As I have been asked by a number of people about thelatest Office of Inspector General’s report, and in the case of Wired they interviewed me and generated a very cherry picked set of quotes designed for maximum clickbait, allow me to share my collected thoughts about it here. TL;DR version: the NSF response to the audit is good and proper in my opinion, not that my opinion is all that important, though I’d worry about breathalyzers a bit.
Remember there are three different groups of people going to Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation: grantees (research staff paid by NSF grant, AKA beakers, from various institutions around the world), contractor (station support staff paid by any of a number of management contractors and subcontractors), and military (the Air National Guard provides flight support and the Navy Cargo & Handling Group does ship offload). That said, the NSF has overarching responsibility for all the operations going on there.
Compared to contractor personnel, grantees going to the continent have a “license to kill”. This is not to say they are unsupervised or lack any repercussions for their actions, but the chain of command over them and enforcement for infractions is looser. This is supposed to be intentional over the whole population to leave the latitude to manage a small and remote crew with as much flexibility as possible through the long winter. The NSF Code of Conduct is a set of guidelines that no contractor is allowed to be looser than, but in practice the contractor has much more management staff on site to enforce their corporate policies, which tend to be more strict than the NSF. It’s a matter of perspective.In my opinion, the NSF has been doing the right things to keep things open enough that the program is responsive to needs as they arise. Codify things too tightly in the safety of an office back at home and you may be inadequately prepared for problems as they come up.
The station managers are deputized as special Deputy US Marshals to deal with the worst contingencies of human behavior that can happen in a remote place. This isn’t exactly law enforcement and it sure isn’t part of the day to day duties of a station manager; it’s an emergency response role. Response to incidents that require using this aspect of their duties is something I suspect is documented quite well and rare.
The idea of using of breathalyzers for cause by managers to insure fitness for duty isn’t all that out of the ordinary anywhere in the American workplace, particularly under government contract. The weird thing for the Antarctic stations is that your workplace also is your home. What you do in your own time should be up to you, but for South Pole Station the population is small enough that there are no separate emergency responders. If you’re in no shape to respond to an alarm going off, that’s a tricky problem. Can I be upset with you for not being respond outside of your regular work hours?During work hours, just like anywhere else in the world, if you’re staggering up to a piece of heavy equipment because you just had a three martini lunch, people are going to notice and have cause. If you’re so badly hungover from the night before that you can’t clearly see which buttons do what on a console, same deal, testing for cause. Your boss would be delinquent in their duties if they didn’t pull you aside and send you to the doc.
Now, whether those breathalyzers are going to work properly on the Antarctic Plateau is another question entirely. You’re hard pressed to get most manufacturers to certifyequipment for high altitude, very low humidity, or temperatures below -40 and without that certification any actions you take based on the results will lack foundation. Hell, I couldn’t even get the manufacturer of my “arctic expedition grade sunglasses” to give me assurance that they wouldn’t fall apart at Pole. That said, it can be done, but it’s going to require some testing. The contractor says they’ve found one that will work without calibration so all the better. Where there’s a will there’s a way to make this happen for almost any gear.
The bar culture of Antarctica is not a bad thing and it had the best interests of the crew in mind when established by the US Navy. Thousands of jokes about sailors aside, the Navy has long experience of how to manage crews in tight quarters, morale building, and how to blow off steam. Acknowledging that people were going to drink, the bars were created make sure they were drinking safe booze rather than homebrew hooch (which happens when you go “dry”) and to bring people together to reduce consumption. You might not think of a bar as a place for moderation of drinking, but it gives your fellow crewmates a chance to watch out for you. If you’re drinking alone in your room, and hoo nelly is that a bad sign, there isn’t any potential for the positive aspects of peer pressure to help rein you in or ask if you’re doing alright.When I got asked why I wouldn’t cut people off, it’s because I was much happier for them to pass out in front of me in the warmth and safety of the bar than have them “finish the job” alone or, worse, lose consciousness in the cold on their way back to their room. Really, the bar is a safety mechanism.
Okay, that’s not a question but with the current story arc of Atomic Robo, Volume 10: The Ring of Fire, there’s been a hell of a lot of people that seem to have made the connection in their head finally. Yes, that is my ugly mug which Scott Wegener has adapted for the comic page. I also get the pleasure of bullshitting with them about science as the Science/Weirdness Consultant. This mainly consists of sending Brian Clevinger this picture all day long. I could probably set up a macro to do this, but I like the personal touch.
Question 2: “What the fuck is with the $5 shipping & handling charge? It’s bad enough I’m paying shipping without that shit. This coffee better be fucking gold!” – Mario M., Staten Island, NY
I specifically chose Mario’s version of this question because he was clearly the most irate & profane of them; the one that tempted me to just refund his money and add his email to the block list. PROTIP: abusing people while asking a question does not make them more inclined to answer your question.
The shipping and handling is the price you’re paying to get the packaging that will get your item to you in one piece and worth consuming, with a side order of my time playing shipping department. Now, you may ask “Why do I pay this again even on refills when I’m sending it back to you in the original shipper?” That is something that I realized was unfair a while back, which is why the refill discount got cranked up from 10% to 20%.
The next question is somewhat related.
Question 3: “Can you sell this through Amazon or some local storefront so I don’t have to pay shipping?” – Amanda K., New York, NY
I understand the desire to pay as little as possible for the thing that isn’t the product itself and there’s a heck of a lot of people that have asked some variation on this question. The short answer is no, though if you’re lucky enough to live in a city in the US with a BBotE Ambassador there you can effectively get it without shipping costs.
The longer version is that Amazon’s supplier relations business model isn’t all that friendly to small producers and their shipping model is based on an economy of scale you have to be Amazon sized to compete with. I, thankfully, am not competing with them but they’ve trained a generation accustomed to a marketplace that provides them with their heart’s desire with one click, overnight, and no shipping costs. You’d think that all this shipping would be saving the USPS’ keister except that economy of scale bit has driven down the margins on postage to the point that it barely covers the wear and tear on the post office’s trucks. Amazon drives a hard bargain in several senses.
And, yes, BBotE has to ship at least at priority mail speeds for domestic orders. Any slower than that, and my faith in it getting to you in a timely manner is weak.
Question 4: “The postal service sucks in around here. Why can’t you ship FedEx?” – John P., State College, PA
You won’t find FedEx as shipping option because, hoo nelly, for all the people that don’t like the price of USPS priority mail you get to pay at least double for the pleasure of FedEx. You also won’t see UPS as a shipping option on the website ever as I have beef with them as a mere recipient of packages, much less trying to ship things with them.
One of those statistics I hear bandied about and I’m inclined to view with a certain level of skepticism is that 3% of packages and letters that go through USPS are lost, damaged or undeliverable. Based on my own five years of heavy shipping experience, their failure rate before implementing their tracking on priority mail was somewhere closer to .4% of my shipments. For the last year and change, my postal problems have mainly been related to people not filling out their address completely/correctly.
Now, that’s strictly domestic mail. Oz Post and I are getting along well as of late. But Parcelforce in Great Britain and Chronoforce in France, oh man, I assume UPS will find a way to merge with those firms to vanish into singularity of abhorrent customer service and incompetence. Really, I have no idea how any package successfully gets anywhere in England and consider it a minor miracle when it happens.
Question 5: “Can you teach me how to make BBotE at home for myself? I promise that this isn’t for sale or profit.” – Matt K., Menlo Park, CA
No, but I welcome you to read the original BBotE posts, glean what information you can and start experimenting. That’s been the most fun part about all of this for me and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of it. If you want my process without the years of effort that went into it for all the various different coffees, well, you’re effectively asking to buy me out of the business and that ain’t gonna come cheap. As the great sage Homer Simpson once said, “Money is exchanged for goods and services.”
Question 6: “Have you considered using your BBotE process on something else, like tea?” – Mike N., Cottonwood, AZ
I get asked this question a lot and had previously answered it here. The TL;DR version is: the pharmacopoeia of “tea” is complex and there sure are a lot different teas in the world.
That said, I did do an experiment a couple weeks back with cascara, AKA the dried coffee cherry or “Bolivian Army Coffee”, from the amusingly named Klatch Coffee just to see what I could see. I was, in short, quite impressed with the result.
The coffee cherry fruit actually has more caffeine in it than the coffee beans do, though the resulting cascara tea that you make typically only results in a drink with about quarter to half the caffeine of a comparably sized cup of coffee. I can’t really call what resulted from putting cascara through my normal processing a Black Blood of the Earth (for one thing it isn’t as dark as the tar entity for ST:TNG) but I like the result. It’s incredibly sweet to me, as if I’d added honey to it or somehow managed to make drinkable raisins with a hint of mint & cherry. Reminded me a lot of Moroccan high tea, minus an entire jar of sugar cubes. It’s quite peppy and I seem to have gotten the caffeine out of the fruit quite nicely.
I’m doing longevity tests on it now. If it works out, I may make it available now and then in the store. Still need to figure out what I’m going to call it though.
Test Subject Ivan has kindly submitted his BBotE rib recipe for you all in the aftermath of one of America’s prime BBQing holidays. Enjoy!
Six shots, each shot is roughly one and a half ounces. That’s over a cup of BBotE. And Deathwish? Hoh, boy, that’s just over half a cup of the deadliest joe ever concentrated. Another two or three shots, and it’s a guaranteed heart attack. Of course, this is for two racks of ribs. One Herr Funranium gave an estimate of three shots per rack (around 8 pounds of meat and bone).
Thankfully, however, they infused the ribs with a slightly dark red color after about twelve hours marinating with a dash of salt, pepper, and smoked paprika. A little dijon mustard to make sure they coat and that’s that.
Here are the ingredients for the marinade of two racks of cut porky ribs:
9 fluid oz of BBotE ‘Deathwish’
3 fluid oz of dijon mustard
1 tbsp of salt, pepper, and smoked paprika (if you don’t have smoked, regular does just as well.)
Mix and coat the ribs, cover in a container to let the deliciously deadly coffee to soak in overnight. (I found that the longer the coffee infuses into the meat, the more pronounced it’s flavor)
Now, here comes the part where you cook the meat. Being an asian with folks who prefer asian flair in the cookery closet of spices, I had a limited selection to choose from. Still; it’s not a bad selection. After all, I had some special stuff to go with it all.
3-4 fat garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
5 cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced (I find that the thinner the ginger is sliced, the more fragrant the result)
2 tsp dried chilli flakes (to taste)
1 tsp Sichuan peppercorns
9 whole star anise
8 tbsp runny honey
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
300 ml Drambuie (Regular scotch, brandy, cognac, or even a cheap red will do)
400 ml pork broth (made with previous batch of test ribs and trimmings)
Equipment:
Large frying pan or cooking tray.
So first is drying the meat and then browning it in a hot pan or cooking tray with a little olive or rapeseed oil. You want to dry it beforehand because once it comes into contact with hot oil…well, that stuff can hurt. Anyway, you want to brown the meat in either a pan or a cooking tray, caramelizing the meat on all sides. You know when it’s browning when it makes contact with the pan and it sizzles loudly. Let them brown and sprinkle in the garlic, ginger, chili flakes, peppercorns, star anise, and honey.
Once all sides are browned, pour in the scotch to deglaze the pan and pick up all the delicious flavor stuck on the bottom. Bring it to a simmer and slowly drizzle the balsamic vinegar into the mix of ribs and scotch. Reduce and then add in the pork broth. The broth should just barely reach the sides of the ribs.
Note: If you’re using the frying pan, transfer the browned meat to a roasting tray and deglaze with the alcohol, then add to the tray once it is reduced to half and the alcohol is burned off. Add the pork broth into the roasting tray.
Stick the whole lot into the oven at 365 degrees Fahrenheit and let it roast for half an hour. Once half an hour is finished, turn the ribs and roast for another half hour. Pull out and let rest as the caramelized sauce thickens on it’s own once it cools.
Tip: While cooling it can create a very sweet delicious glaze, I find it best to reduce it and then let it cool to let the taste of spice and coffee to come through even more strongly.
Note: By the time I’ve sent this, roughly four in the morning, I will note I have only eaten six ribs roughly eight hours ago and am still wide awake. Devour with caution!
Just a quick heads up that while I’m sad Panama left the line up for the season last month, but two old favorites are back again and you can review their flavor profiles here.
After a year off , Guatemala Nueva Vinas from the lovely folks at Caffe Vita is back again. I have pounced on it thusly for you and will be doing my best to keep a steady pipeline of it going as long as I can. As of this post, it’s now available as radio button for all the normal pre-order slots on the store.
More importantly, considering the number of people that wanted heads up as soon as I got some more in again, Jamaica Blue Mountain is finally back. Between weather, blight, the narrow bands of coffee cultivation shifting and ever increasing demand, this crop is getting harder to get a hold of. It is, unfortunately, getting more and more expensive. As I said at the end of last year:
For the foreseeable future, Jamaica Blue Mountain is off the table. As I mentioned a while back that last time it disappeared, the crops coming out of Jamaica for the past several years have been painfully small, while demand has only gone up. This means that my roasters of choice are hard pressed to get any when it comes up on auction. If, and this looks increasingly unlikely, they are able to get any beans, the prices are likely to jump up by at least 25%. Considering how painfully expensive the Jamaica Blue Mountain BBotE is, that probably takes it out of even “Extravagant Gift” price range for folks. If you really, really want some, ask and I’ll see what I can do.
