Active Rigs Down To 140 -- February 4, 2015

Active rigs in North Dakota:

	2/4/2015	02/04/2014	02/04/2013	02/04/2012	02/04/2011
Active Rigs	140	190	184	202	165

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Odds And Ends, But Mostly "Ends"

Bookstore ends: Borderlands done in by minimum wage and ObamaCare.

Clean Coal Project ends: Obama administration shuts down "Clean Coal" demonstration project in Illinois. Many, many story lines: nuclear industry against this project; nuclear industry in financial trouble in some areas; enviro-nazis against any kind of coal energy; loss of jobs in a state that could use some jobs.

By decade's end: US government interest payments will exceed defense spending and non-defense spending.

US crude oil pace of production could end this year. FuelFix is reporting.

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How's That OXY Spin-Off Doing?

InsiderMonkey is reporting:

The spin-off of the subsidiary was completed on November 30, and California Resources Corp (CRC) began trading publicly on the NYSE on December 1 at $7.37, which was well below estimates of where the stock would open. Issued shares to Occidental shareholders began trading off-market in the middle of November at $8.45, which was 15% below the $10.00 range expected. However, slumping crude oil prices conspired to greatly limit the value of the new company from earlier estimates, and it would continue to drop over the following two months, to as low as $3.93 in late January.

See disclaimer. 

Today, CRC's EPS: a loss of 75 cents/share per Yahoo!Finance. CRC will report earnings on February 19, 2015.

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A Note for the Granddaughters

One of the more interesting initiatives that primary educators have instituted over the years has been an interdisciplinary approach in education starting in elementary grades. For example, arithmetic teachers were to use word problems to help students with reading comprehension, not simply arithmetic. Science teachers, likewise, were to assign more essays instead of multiple-guess questions in their assessments. I was mentioning to this to our younger granddaughter and she said her school does that. When the science teacher assigns them an essay, the science teacher checks the paper for scientific accuracy and then gives the essays to the language arts teacher who evaluates the essay on grammar, punctuation, spelling writing, etc.

We did the same thing when I was substituting as a teacher for a middle school in San Antonio, Texas, a few years ago. But I always wondered how physical education instructors would fit in.

Yesterday, our younger granddaughter told me a most interesting story. Yesterday, in physical education, the gym instructors (probably with assistance from the science teachers) set up an obstacle course in the gymnasium. The obstacle course was in the "shape" of a heart, with long tunnels for the aorta, arteries coming from the aorta, and the pulmonary arteries. When going through the lungs, the students were jerry-rigged into some kind of scooter - pulley system and pulled along, grabbing oxygen models along the way. 

She asked me about the aortic valve and about the arteries that went to the brain. This was all in her gym class yesterday.

This morning when I picked up the two granddaughters to take to school, she was on the computer looking at a model of a heart, and pointing out where I was wrong and that she was right all along. LOL.

She also knew that when looking at diagrams of the human body, they are usually reversed. The heart, for example, is pictured on the right -- in the diagram -- though, of course, it's on the left side of our body. This was in third grade that she's learning all this. And she's learning biology and the circulation of blood in physical education. I'm quite impressed.

I can't wait to hear what she says the boys do when they pretend to be going through the digestive tract next. LOL.

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The Fifties

Lost In The Fifties Tonight (In The Still Of The Night), