Frac Daddies And A Special Note To The Granddaughters

Frac Daddy did not come in first in the Kentucky Derby yesterday, but he was still a winner.

And all the "frac daddies" in the Bakken are winners, too.  And active rigs: 192. Nice.

Not much yet to write about, so will drop back and punt, mixing metaphors early on a Sunday. A reader, yesterday, sent me a link to Grantland.com, a flashback to an article about the Kentucky Derby written by Hunter S. Thompson.

I had read that article before; it was part of an anthology of HST works, if I remember correctly. I have not been to the Kentucky Derby but HST's description makes me feel like I have, especially combining that with what I see on television.

I had not seen Grantland.com before, or if I had, I had forgotten how really good the writing is, and how crisp the photography is. I've added Grantland.com to the list of external links at the sidebar at the very, very bottom.

Alerting you to that detail also reminds you of the other excellent external links regarding the oil patch.

And you all knew, I'm sure, this was coming:

Who's Your Daddy? Toby Keith

Some of Toby's lines are from Willie Nelson's "if you got the money, honey, I got the time." Toby is America's answer to Australia's Slim Dusty.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

Two dots to connect. The first dot: in the early Steve Jobs/Apple years there were many, many stories about how Steve solved the problem of dissipating heat in his computers. The other dot: can computers be programmed to think for themselves and even taken the next step: replicate?

As we all know, computers work on a binary process. On/off. 0/1.

It turns out the the brain is also binary: neurons are either firing or they are not. They are either on/off. O/1. (By the way, if the nervous system is digital, the endocrine system (hormones) is analog. But I digress.)

Brains and electronic computers both use quantities of energy in performing their work of logic -- all of which is wasted and dissipated in heat, to be carried away by the blood or by ventilating and cooling apparatus. -- James Gleick, in The Information, p. 241

Now, connecting the dots.

In some planetary system light years away, an intelligent being has been able to do just that: the intelligent being "developed" a computer that could be programmed to think for itself, and even replicate.

TIB started with the central processing unit, the CPU. The CPU was easy. Cooling it and providing the energy were the challenges. TIB was only allowed to use the lighter elements, C, H, and O. (In the end, TIB did cheat, sneaking in some iron, sulfur, and phosphorus, for example.)

TIB solved the heat problem with a fluid pump/radiator system (heart and vascular system).

There were various solutions to the question of how to provide the energy to a) run the computer, and, b) run the pump to cool the computer.

The energy could have been centralized or decentralized. Had it been a 12-volt battery located outside the computer, it would have required another system of "electrical wires." Why not decentralize the energy source in small, nano-batteries? That TIB did and these nano-batteries were later identified and called mitochondria. There is one each in almost every living cell.

I suppose there would have been ways to convert all waste to gas but if there was going to be solid/liquid waste, one might as well develop apparatuses that could do double duty, doing something other than just eliminating solid/liquid waste. The real purpose of the solid waste apparatus was to recycle water. The liquid waste apparatus was engineered to provide answers to a number of other problems that the system kept coming up with.

TIB had done it: a computer that could think for itself; it was ready for prime time. One last addition: the replicator. And, of course, that was binary, also: DNA, a double strand of binary threads cross-linking binary digits (or bits, which all biology students now know as A, T, C, and G).

It is almost spooky. The entire body (except for the reproductive system) was developed to do two things to support a computer: a) dissipate the heat; and, b) provide the energy to run the CPU.

In my mind, the most fascinating solution TIB came up with: how to supply the energy. Little nano-batteries called mitochondria dispersed throughout the entire mainframe. Very, very clever.

My hunch: Steve Jobs is out there, somewhere, even now, working on nano-batteries for iPhone X.