And, oh yes, those prices on the beans did go up. However, for the moment, I’m holding the Jamaica Blue Mountain BBotE prices steady where they were last year because I want it to at least stay merely ridiculous but attainable. I don’t know how long supply is going to last so enjoy it while it’s here.
In other news, I’ve been on jury duty for the last several weeks. It has been enlightening as I never thought I’d be allowed to remain on the panel, though not necessarily in the sense you might think. With respect to the potential jurors that were dismissed, I ask you to please consider what a life of innumeracy is like. I have met, talked, and helped people with illiteracy. I know how they made their way through life and they made no bones about it that it was hard, but you doable. I have no idea how someone functions with no real concept of numbers. This is the most alien mind I have ever met and it’s been gnawing on my mind how this person’s life worked.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a piece of Nevada that America decided was expendable. It had eaten countless settlements, boomed and busted so many times with the precious metal of choice, and the taken the lives of settlers with it. We then sacrificed it on the altar of national security and science, to forever be removed from the world, burning it with nuclear fire. The Nellis Bombing Range, AKA Nevada Proving Grounds, then renamed the Nevada Test Site (NTS), and now known as the Nevada National Security Site. Because for most of my life, certainly during the period when I worked in the complex, it was known as the NTS that is what I will refer to it as in this post.
NOTE: I once held endorsement to go to the Nevada Test Site in an official capacity but never actually made it out there. This was the first time I ever made it there and it was as a member of the public, not as the privileged and clearance holding.
ICECAP Test Assembly Tower (photo courtesy of DOE/National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office)
I was lucky enough to get to take a public tour out there back in March. If you have the slightest interest in the desert and Big Science, or you’re just an atomic tourist, you owe yourself putting your name in the hat to take one of these tours. Slots normally open up in June, so keep on eye on the the DOE/NV Site Office Website for further announcements about tours. Yes, you will need to do some paperwork and possibly use a fax manchine. If you aren’t an American citizen, you may need to do even more.
Your tour begins at the Atomic Testing Museum at UNLV, which I’ve previously discussed, at 7:30 in the morning. Why so early? Because the next thing you do after collecting your badge is to climb on a bus as it drives an hour north of Vegas to the south entrance of the NTS. As a matter of entertainment, you’ll pass by Creech Air Force Base and have an opportunity to watch an air field that seems devoid of humans but with drones buzzing by regularly. The nearby town is boarded up, but the skies are humming.
I should add that I didn’t go alone on this trip. I was accompanied by my mother and sister, my Lovely Assistant, and Test Subjects Mortician & IT to Porn. This was a trip I had tried to organize before my father passed, but it took a couple extra years to get it all together. Some of the observations I’m sharing are collected from the larger group.
Once you actually arrive at the NTS, your first stop is badge check at the main gate. Just because you got issued a badge already doesn’t mean someone that shouldn’t be there hasn’t snuck aboard in the last 50 miles of lonely highway, so they check. This is the location that most of the old “No Nukes” protestors probably remember best as this is where the civil disobedience arrests used to take place. Our minder related his memory of when things had started to get a bit rowdy and there were too many people at one time to easily deal with, so they built a holding pen out there. Funny enough, the sherrifs discovered if you put too many likeminded people of a certain age together, of opposite sexes, bored, and possibly (very likely) stoned out of their minds… well, you need to build two holding pens. As described, it sounded like practice for future Burning Man camps.
Our next stop after going through the gate was the small town that is Mercury, NV because we’d been on the road for over an hour already, and there wasn’t going to be another good bathroom stop for quite a while; remember, this place is big, as in comparable to some states in New England. The more I think about it, town is much too generous a term for Mercury. It’s a quasi-military encampment that been there for decades, but it has a post office and zip code, therefore the place has to have a name and the original postmaster dredged up one of the old ghost town names for the area. Honestly, ghost town is a really good description for what Mercury was like. Other than the cashier in the NTS Cafeteria & Steakhouse, I saw one other person in Mercury who wasn’t on our tour.
Regarding the Steakhouse & Cafeteria, the Steakhouse wasn’t open when I was there, but I did peek through the window on the heavy wooden door. It reminded me of the fake rustic doors of old 1970s Italian restaurants you find in mini-malls, the ones with the tiny watery glass window with bars over them. On the inside, well, it wasn’t impressive. It reminded me of some of the less cared for VFW hall bars, except it lacked the character that comes with the old soldiers adding memorabilia and decor. Trestle tables, plastic table cloths, and a menu featuring Sam Adams as it’s microbrew. While it doesn’t look great, I’m to understand the steak is quite good, especially after a 12 hour long training exercise.
In the cafeteria proper, we who had woken up far too early for the tour had a chance to get desperately needed coffee. This was a mistake. A venerable government machine urinated into a cup for us. Test Subject Mortician took a sip, made a face, and said, “Tastes like its filled with scalding sadness.” I similarly winced and agreed with him, while my mom looked on and laughed at us for, truly, nothing had changed. The term she’d learned at Harris Technologies for this, circa 1970, for the magical machines that dispense coffee, tea, and chicken noodle soup, which all came out tasting identically horrible, was “Let’s get some kerosene”.
We then piled back into the bus with our snacks, to head out into the desert. Our minder for the tour was a former program director through 1980-90s for the non-nuclear experiments at NTS, so we got some interesting insights and tales of experiments that we might not associate with the place. For example, answering questions like “If you were to successfully shoot down a SCUD missile with a Patriot, which is POWERFULLY unlikely, and it’s loaded with chemical weapons, would the results of the interception be any worse than not doing anything?” or “If I wanted to try to weld a pipe onto the side of leaking chlorine rail car that’s leaking DID I MENTION THAT IT’S LEAKING to try to safely offload the contents, is there a way to do that without starting a chlorine fueled metal fire?”
Our next stop was the three mile line for the the Plumbob test series where, in addition to doing bomb performance studies, we were also doing survivability tests for different architectures and materials of typical infrastructure. We piled out of the bus and then looked up at the desert rusted heavy steel structure of the box girder train trestle, bent from blast forces, bolts sheared or yanked out of the concrete. The circle of concrete pediments continued at three miles from ground zero. We then kept driving and saw pummeled concrete domes, blasted houses, quansit huts. At the three mile mark most things survived; at the one mile mark, even the strongest, thickest, reinforced dome bunker looked like it had been smote from above.
The last stop I want to tell you about, because I want to leave some surprises for your own trip, is ICECAP (see photo above). In 1992, President Bush the First signed a temporary nuclear test moratorium. It’s still temporary, but the original 9 month moratorium has now become the more or less permanent 23 years and counting. Like anything that’s an ongoing process you bring to an end, not only is there something that has to be the last one but there also was going to be a next one. ICECAP is the nuclear test that never happened.
