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Monday, 19 September 2011

09:52 – I’m sure Reed Hastings’ email will be reproduced elsewhere on the web, so I won’t bother. The big news, of course, is that Netflix is splitting into two independent companies, with Netflix keeping that name for streaming and the disc rental service renamed Qwikster. Separate memberships, separate queues, separate billing, separate user ratings, separate everything. Oh, and Netflix might as well have casually announced that GameFly is now toast, since Qwikster will also be renting games.

My first reaction was negative; I don’t really want to have to manage two separate queues without any links between them. The stuff we watch sometimes changes from disc-only to disc-plus-streaming and then back again. More than once, we’ve watched the first episodes of a long series on disc, watched others streaming, and then had to switch back to discs when the streaming contract ended. That hasn’t happened as much lately. Of the 92 titles in our instant queue, only three–The Planets, Walking with Cavemen, and Occupation–are currently showing as expiring. As usual, we get only a few days notice, in this case until the 23rd.

I really do wish that Netflix would negotiate permanent unlimited streaming licenses. It’s fine if they delay streaming availability until a few months after the DVD releases. For example, series 3 of Sons of Anarchy just released on DVD. Series 1 and 2 are available streaming, although only Netflix knows for how long. Series 3 will, no doubt, be available streaming in a few weeks or months. So why doesn’t Netflix negotiate a standard contract with the rights owners to Sons of Anarchy? Agree to pay them a fixed sum for permanent unlimited streaming for each episode as the new seasons become available, after a window to allow DVD sales. Most DVD set sales occur very soon after the set is released, and there’s little in the way of paying markets for old series episodes after that. Sure, a few people may buy episodes or even the entire season from iTunes or whatever, or they may be able to sell re-run rights to local TV stations, but an old series is basically spent in economic terms once the DVD set releases.

Licensing on this basis would be win-win-win for the copyright owners and for Qwikster and for Qwikster subscribers. The copyright owners would get “free money” from Qwikster, and Qwikster would build its back-catalog of good TV series and subscribers would have a lot of good content waiting to be discovered.

Of course, people like Barbara and me would love to see such a plan. More and more people are doing what we do; wait until a new series is available on Netflix/Qwikster before starting to watch it. I adore Emily VanCamp, for example, and she stars in a new series that debuts in a couple of days. In the past, I’d have set up our DVD recorder to record the episodes as they were broadcast and then zap the commercials. But we won’t watch it on broadcast TV. Instead, we’ll wait until next summer, when it will release on DVD, and watch it commercial-free.

Work continues on the biology book. I’m currently prototyping the biology kit and putting together purchase orders for a small number of the kits. I plan to have the book 100% complete by year-end, so I have to have kits ready to ship soon after that.

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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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Thursday, 25 August 2011

08:22 – I’ve been thinking about unusual antonyms, ones that almost no one knows. Last night, I was thinking about writing something about the Euro crisis, focusing on the mistaken idea that the Eurozone is an “optimal currency area”. Far from it, the Eurozone is the opposite of optimal. So what’s the antonym for optimal? I had to think about for a moment. So, quickly and without looking it up, what’s the antonym?

Having thought of it, I did a quick google search on “optimal” and its antonym. The results were about 200 million hits on “optimal” and about an eighth of a million on the antonym, making “optimal” about 1,600 times more commonly used than “pessimal”.

In every one of my books, I’ve included one horrible pun, often quite subtle, and I just added the one for the biology lab book. I was writing up a lab session about the effect of nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobium) on the growth of lima bean plants, touching on the ecological principles of mutualism and commensalism.

In mutualism, each species benefits from the relationship with the other species. In a commensalist relationship, only one of the two species benefits. The other does not benefit, but suffers no harm. For example, on one level the relationship between squirrels and oak trees is commensalist. The oak tree provides shelter for the squirrel by providing a secure location for its nest, but the tree does not benefit from the presence of the nest. (In another sense, the relationship is mutualist, because the squirrel benefits from acorns as a food source, while the tree benefits by having the squirrel bury its acorns far afield, where they can germinate.)

Rhizobium forms nodules on the plant roots, and converts atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates that the plant can use, an obvious benefit to the plant. But what is the benefit to the bacteria? Obviously, there must be some benefit to the bacteria from a close association with the plant, or the bacteria would be distributed throughout the soil, rather than forming nodules on the plant roots. Oh, yeah. The pun. I mention the plant providing the bacteria with a location for a nice, cozy nodular home.

09:09 – I just ordered a Pentax K-r DSLR with the kit lens from B&H, along with a spare Pentax battery and a Class 10 memory card. The AA battery adapter is back-ordered, so I’ll pick up one of those later. B&H is supposed to email me when they’re back in stock.

This is the first DSLR we’ve bought that can save image files simultaneously in RAW and .jpg formats, a feature that I’ll definitely use. For the last few years, we’ve always saved as RAW format and then I’ve used showFoto to convert to .jpg for printing at Walgreens and so on. Having the camera produce and save .jpg files along with RAW files will save some time and effort. Speaking of RAW, that raises another question. All of our past Pentax DSLRs have offered only the proprietary Pentax .pef RAW format. This camera offers the choice of saving RAW as .pef or .dng. Is there any advantage or drawback to choosing one or the other?

16:06 – As usual, good sense from Pat Condell, this time concerning the European Union.

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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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Biology book

I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. I wasn’t happy with the original structure, so I’m reorganizing it and moving stuff around, rewriting some stuff, and writing new stuff.

It’s times like this that I really envy fiction writers. They don’t have to work within the constraints that we non-fiction writers do. They can just make stuff up, and as long as it’s believable that’s all that matters. If a book runs too long, they can just cut stuff out; if it runs too short, they can just add some scenes. We non-fiction writers have to get everything right, and we have to fit everything in that belongs there.

I remember years ago at a mystery conference sitting down with Peter Robinson. When I told him that I wrote non-fiction, he said he could never do that because it would be too hard to get everything right. I told him that I’d never written fiction, but I thought it would be more difficult than writing fiction. Nowadays, I’m coming around to his point of view.

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