Tuesday, September 16, 2014

East Fork oil field has been updated.

Active rigs:

	9/16/2014	09/16/2013	09/16/2012	09/16/2011	09/16/2010
Active Rigs	198	178	193	199	145

RBN Energy: the challenges of condensate and widely varying quality of oil in the Eagle Ford.

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Doomsday

I track the states over here.
 
Breitbart is reporting:

Among the many metrics that show Obama's home state is struggling to break the Great Recession, a new report shows that applications for food stamps in Illinois is greater than its creation of jobs. [And, of course, that can only go on for so long, I suppose.]

Illinois has had the worst recovery from the recession of any state in the country, the Illinois Policy Institute reported this month: "There are nearly 300,000 fewer Illinoisans working today than in January 2008, and 170,000 fewer payroll jobs. "

"For every post-recession job created in Illinois, nearly two people have enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps," the Institute wrote. “In the recession era, the number of Illinoisans dependent on food stamps has risen by 745,000.

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Staggering

I knew "the number" but I missed the staggering significance. Apple probably sold in excess of 4 million iPhones in the first 24 hours, September 12, 2014. Everyone said that set a record. I guess. That was double the number iPhone 5's Apple sold in 2012 in that rollout. Link here. Apparently analysts were hoping for more. LOL. The stock (AAPL) is down almost 2% today.

On a side note: it's pretty well agreed that not more than four or five million people actually signed up for ObamaCare after several months of intensive marketing and arm-twisting and laws requiring folks to sign up, and yet Apple sold more than 4 million iPhones in less than one 24-hour period. And their website did not falter - though in the first three hours, the website was oversubscribed/down simply because too many folks trying to access the site. But that resolved itself in less than six hours. Ellen DeGeneres was incredulous that as many as 5 million people might have signed up for ObamaCare, and yet many more than that will buy an iPhone 6/6+ in the first two weeks it is offered.

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A Note to the Grandparents

Our 11-year-old starts off the year in her science class studying the periodic table. That is one of her favorite subjects; we've "studied" the periodic table, off and on, together for the last two years. 

One of the things we discovered on our own was the "ability" to predict whether the radius of an element/atom would be be greater or smaller than the radius of the preceding element/atom in the periodic table. I say we discovered it on our own because we had not see that particular subject discussed anywhere. [Yes, one can find discussions of such by googling, but in the general textbooks and general science books we've been reading, we did not come across it.]

She said she was disappointed that they would "only" be studying the first three rows of the periodic table. LOL.

I reminded her that whatever she learns, it builds on the fund of knowledge she already has about that subject, so studying "just" the first three rows would be fine. Even if they studied just one element, she could learn a lot. She seemed to accept that.  

I say all that because two books that seem to "read together" nicely on the subject are: Sean Carroll's  Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, c. 2013 and, Lisa Randall's Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, both c. 2011, 2012. The first is short, snappy, and to the point, and includes some nice glossy photographs, even as a softcover. Lisa is a lot wordier, seems to digress a bit too often, and treads (occasionally and unnecessarily) into "religion vs science." I have the paperback and perhaps she added some of that after the initial hardcover release although I doubt it.

Although I don't understand the math and understand very little of the theory, I feel I've come a long way in "getting it."  Forthe first time I feel I have a better grasp on all the hoopla surrounding the Higgs boson. That, and $1.89, will get you a tall dark roast cup of coffee at Starbucks in north Texas.