Depending on who you ask, ICECAP was either days, weeks, or months away from being ready for testing. It was intended to be what’s known as a String of Pearls test where more than one device was tested/disposed of at once, one stacked on top of another. But in particular it was intended to be a test of a British nuclear device where they were interested in performance in freezing temperatures, so there was an integrated freezer unit. They had the hole drilled, all the cabling and the diagnostic equipment prepped, and devices in preparedness to be loaded down the hole.
Why would we be testing a British nuclear device in Nevada? Once upon a time, the UK used to test in northern Australia until it got pointed out that the wind patterns weren’t great, hey, how about we test your stuff underground in Nevada instead? We’ve got a lot of Nevada, it’ll be great.
And then the moratorium took effect. Allow me to assemble a sarcastic, abbreviated year of diplomacy for you:
Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE): We really wanted our test.
US: We just put a moratorium in place. Sorry.
AWE: That’s your moratorium. We didn’t sign any of moratorium. We want our test.
US: Well, test away. Just not in Nevada.
AWE: We spent many, many millions of pounds for this test!
US: Cool.
AWE: NOT COOL! We want our test! We want our money back!
US: [whistles to itself walking around the desert]
AWE: C’monnnnnnnnnn
US: Nope.
And this is how a Smithsonian grade museum exhibit of late 1990s nuclear testing capabilities came to be in the middle of Nevada Site. Thanks, British government!
You will also get to see the Sedan Crater (which is the very large physical remains of the Plowshare Program), visit the nuclear waste facility where the remains of the Manhattan Project are slowly buried one football field worth at a time, and drive through Bilby Crater so you can say you’ve been to Ground Zero of a nuclear test. I cannot stress what a wonderful history and atomic archaeology nerd once in a lifetime experience this is. My only regret is no pictures, I have to hold it in my head as a dear memory.
That Feeling Of Relief Which Comes With Really Good Rant
This was originally written on June 16th, 2012 after my family’s Father’s Day viewing of “Prometheus”. It was then published in the final issue of Coilhouse. The editor of Coilhouse, Meredith Yayanos, immesuarably improved my words by adding excellent illustrations, such as the one to the right.
Hollywood, we need to talk about your dating habits. In particular, how important it is to have a reference to verify ages before you get in trouble. No, I’m not talking about the hypersexualization of 12 year old girls trying to pass for 18. Nor am I talking about the 60-somethings trying to pass for 18 as well. That is a totally separate head shaking situation.
I would like to blame the movie Prometheus for this rant, but they’re hardly the only guilty party; it’s just the one that finally made me snap. Hollywood, you don’t understand how carbon dating works, that there are other dating methods that sometimes work better, and that the true (unattainable) goal is to find the perfect point of reference to scale them all against. But underlying all of that is a body of scientific work and assumptions that you’ve conveniently ignored in the interest of “character driven plot”. But I have news for you: your characters and your plot make less sense when you take these shortcuts. And when you do this people become confused as to what science and technology actually are, to the point that we have to deprogram juries and judges of the CSI Effect in capital punishment trials because Reality. Just. Doesn’t. Work. Like. That.
You have science advisers. You ignore them at your peril. To quote Atomic Robo‘s Brian Clevinger, “What’s particularly frustrating is that it takes so little effort to find the intersection between plausible science and your fiction such that the audience will go along with everything.”
I’m here to help though. I’m giving you this quick primer on dating methodology, and the humorous ways they fail, for free. Of course, you get what you paid for.
We start by discussing cosmic bombardment. No, not “Nuke ‘em from orbit” Ripley-style, although I like the way your mind works, but rather the continuous rain of high energy particles blasting from The Great Beyond. By far the biggest source is our own sun, but that just because it’s so close. But we also have all our neighboring suns of the Milky Way, many of which are much larger and energetic than ours, and the monstrous galactic core belching stripped nuclei at relativistic speeds at us. Oh, then there’s the entire rest of the universe, supernovae, black holes and all, sending nuclei (mostly hydrogen & helium) at us at 99.999% of the speed of light, exploding in particle physics collisions with our atmosphere. The atomic fragments of this are still energetic to have a half dozen more of these collisions. This is what is known as the “cosmic ray air shower”. NOTE: at no point in the process do you create the Fantastic Four.
Next, let’s tackle radioactivity and isotopes. For any given element, its chemical properties are dictated by the number of protons, and thus electrons, that it has. Chemically speaking, you can have any number of neutrons you want in the nucleus and it will still be the same element; those different mass nuclei with varying numbers of neutrons are known as “isotopes” of that element. However, nuclei with too few or too many neutrons are unstable and they will shed energy, in the form of light or ejected particles, to try to achieve a stable nuclear arrangement. This is radiation. An isotope that emits energy in this manner is “radioactive”.
For the bonus round, the particles generated by the cosmic rays can interact with the stable nuclei of the atmosphere to create new radioactive isotopes. Carbon-14 (or as I will shorthand it from now on, C-14) is one of the many naturally occurring isotopes, in this case generated in the atmosphere due to the cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen-14 with neutrons. Cosmic ray bombardment of Earth does vary with latitude and the Earth’s magnetic field but due to atmospheric and water mixing, the ratio of radioactive C-14 to plain old stable C-12 is considered to be constant through in the environment. When an organism dies, no new C-14 is taken into its tissues and it starts to radioactively decay away. We can date thus things based on the changing ratio, relative to the half-life of C-14 (5712 years).
“How does this all relate to dating?” you may ask. Through some rather painstaking observation, we’ve been able to establish that any given radioactive isotope decays away to stable ones at a constant rate (the time until only half of the starting amount is left is known as the half-life). If you know how much of the radioactive isotope you started with and observe what’s left, you can then calculate how much time has passed. Simple, right? All I need to do is go measure how much C-14 is left compared to normal non-radioactive C-12 and, bam, I know old the thing is. Let’s examine the underlying assumptions of let C-14 dating techniques. Please remember that anytime the words “every”, “always”, and “only” appear in assumptions, one should be wary:
A living thing has the same concentration of C-14 in it as everything else in the world, right up until the moment it dies.
C-14 concentrations are the same everywhere on Earth and always have been the same.
C-14 is being created in the atmosphere at a constant rate by a cosmic ray bombardment that has always been the same.
Cosmic ray bombardment is the only source of C-14 production.
We have a KNOWN C-14 reference point in time to calculate against calibrated to our calendar.
To seemingly completely change gears on you, My Lovely Assistant found this article regarding the oddity of the Dry Valleys near McMurdo in Antarctica. I would like to bring your attention about two thirds of the way down to the picture of the Most Important Seal Carcass EVAR. “Why is this most important seal carcass”, I hear you ask, “Do you have the brain worms again?” No, I don’t but let me explain myself. It is important because:
It is a good example of the danger of doing science and not questioning your assumptions.
