 kits, if not many more. Delivery time on the slides is typically 60 days ARO, so we may have some juggling to do. That delivery time means I also need to get the slides on order no later than mid-February if I want to have them available by mid- to late April.