08:04 – I spent most of yesterday shooting images for the vertebrate survey lab, and I’ll do the same today.
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08:04 – I spent most of yesterday shooting images for the vertebrate survey lab, and I’ll do the same today.
08:00 – I see that a jogger in Chicago was savagely attacked by two pit bulls, which persisted in their attack despite the attempts of a bystander to drive them off with a baseball bat. The cops eventually shot the dogs. What surprised me was that the article mentioned that this was not normal pit bull behavior, and that the dogs must have been abused.
Pit bulls have a horrible reputation, of course, but the truth is that they’re normally sweet, gentle dogs, at least toward people. Pit bulls were bred to fight other dogs, and I would never trust a pit bull around other dogs. But they were also bred to remove any aggressiveness whatsoever toward humans. That was crucial for the safety of the handlers, who had to handle dogs coming out of the pits after fights, when they were injured. Any dog who showed even the slightest aggressiveness toward humans, even if the dog was injured, was ruthlessly culled.
I’m still working heads down on the vertebrates chapter. I’d planned to do a lab session on animal behavior using a couple of mice. Barbara says she won’t have any mice around here. I offered to give them to Colin to play with afterwards, but she still says no deal.
Not that Colin would hurt the mice. I remember the time Duncan caught a chipmunk out in the yard. It had strayed too far from its burrow, and Duncan pounced. He came up with the chipmunk in his mouth and pranced around for a while, showing off his prey. I yelled at him to let the chipmunk go and–I am not making this up–he carried it back over to its burrow and dropped it. At first I thought it was dead because it didn’t move, but apparently it was just stunned. Duncan snouted it towards its burrow a couple of times and it finally woke up and scampered into its burrow. My best guess is that Duncan considered the chipmunk to be a very small sheep.
13:38 – I’m sure all of us are eagerly awaiting the results from Iowa. There’s one thing I don’t understand, though. According to all the political commentators, Iowa is so important that if Romney wins it’s game over for Paul and the rest of the Republican hopefuls. But if Paul wins, which seems about equally likely from all the polls, it doesn’t matter. Huh? A little biased, are we?
08:50 – I sent off the chapter on arthropods yesterday and got a good start on chordates, although I decided to change the focus from chordates to vertebrates. Right now, I’m shooting lots of photomicrographs. I’m using lots of images to minimize the need for readers to have complete sets of prepared slides. The images are not a perfect substitute for slides by any means, but they’re better than nothing, which is what many readers will have.
If I were doing this book again, I’d start by finding a high resolution video camera, say 6+ MP, and shooting video of all the slides, tweaking the focus as the video was captured. I’d then use stacking software to build composite images to eliminate depth of field problems. Of course, that would have added a lot more work, both in the shooting and the processing. Even on a fast six-core system with gobs of memory, processing a large stack of high resolution images into the composite could require many hours of processing per image.
After nine days at home, Barbara just headed back to work. Colin, of course, is now used to having her at home, which means he’s likely to be demonic for the next few days. He’s sitting outside my office door whining right now. I’m taking that as a warning.
The good news is that Colin may get to see snow before much longer. We’ve had shirt-sleeve weather for a couple of weeks, but the high today is to be only 41 °F (5 °C), with the low tonight 23° (-5°) and the high tomorrow 35° (2°). There’s supposedly a 10% chance of some snow tonight. It’s always fun to watch a puppy experiencing snow for the first time. They all instinctively spread their toes, making what Barbara and I call “snow paws”, to get better traction and avoid sinking into the snow. Then, when they come back indoors, they lie there chewing and spitting on their paws to get the ice out from between their toes.
Someone at the house down on the corner just called 911 for the second time in about a week. An elderly woman lives there with (I think) her grandson, who’s maybe 12 years old. According to the neighbors, the kid is a perv. I’m not sure if he’s officially a sex offender or what exactly he’s accused of doing. Something like exposing himself to little girls, I think. At any rate, the fire truck just showed up, followed in quick succession by the police and ambulance. Last time, I waited until the ambulance hauled her off. Jasmine told me later that she has severe asthma, so presumably that’s what caused the 911 call this morning as well.
That got me wondering how (or if) 911 calls are billed by the city. Does each person get a certain number of free 911 calls per year with additional calls being charged for? It seems strange to bill for emergency calls if there’s a true emergency, but on the other hand I know that 911 is often abused. So do the fire department and police and ambulance just keep responding to frequent calls from one home, or do they start charging after X number? Or do they judge whether a reasonable lay-person would have considered the problem to be an emergency worth calling 911 for? I would imagine they have to show up no matter what, given the potential consequences, not to mention lawsuits and bad publicity. But there has to be some kind of boy-who-cried-wolf option for declining service to serial 911 abusers, doesn’t there?
09:44 – We’ve had some discussion here recently about free will and my arguments that it does not exist. Jerry Coyne has an interesting post up this morning, which links to his full article in USA Today. If you still believe that free will exists, which of course you must if you’re a Christian, read this article and think about it.
14:19 – Also found on Jerry Coyne’s site: a baby Linux getting a tummy rub.
08:58 – Today I’ll finish the lab session on worms and start the lab session on bugs. Tonight, of course, I’m hoping to shoot some reindeer that I can dissect, but that’ll be for the next lab session, on Chordate structures.
11:35 – Barbara didn’t give me many ideas for good gifts for her this year, so I had to come up with something myself. I decided to give her a handmade gift. It’s a sheet of 14 sticky labels. (Avery 5162 or Maco ML-1400, for any of you who still haven’t bought something for your girlfriend/wife/SO.)
This coupon entitles Barbara Thompson to insist that her husband, Robert Thompson, do something she wants him to do, whether he wants to do it or not, for a time not to exceed three hours. A maximum of three coupons may be redeemed in any one calendar month.
Serial #: 01
Expires 12/31/12 at 23:59:59. Not transferable. Photocopies not valid.
14:55 – I just asked Barbara, “By the way, does that pet store you go to across from the library carry live mice?” She replied, “I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not having live mice around here!”, to which I replied, “Don’t worry. After I’m finished with them I’ll feed them to the snakes.” Heh, heh, heh.
Actually, when I’m finished with them I’ll give them to Colin to play with. Either that, or I’ll just step on them or put them down the garbage disposer.
09:21 – In bizarre local front-page news a 23-year-old woman has been arrested and charged with having consensual sex with a 19-year-old man. The problem is that she’s a public school teacher and he is a student at her school, although the sex took place off-campus. North Carolina has a very strange and probably unconstitutional law that says a teacher who has sex with a student who attends his or her school is committing a crime, unless the two of them are married. Eh?
It seems to me that if two people, regardless of their sexes, decide to have sex it is not a matter for the law unless one of them is under the age of consent, which should be 14 years old at most. Now, it’s probably reasonable for schools, public or private, to have a no-fucking-the-students rule. But if a teacher violates that rule, he or she should be fired, not arrested. I don’t buy the argument that the teacher being in a position of authority automatically means the student can’t consent. Anyone who believes that has no experience with teenagers. And a 19-year-old man is obviously perfectly capable of consenting, or not. (Not that any heterosexual 19-year-old man in all of the history of our species has ever refused to have sex with a pretty 23-year-old woman, obviously.)
And, in related news, a local teacher was cleared yesterday of charges that he’d had sex with a female student. Apparently, the investigation turned up no evidence that he had done so, so it appears the girl was lying. Of course, the assumption should always be that the person who claims to have been raped is lying. That’s a fundamental principle in law, presumption of innocence. But for some reason, when it comes to “sex crimes”, there is instead always a presumption of guilt. This guy was very lucky indeed.
I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Catherine Conant of Triarch, a family-owned Wisconsin company that produces prepared microscope slides. She’s the granddaughter of the founder, who started the company in 1927. I asked her if she’d be willing to put together sets of microscope slides customized for the biology book.
Originally, I intended to put together these prepared slide sets myself, using slides purchased in bulk from an Indian manufacturer, but after looking into what would be required I decided it was simply more than I wanted to take on, not just in terms of work but in terms of storage space and carrying costs for inventory. This way, all I have to do is come up with lists of the slides to be included in the sets. Triarch will produce and package the sets and sell them direct to anyone who wants to buy one.
The only downside is cost. Chinese-made slides in sets of 25 typically sell for $25 to $40, depending on the particular slides in the set. The same slide set from India might sell for $45 to $75. The same set from Triarch might sell for $85 to $120.
The upside to US-made is quality and specificity. Chinese slides simply can’t be trusted. There’s zero quality control, to the extent that sometimes the specimen is actually not present on the slide. Even worse, the specimen may not be what it’s supposed to be. For example, yesterday I looked at a Chinese slide whose description was “Hydra, l.s.”. What was on the slide was indeed a longitudinal section, but it sure didn’t look like a Hydra to me.
So I emailed the vendor, saying that this sure didn’t look like a Hydra to me, and I suspected it was some kind of Planarian (flatworm). I got email back thanking me for reporting the problem. The customer service rep said her boss, the owner of the company, had looked at the rest of their stock of that slide and pulled it from inventory because the quality was unacceptable. He maintained that it was in fact a Hydra ls, however, but that the sectioning was poor and didn’t show any “polyps”. Okay, whatever. But Hydras are vase-shaped, with a thinner portion on the posterior, where the basal disk is located, then swelling to larger diameter for most of the body, and again narrowing toward the mouth and tentacles on the anterior end.
Of course, the real problem is that the average student is going to assume, reasonably enough, that the slide label is accurate, so that student may look at what he assumes is one type of specimen when in fact it’s quite another. That can get confusing fast.
That’s one of the major reasons–along with typically poor sectioning and staining–that led me to rule out Chinese slides when I was considering assembling my own slide sets. Indian slides are generally much better than Chinese slides, with decent specimen selection and sectioning as well as useful staining. The problem with Indian slides, unless you import them directly in large volume, is that US resellers are generally clueless about what specifically they have available. Also, if a particular slide is out of stock, it’s often literally several months before it’s back in stock.
So that’s why I decided to punt the slide sets to Triarch. They carry about 4,500 different slides, nearly all of which are always in stock. If they do run out, they make another batch quickly. And anyone who buys Triarch slides knows exactly what they’re getting and can be confident that what they’ve ordered is what they received. Triarch slide sets won’t be cheap in any sense of that word, but they also maintain their value. People who pay $90 for a set of Triarch slides for a school year should be able to turn around after that year and resell that slide set for very nearly what they paid for them.
08:29 – I finished the chapter on Porifera and Cnidaria. Today I’m starting on invertebrates.
09:49 – I was just reading an article the other day about the huge decline in use of the GPL and similar encumbered licenses among software developers in favor of more permissive licenses like BSD, Apache, and even public domain. I’ve never considered the GPL and related licenses “free” in any sense other than Orwellian, so it’s good to see developers abandoning the GPL in favor of making their code freely available and reusable.
Free versus encumbered licensing bears on the biology book project as well. Ironically, even though the book will be released under a Creative Commons license, in practical terms I can’t use images or other material that’s CC-licensed, let alone Gnu-licensed, because of potential encumbrances on the book. To use such images, I’d have to contact the copyright owners, if they can even be found, and get them to sign physical documents provided by O’Reilly’s legal department to give us legal permission to use the material without encumbering the book.
That’s simply nuts. (Not O’Reilly’s legal department’s requirements; they’re just doing their jobs to protect O’Reilly and us.) The whole idea of CC is to make material freely accessible and reusable. If it’s easier just to re-invent the wheel, what did CC licensing accomplish? Nothing. So, all of the images in the book will be either ones we’ve shot ourselves or ones that have been released into the public domain. And, not being hypocrites, we’ll release all of the images we shot for the book into the public domain so the next author who needs, say, a cross-section image of a Hydra will have our high-res images available to re-use freely.
15:17 – Speaking of copyright garbage, I really hate it when they disappear stuff off YouTube. The other day, I noticed they’d pulled the parody Literal Video version of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, which was actually better than the original. My favorite lines?
“Get out of my way! I gotta pee!
Never mind. I just went on the floor!”
and
“What the effing crap?
That angel guy just felt me up!”
Oh, well. At least that video is still available in modified form. Someone reframed it and added a cat to the screen to prevent YouTube’s auto-deleter from finding it. The same can’t be said for a video that was run on French TV of Cyndi Lauper doing a haunting version of Walk Away Renée with Peter Kingsbery. That used to be on YouTube, but it’s gone.
08:06 – I finished the group of lab sessions on Plantae yesterday, and I’m starting on the group on Animalia this morning. That’s the final group. When I finish it, I’ll go back and start “filling in” with additional lab sessions in other groups that I wasn’t sure I’d have time to complete.
So this morning I’m starting on a lab session that covers Porifera (sponges) and Cnidaria (jellyfish, anemones, hydrae, and so on), both phyla that include the simplest animals. After that, I’ll do another lab session on invertebrates–worms, insects, and so on–and then move on to chordates–fish, amphibians, reptiles, and of course mammals.
07:56 – EU officials announced yesterday that they would make Britain suffer for vetoing their planned power grab. “Nice little financial services sector you have there. Be a shame to see anything happen to it…” Meanwhile, the markets are treating the results of that failed summit last week with the contempt they deserve, and the ratings agencies have said outright that nothing significant was decided at that summit, so they plan to go on with their review and likely ratings downgrades. And yields on Italian and Spanish bonds have again climbed into the unsustainable range after only a couple days in the sub-6% range. Merkozy must be getting very frustrated that nothing they do fools the market into doing what they want it to do.
Work continues on the biology book, and stuff for the kits is starting to arrive. I now have a good supply of carrot seeds for one lab session and of lima bean seeds and rhizobium innoculum for another, probably enough of each for 100 to 200 kits. That was the last of what I needed for the biology kits. Once I finish writing the book, I’ll put together the first batch of biology kits, probably only a dozen or two to start. That’ll let me work out packaging, subassemblies, assembly order, and so on. Then I’ll go to work on the forensics kit and manual.