It is used as a basis of support for Young Earth Creationism (YEC) that is less shaky than the idiocy of carbon dating dinosaur bones and I want you to be able to call bullshit on it.
Carbon dating is not perfect. First, you need to calibrate the carbon “clock”. We’ve done this by comparing the carbon ratios in organic matter that we are pretty sure of the age of, such as tree rings. In particular, we tie specific events we know the date of, like volcanic eruptions in the historical record, and a particularly ashy tree ring. Sadly, we have no trees older than ~6000 years. Second, your ratio is only as good as your ability to detect AND count the beta radiation from the decay of C-14. The amount of C-14 in the environment is minuscule, hard to detect, and it doesn’t get any easier as there is progressively less of it. After about ten half-lives (~60000 years for C-14), we in the radiation detection game declare a radioactive isotope to be effectively gone. Really good mass spectrometry equipment can see beyond that, but the error bars on the measurements get progressively larger as you have less and less material to work with. For this reason, we add spikes of C-14 to bring really old samples out of the background noise.
For these reasons, carbon dating is best used within the last 6000 years or so and gets progressively less accurate the further back you go. Beyond 60000 years, your dating is more or less useless. If anyone tells you they carbon dated something and got a date older than 60000 years, you are allowed to call bullshit on them or you should closely examine their method and decide if you need to award them the Nobel Prize.
This should go without saying, but carbon dating is useless on something that wasn’t organic material to begin with. If you want to be really, really picky you could point out that limestone and calcite, both being calcium carbonate, were originally teeny tiny organisms’ shells so they’re organic material, right? I would give you the finger for being a smartass, albeit a correct one. However, it tends to take more than 50000 years to create a limestone deposit. Sure, I can go hit the tops of coral reefs for samples but I don’t have to drill very deep on the reef to find coral too old to accurately date.
Back to Antarctica…
Down in the Dry Valleys, there was a researcher had been passing by this seal corpse every day and decided “Dammit, I want to know how old this thing is” and took a sample for dating. The corpse read as being about 10000 years old. This was somewhat mindblowing as the specific seal carcass was a modern seal. The problem cropped up when they dated a bit of seal from a recently collected sample to help calibrate the carbon dating “clock” for the local area. The fresh sample, from a living seal that unhappily flopped away, dated as being 2000 years old. Uh oh…
Sharing these results, this turned into an immediate proof for refutation of carbon dating, and thus all science that might suggest an Earth older than Bishop Usher’s estimate, by the YEC believers. A simultaneous contradictory thought accepting carbon dating commonly held by YEC that carbon dating of dinosaur bones shows them to fall in the last 10000 years. They generally fail to discuss the likely contamination from sample collection (say, perhaps, plaster…) and that DINOSAUR BONES ARE FUCKING ROCKS, NOT ORGANIC SAMPLES. Sorry, I get excitable about these things.
Scientists, on the other hand, were very puzzled by the discrepancy. They repeated the experiment several more times. Except for elephant seals and orca, every time they sampled a local organism, they kept getting an anomalously old carbon date. The exceptions were what broke the mystery; every other organism they sampled did not leave the Southern Ocean on its migration. From this, we learned to question the underlying assumption of carbon dating, that the C-14/C-12 ratio was constant in the environment. It’s not.
Imagine, if you will a place that is very cold, and isolated from the global carbon cycle due to the austral circumpolar flow of air and surface water. Relative the carbon cycle, it is an island. There is deep flow of the cold water along the ocean floor to Antarctica, but it takes centuries to get there. The low intensity of the high angle cosmic ray bombardment on Antarctica means there is less locally produced C-14 inside of the isolated area. Antarctica is a naturally C-14 poor environment. Relative to the carbon dating calibration curves of the rest of the world, everything looks ancient.
From this we also learned that our numbers get skewed in the vicinity of volcanoes; they’re big CO2 carbon output from very old carbon locked in the Earth’s mantle that ends up saturating the local environment. So, while it’s great to use that nice ash layer in a tree ring to help set your chronology clock, you might not want to carbon date that specific ring when choosing your samples. Also, we figured out that we have completely screwed up carbon dating for the future (without creating major correction factors) by dumping huge amounts of most venerable carbon into the global cycle by burning fossil fuels.
Humanity also kind of, sort of, if you want to be really picky, manufactured a bunch of C-14 through nuclear testing that we’ve blasted into the atmosphere that negates the assumption that cosmic ray bombardment is the only source of C-14. For this reason, when we do carbon dating “The Present” is defined as January 1, 1950. It’s the consensus date the scientific community could agree upon where, after that, we’d muddied the waters with nuclear blasts too much to do dating. Because I’m funny that way, I created a word to describe this: nuclearche, the onset of nuclear activities that are widely observable in the geologic record. Truly, we live in the Anthropocene Epoch and the pulse of interesting isotopes and their decay products will be the signpost that the geologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists of the future uplift raccoons society will use to study our times.
(I might be wrong about the raccoons. It could be crows. It pays to be nice to your future corvid overlords now.)
To bring this all back to complaining about the science of Prometheus, all of this goes out the window when you leave Earth. All those assumptions don’t hold true 100% on Earth, much less another planet. We established the primordial radionuclide dating system thanks to meteorites, which we assume (assumption 1) are made from the same uniform mixture of starstuff (assumption 2) that condensed into the solar system. These systems might work for Mars, but you have no idea what an alien solar system’s chemical and isotopic make up is. We have no signposts for alien worlds. Sure, we could take the time to establish what the C-14 generation rate on a given planet is, but we have no frame of reference when we first get there.
THE (SPOILERY) CONCLUSION:
When the good doctors date the corpse of the Engineer’s head and body they discovered with the Magical Dating Stick of Science, they immediately come up with 2000 years. The only way that possibly makes works is if he was born and bred on Earth, made of atoms from Earth, went to LV-223 in a vessel with no cosmic ray bombardment, and then died promptly on arrival without breathing or eating much of anything on that moon.
And this all is what went rattling through my brain and distracted me from the rest of the otherwise very pretty movie. Not nearly as bad as when I stood up in the middle of The World Is Not Enough and yelled at the screen, “THEY NEVER LOOK LIKE THAT!” to scantily clad Denise Richards when she introduced herself as an IAEA nuclear physicist.
DON’T PANIC – In customary Megadodo Publishing “Super Soothe” font (courtesy of BBC Two Productions)
Okay, wow. Despite the ongoing denial of service attack, despite all the backend fiddling with hosting we’ve had to do to keep Funranium Labs up, you’ve managed to zero out all the June 13th pre-order window slots. Ten days early at that. I am impressed. Perhaps you’re all having residual horror from last year when The Month Without BBotE happened and are getting while the getting’s good.
