Murder numbers are official!

Driving to work this morning i purchased a newspaper from a street vendor. The head story is about colombia, how Mr Uribe won the first presidential elections round by 60%, while his extreme left wing counterpart only got 22% and some other dude the rest. Then we see a huge picture of driver Fernando Alonso in his har waving after winning the Monaco GP yesterday.

Among other stories, we find a curious little note on the bottom half of the paper, one that states "600 murders accounted for in the city" and a footnote that states that this is just up to april, not may.

The blurb of the article on the front page states:
"The index of murders in the capital increased by 51% compared to 2005. Should this tendency be maintained, which according to experts is caused by the remarkable social hatred present in our society, the current year will close with well over 2170 violent deaths"

The note goes on inside the paper saying that statistically this is by far the worst year ever and that this puts us right up there with the most dangerous, not-at-war countries of the world.

Reassuring isn't it?


Monday started extremely weird. I was asked last minute on friday to act as substitute teacher for biology and chemistry today and tomorrow. Some mixup happened and it wasn't clear who would do first period and who would do second period. In the end nobody showed up for first period, and the kids were left alone in the hallway for 15 minutes.

While this happened, i met general science guy who told me he had a bit of a mishap in his lab. He had kept a beaker full of saturated NaOH, a powerful base, in his cupboard over the weekend. He hadn't noticed that the beaker was cracked at the bottom. Of course, the wonderful caustic slowly leaked out of the beaker over the weekend, eating through the paint and metal of the shelf it was on. The beaker barely stood balancing itself on one of the cracks on the metal. The grand total, 3 shelves with holes in them, a lot of equipment damaged because of the spill, 2 damaged beakers and about 30g of dry, hydrated NaOH everywhere.

I swept and picked up most of the big stuff and then proceeded to vacuum and neutralize the whole thing with 0.5M HCl. The results were pretty good but the holes weren't all that nice. I patched it up by setting a sheet of aluminum over the holes.

At 1200 i have to sub another biology class and have them do some stuff with hormones and review some other stuff.

On the bright side, i can go home at 1630 today as all co-curricular activities have ended, which means no more after school science workshops and no more labs for me to clean up.

June 9th is the date i look forward the most: the start of the fifa world cup and the end of classes.

I shall bring a TV to my lab and then have a hell of a time watching the matches. That IF i don't have anything else to do, we'll see. If i have, i'll record them and watch them at home later.