11:28 – Now here’s an interesting site. It’s currently tracking about 53 million users, 113,000+ torrents, and about 2 million files totaling more than 106 TB. Alas, when I visited the site, the only thing it could tell me about my own torrent usage was: “Hi. We have no records on you.”
09:22 – Well, this latest summit was widely considered to be the last chance to save the EU and the euro. Instead of concentrating on the immediate crisis and coming up with measures to address it, the participants focused on how to avoid future crises, doing essentially nothing to deal with the current mess. They fooled no one, nor was their attempt to make the UK the scapegoat successful.
Nor was there any sign of their so-called “big bazooka”. I was about to say “stupidly-named big bazooka”, but in fact it’s well-named when you think about it. Ordinarily in a situation like this, people talk about bringing out “the artillery”, crew-served weapons that fire large and effective charges. A bazooka was a personal weapon that fired a small and usually ineffective charge, which makes the comparison exact with what the EU had done to date. They’ve essentially lined up to piss on a 5-alarm fire, and nothing decided at this most recent summit changes that.
One of the reasons we redesigned the latest batch of chemistry kits was to allow them to fit into a USPS priority mail large regional-rate box rather than the priority mail large flat-rate box we’d been using. The large regional-rate box is just enough smaller than the large flat-rate box that the earlier version of the kit wouldn’t fit.
The upside to the change is that we expected it to reduce shipping costs. The large flat-rate box costs $14.95 to ship anywhere in the US, including Alaska and Hawaii. The large regional-rate box costs anything from $5.81 to $14.62, depending on the destination.
So, yesterday I drove out to the post office to mail the first batch of the kits in regional-rate boxes. When I got to the counter, the guy told me that the USPS didn’t offer counter service for regional-rate boxes. He could still ship them, but he’d have to charge me standard priority mail rates according to the weights and destinations of the boxes. If I wanted the regional-rate postage rates, I had to generate the label on-line with postage. Crap. I’d never been able to get the USPS Click-N-Ship web site to produce a label. When I tried to produce a test label, the site just went into an endless loop.
After he weighed the boxes and told me the postage cost for each, I told him I didn’t have any alternative, so to go ahead and ship them. The postage costs were all over the place, but all were higher than they would have been for regional-rate. For example, one box going to Pennsylvania would have been $6.88 under regional-rate postage but ended up costing $10.95 under standard priority mail rates. Another, going to New Jersey, would have been $8.06 regional rate, but cost $12.40 at standard PM rates. Another, going to New Hampshire, would have been $10.51 regional rate, but ended up costing $17.45, which is actually more than the large flat-rate box would have cost. And so on.
I drove home fuming, because I’d seen nothing anywhere on the USPS site that mentioned that local post offices don’t accept regional-rate boxes at regional-rate postage rates. So I spent a while looking around the USPS site, and finally found one place where it does mention that. Otherwise, I’d have fired off a nasty email to the Postmaster General. I may do that anyway, because the notice is extremely easy to overlook. Most people who’d used Priority Mail flat-rate boxes would probably assume, as I did, that if the USPS accepted flat-rate boxes at the counter they’d also accept regional-rate boxes.
But the story does have a happy ending. I’ve made my last trip to the post office. While I was on the USPS site, I decided to try once more printing a sample Click-N-Ship label. This time it worked. Apparently, even though I had the latest available Linux version of Adobe Reader installed, it wasn’t compatible with the USPS web site. I got rid of Adobe Reader and just used a native Linux PDF reader, which worked fine.
So, no more carrying boxes out to the post office to ship them. USPS will pick them up at my front door. Printing labels and postage on-line also provides a discount over the rates charged at the counter, even for flat-rate stuff, and they include delivery confirmation for free. It’s a no-brainer to use the on-line service, and I would have been using it all along if I’d been able to get it to work.
With the USPS pushing so hard to get people to buy postage and print labels on-line, I have to wonder if this is part of a larger plan eventually to eliminate local branch offices. When you think about it, there’s not really much need for them, and they are extremely expensive to operate both in terms of staffing and facilities costs. There are all kinds of places that rent PO boxes. You can buy stamps at Costco. A huge percentage of mail volume comes from corporate mailers, who don’t need the services provided by local branches. Closing all of those local branches and firing the staff would go a long way toward putting the USPS on a sound financial footing.
10:47 – The Open/Libre Office standard dictionary never ceases to surprise me with what’s included and what’s not. As I write the biology book, I’ve had to add a large number of pretty common scientific terms to the dictionary, so I’ve gotten used to it. But today I typed the phrase “monocotyledonous or dicotyledonous”, fully expecting to see squiggly red underlines for both words. Nope. Both were already in the standard dictionary.
10:43 – Still working heads-down, writing, shooting images, and doing lab work. I have about 8.5 weeks left to get this book finished, and I’ll use every minute of it.