In answer to the plaintive cries of folks that want to get their place in the production queue, I’m opening the June 27th window early. Because the coding for the store is only so smart, if you’ve already put your order in and then go to check the website you will see a note of “Will Ship No Later Than June 27th” on something you expected no later than the 13th, but don’t worry. Your orders are already on the production board and will get out in a timely manner, but I need to let other people get in line.
Theoretically, there’s some Ambassador resupplies due to go out soon too. More news as it develops.
Alright, I’ve good news, better news, great news, and a small bummer for you all.
The bummer: my roaster of choice for my Panama declares end of season. Accordingly, it has been removed as a selection on the radio buttons when you’re placing an order. It will be missed, as it always is, and hopefully will return to us in six months or so, El Niño and blights permitting.
The good: I am pleased to announce that the BBotE Embassy of Dublin, Ireland is now active again! Jonathan, who you can contact by email bahrae [at] yahoo [dot] com, is stocked with 1L bottles for €70. His case should arrive tomorrow if you want to lay claim to some of his sweet caffeinated bounty.
The better: I got to play with Lego and hang out with fun people! Norm and Will at tested.com have a segment that I am quite fond of called “Lego With Friends”. As I am a friendly person, with impeccable Lego credentials of insobriety thanks to the Liquor ‘n’ Lego tradition, they invited me on. The first episode of the series of five is free for the world to see, though the subsequent ones are premium content. For those of you that’ve been reading the blog all along, some stories may sound familiar. These are the same two guys that have previously run the Octobercast fundraiser that I joined them on at stupid in the morning two years ago, but luckily there was BBotE.
PERFECTLY NORMAL COFFEE – Approved for filthy mammal consumption.
The great: THERE IS A DR. DINOSAUR LABEL FOR BBOTE!!! Folks have been asking if this could happen since… well… conservatively speaking, since the Tesladyne & Atomic Robo labels first appeared. In thanks for the support over years and to celebrate Atomic Robo Volume 10 kicking off online, half a page a day, every day, Scott & Brian gave me their blessing to make up a Dr. Dinosaur label. And here it is, DR. DINOSAUR’S PERFECTLY NORMAL COFFEE!
I would also like to extend tremendous thanks for this label existing to Test Subject Miller who did tremendous amounts of art & graphic design work so that this label could see the light of day. Scott may’ve created Dr. Dino, but cramming his goofy therapod butt onto a label wasn’t easy, she wow’d Scott & I with her tinkering, and now it’s finally here. If you wish to see her other arts, some of which are quite naughty so can’t say you haven’t been warned, you can go hit her deviantArt page here.
When you are insane with genius, time management skills are the first thing to go. (Dr. Dinosaur courtesy of Scott Wegener & Brian Clevinger)
I am starting to build a backlog of incomplete posts, for which I apologize. For the TL;DR version: I went to the Nevada Test Site and it was awesome, the BBotE order slots for the window ending May 30th are now up, and a new label for the bottles is coming that I’m very excited about.
But today, I wish to grant the wish of a someone that made an order and asked “I’m a 23 year old engineer aspiring to make a difference in the world. Can you enlighten me with your wisdom through the telling of a story?” So, here you go, man. I do indeed have some advice to share.
_______________
You are a wizard. No, really. You have Wisdom of Things and can tell the future of how they will work, or won’t as the case may be. Somewhere, somewhen, in Middle Ages the line between philosophy (natural philosophy being the old term for what we’d call the sciences) & magic got a bit blurred and it’s been hard to disentangle them ever since. Clarke’s Third Law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is just a reflection of that old confusion.
And that’s the trick as a scientist or engineer; it isn’t magic to you.
In the long, long ago, in the beforetime, I was a physics undergrad functioning as a TA for the Academic Excellence program at UC Santa Cruz, which had the dedicated mission of trying to help minority students in the sciences stay in them, with a grad student functioning as our supervisor. The grad student ditched out of the program very early on, leaving my fellow TA and I with a hard choice: do we fold up the physics program as we have no one in charge, or do we team teach it as best we can as undergrads? Neither of us had ever had a teaching gig of any kind before this one and no one taught us anything about pedagogy. We were second quarter sophomores for fuck’s sake; we’d just started taking upper division classes, having finished the dedicated physics major version of the lower division courses we were now teaching other students, who were usually older than us.
And they let us do it. They never made an effort to hire a new grad student for the next two and a half years. Our supervisors trusted that, hey, they’re physics majors, of course they can do it. We did and we did it well. Every single one of our students passed with B or better and the only one that had bailed on the program had to do it for health reasons, not because he wanted to.
But that trust is what I want to focus in on. Think of all the people in your life that have decided that math is frightening, that there is simply too much in the world to know. You have been equipped with the tools to tear apart the toaster of reality and take some good guesses how things actually work. When you can do that, I find people react in one of two ways: unwavering trust or fear. That trust put two undergrads in charge of 60 students that the system expected to fail. And they might have, if I hadn’t intentionally broken my students’ trust.
While giving a review lecture for mechanics about rotation and changing inertial reference frames, I made a sign error. Normally, this isn’t a big problem but when you’re bouncing between reference frames, things start getting weird fast. I decided to just roll with it and keep going, as no one had called me on it, just to see how far I could go with patently bizarre and wrong math on the board.
At the 40 minute mark, I capped my dry erase marker, put it down, and turned to the class. “I made a mistake over a half hour ago and none of you caught me. If you did, you didn’t say a word and let me keep going.” There were stunned and angry looks. Most of my students were pre-med, which means they were used to a steady stream of rote memorization from a year of biology and chemistry. With sad understanding in my voice I told them “Memorizing won’t work here. There are too many formulas and you can’t possibly hope to memorize the infinite permutations of them for every possible scenario. The Laws of Motion and energy conservation are conceptual tools that help you build the tool you actually need for any given problem. Let’s start again, but now I’ve taught you an even more important lesson: I make mistakes too. Being a physics major doesn’t make me infallible. NEVER accept what what the person at the board is doing as absolute truth, you have to keep thinking. This ain’t a church and I’m not the pope. Pay. Attention.”
They never let me get away with it again. Thinking harder about the world and getting more familiar with using the tools they’d been handed, rather than just memorizing their shapes for organization on the pegboard in the tool shop, started making them much better in their other classes too. To the point that after three quarters, when I put up three blackboards worth of scenarios asking “For each of the following, using what you have learned since the fall, please explain why Phil didn’t die.” that they were able to answer them all. They were a little concerned that each of those scenarios was a real story, but that’s another matter. I actually got one convert who decided that physics was the major she should really be doing. It’s been almost 20 years and that’s still a moment in my life I look back on with tremendous pride.
You aren’t going to be able to do much about the people that are afraid of you for what you know and seem to be capable of (see also: the fate of almost every wizard in folklore), but you can try to get the people who blindly trust to join us. No one’s ever going to master everything, but the point is to get people interested enough to try; case in point, I’m shitty at drafting and never will make a good engineer, but that doesn’t stop me from staring lustfully at the CNC machine.
I would like point you at the old World of Darkness game Mage the Ascension, specifically to the Technocracy’s updated Convention sourcebooks. This isn’t just because Brian Clevinger managed to sneak my name into the 2013 revision of my favorite of them, the Void Engineers. They were traditionally portrayed as the adversaries in that game, with the “heroes” trying to keep the ancient mysteries alive and reassert them as dominant paradigm in the world. I had a hard time with this as the Technocracy were clearly the heroes trying to advance and awaken humanity as a whole, not just pursuing a personal and hubris driven set of obsolete beliefs. The lone wizard in the tower, looking for the secrets of yore in ancient tomes is doing it wrong. The wizard teaching an army of apprentices to wield magic in their own right for the common weal, that is noble.
Probably not a Nobel, but if you’re doing it for prizes, you’re in the wrong field. I’m not telling you to get out there and become a science teacher at your local school, but take every opportunity you can to explain what you’re doing and why to anyone who will listen.
TL;DR moral of the story: do not prank emergency responders. We will play it straight and you won’t like it.
Once upon a time, several years ago, a grad student decided to call the spill response line and call in a spill in a non-radiological control area. Because my name is first in alphabetical order on the receptionist’s list, the call got routed to me rather than the co-worker of mine he was hoping to prank. When I showed up to the lab, heavy spill kit and normal work bag in tow, and was directed to the break room where the there was a spilled mug of coffee, student declared, laughing, “APRIL FOOLS!”
I didn’t laugh. I remained stonefaced. I asked, “Is that the radioactive spill?”
Fainter laughing from student, “It was just my coffee, man.”
With continued stoneface, but a trace of concern in my voice, “So you drank it then?”
Student, now with concern in his voice, “Look, it’s just coffee.”
I opened the spill response kit and started to take things out. “Do you know it wasn’t contaminated?”
Student, stammering, “C’mon man.”
I handed him a bioassay kit. “When you’re finished here, I’ll need you to give a urine sample to verify there’s been no uptake.”
Student, “What?”
I gestured to the kitchen and desk areas of the lab “Once you’ve made a documented survey and decon’d this entire area, because I see several other mugs of suspicious fluid and evidence that the spill has been tracked through here, THEN I will need you to do a urine bioassay to verify that you have not ingested any radioactive materials.”
Student, getting angry now, “THIS IS BULLSHIT! I’m not doing this.”
I did not smile. “If you don’t, then I have to. This is a spill response. And if I have to respond to a spurious spill, you will then get to explain that charge to your PI when it makes it’s way though the accounting in about a month. We always give the lab a chance to clean first during spills before we get involved. Your choice.”
About this time, while it was now dawning on student #1 that once you trigger the safety response script it has to play out, another student walked into the office area to come get something from her desk. I firmly told her “Stop right where you are. You have just entered a contamination area.”
She just rolled her eyes and said “Yeah, right.”
I blocked her way, handed her a pair of tyvek booties, and hit her with full force of Command Voice I can summon. “Stop. Remove your shoes, place them in this bag and put these booties on. This is not a request. When he verifies they’re clean, you can have them back. Meanwhile, you!” I gestured to Student #1, “Get the rad tape up. You don’t want anyone else entering the contamination area.”
Eventually all nine grad students of this lab were participating in an item by item survey of the kitchen and office area, and a complete on-your-knees survey of the floor of the entire lab space. Luckily, I had brought extra meters in the spill kit so it was easy for everyone to take part. Four hours of verifying zeroes later, I congratulated them at the end for running an exceptionally good decon drill and that I trusted that they would be well equipped for any future response.
That lab’s students skittered away from me from then on when ever they saw me in the halls.
This is a tale of contracts ending and product evolution.
Two months or so ago, some of my favorite people decided to take a chance with their creation, Atomic Robo. They are bringing the entirety of their work for the last 9 volumes online as a free webcomic and launched a Patreon to support the comic going forward, in addition to the Atomic Robo supply depot. Brian Clevinger got his start in webcomics with 8-Bit Theater, so this is somewhat a return to ye olde tymes in a swanky format to him but for Scott Wegener this is a a bold, new, different, and thus somewhat scary frontier. To be be honest, not many careers seem to be as cruel yet rewarding as comics artist, so my read on the scary level is “Can’t be much worse than normal, but I do like food now and then.” I could be wrong, but I think Scott is fighting Bob Cratchit for the last lump of coal in the scuttle right now in the midst of New England spring which hasn’t quite gotten the memo about winter being over.
Because I have the pleasure of being their Weirdness Consultant (I got a promotion from mere science nerd recently), I knew this was coming and I wanted to do my best to help them make the most of it. Because people are more than a little excited about the prospect of FREE ROBOT SCIENCE PUNCHING COMIC, the traffic that came bearing down on them was similar to the catastrophic Leo Laporte/TWiT Army load testing of my own website (despite my best efforts to Warren Ellis-proof it). You guys brought them crashing down but thanks to Hiveworks they’re up and better than ever. I’d been haranguing them for what seems like years, because it totally was years, to get themselves some sort of merch up and running as they kept making wonderful images and words that needed to be available as consumer products.
I cannot adequately express how not excited they were. They make art and words, and try really hard not to think about sales of things that are not comics because that is distracting. I point blank told both of them that if the poster in the background of NASA Director Bolden’s office “SPACE: IT’S OUT THERE!” did not become a purchasable item, that they clearly hated money. This is very similar to how I tell researchers I have no interest in accounting when discussing their work with radioactive materials; if something is going wrong, I want you to talk to me, not worry how much things may cost down the road. Luckily, they got themselves George Rohac who actually likes the business and logistics side of the house and fired up the store like it had never existed before. Just for the record, for those of us that like fine paper products, it’s their intention that trade paperbacks will continue to be available.
Atomic Robo has always run on the slightly weird schedule of roughly nine months of comics per year and then three of downtime for business retooling (see also: Scott’s excellent new Wacom tablet), story development, and remembering that loved ones exist. Unlike Brian & Scott’s normal incredibly busy breather, this one has been marked by the actual transition to the online comics. Issue by issue, the old volumes of Atomic Robo, including the Free Comic Book Day specials, have been appearing on the website at the rate of three per week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Eventually, they’ll catch up to Volume 10 and the new releases will begin in early May.
You may recognize this as my user icon from many different services. Picture title: “PHIL YELLS AT THE METAL DINGUS”
I bring all this up because they just hit Volume 6, Issue 1 “The Ghost of Station X”. Issue 2, which starts next Monday, is where my alter ego, Dr. Phil Broughton, Action Scientist, first appears on the pages of Atomic Robo. This is my reward for having helped over the, umm, more than decade that all this has been rattling in Brian & Scott’s heads. I take it back; the real reward has been getting to help bullshit with them endlessly and help make Atomic Robo as wonderful as it is.
They also made these two wonderful Tesladyne and Atomic Robo labels for my BBotE bottles and let me use them when I really needed to help my mom after my father passed. In turn, I now toss back profits from those back in the pot for their Patreon in thanks.
If you’ve never read Atomic Robo before, now is a great time to start for the low, low cost of free right here at Volume 1, Issue 1. If you’ve been reading all along and were confused about the transition online, now you have the straight dope on how to proceed.
As we wind down into the final days of 2014, I have done some assessment of the state of production to let you know the lay of the land for 2015. Resupply cases are headed to Wish in New York City and Natara in Los Angeles, though I’m pretty sure Natara’s is completely slated for a tasting party for New Year’s.
After the production window ending January 3rd closes, I will be winding the coffee engines down for a week because I jump on a plane shortly there after to head to CES 2015 (reprising the 2011 CES journey). For that reason, the next window will go until January 24th since I’ll be out of town. I will be spending most of my time in Vegas for CES at Caesar’s if for some reason you wanted me to bring a stein with me for you. I also happily accept cocktails if you can find me.
Anyway, status reports in no particular order:
1) Changes to the Flavor Line Up – For the foreseeable future, Jamaica Blue Mountain is off the table. As I mentioned a while back that last time it disappeared, the crops coming out of Jamaica for the past several years have been painfully small, while demand has only gone up. This means that my roasters of choice are hard pressed to get any when it comes up on auction. If, and this looks increasingly unlikely, they are able to get any beans, the prices are likely to jump up by at least 25%. Considering how painfully expensive the Jamaica Blue Mountain BBotE is, that probably takes it out of even “Extravagant Gift” price range for folks. If you really, really want some, ask and I’ll see what I can do.
Otherwise, the availability of the rest of the varieties appears to be stable. There’s a chance that Ipsento Panama will run out and that Congo will come back.
2) BBotE Ambassadorships – At this time, I have no intention to expand the number of BBotE Ambassadors out there. The addition of of Melbourne (Australia), Toronto (Canada), Albuquerque, NM and Prescott, AZ at the end of last year was a bit of a push and I’d like to make sure they get established and I can handle their demand before adding anyone else. Sadly, after this case Wish is hanging up her hat in New York City. I’m afraid secure buildings have made easy hand off to folks tricky.
3) Price Changes in Australia – My retail prices of BBotE have stayed stable for the past several years despite generally rising prices in coffee and supplies. I like my price points and want to keep them there as long as I can. However, in one place, they’re going to have to change: BBotE Ambassador hand off in Australia. As a kindness, I’ve been letting people just pay in AUD as it was more or less 1:1 for the exchange rate. Was is the operative term. I’m afraid those prices are now something closer to AUD90. Sorry, everyone down there. Melbourne & Perth rates are now a titch higher starting January 1st.
So far, this isn’t coming to Toronto or London yet, but I’m watching those rates.
4) THE DEADLY RADIATIONS!!! – As I have often said, the price of writing about interesting things is that it takes time away from doing interesting things. I have high hopes of actually getting a few more tales up here in the coming year. The TL;DR version of 2014 has been “Goddammit, you still aren’t dying from Fukushima, stop calling me.” Also, if you are need of something to donate to for tax reasons and like tales of radiation, may I recommend the Atomic Heritage Foundation to you?
5) Travel – Other than the trip to Las Vegas in the first week of January I mentioned above, nothing specific is on the docket. There’s been mutterings about a mission behind the Orange Curtain and possibly Boston, but nothing concrete. Nothing that shuts down production for a month like the Great Cross-Country Journey of 2014.
With the shipments that just went out today, and the few remaining for tomorrow, the December 17th BBotE production window draws to a close. According to the nice ladies at the post office, everything should reach their respective destinations by next Monday at the latest. The next production slots, ending on January 3rd, 2015 are now up for most all items on the site. I will do everything in my power to crank out as much BBotE as possible out the door in hopes of getting out to folks before the holidays end but there’s no guarantees at this point.
So, if you wanted to get something for someone for Christmas or Hanukkah and the last minute has bitten you in the butt because I can’t possibly get something to you in time, I do have one final option for you: Gift Certificates. I deeply apologize that you can’t give someone a gift certificate in excess of $1000 on Funranium Labs, but such is life.
As for steins, supplies are, in a word, depleted. Those numbers will rebound sometime in mid-January.
It is now time for some good holiday cheer as only my favorite artist can provide:
The last of the December 6th production window BBotE, along with several steins and resupply for the BBotE Ambassador of Melbourne, are now out the door. This means that the December 17th BBotE production window is now open. The last of the dewars I ordered in preparation for the 17th window are due to arrive on Tuesday, at which the “steins on hand” numbers will lock in for the rest of the year.
Thanks to the kind endorsement of io9 and The Wirecutter gift buying guides, it is fair to say that slots are disappearing at a fair clip this year. After the 17th, another set of slots will go up, however I won’t be able to guarantee anything making it before Christmas at that point. If you’re in the last minute crowd, drop me an email and we can see what we can make happen. (PROTIP: not being picky about what variety you get really helps with that)
And with that, it’s time to closely research this scene to learn the secrets of the classic LAPD holiday punch, courtesy of “L.A. Confidential”.
The next milestone has been hit: Stein #600 and it’s companion #601, a 665ml FMJ for the low low price of free, are now on their way to New Jersey for a what I can only hope is a very enjoyable Thanksgiving feast.
In other news, Congo has departed the ranks of BBotE to be replaced by an excellent Tanzania from that same roaster. It’s very similar to to the Congo in flavor, which considering these to farms are on either side of Lake Tanganyika. It’s the same dry red wine & baking chocolate, but a bit sweeter. Kinda smoky on the end. I like it and am happy to put it up in the roster for you all to choose from. As always, the BBotE flavor profiles can be found here.
Resupply of all the BBotE Ambassadors is going as fast as possible. London’s just went out today, should arrive at the end of the week. Chicago asks that people come clean them out as soon as possible because there is a need for more refrigerator room to hold Thanksgiving leftovers. DC/Baltimore is headed out of the country for the holidays, so if you want BBotE around the capital, drop him a line before December 15th. If you’d like to grab something locally, drop them a line. Ambassadors are standing by.
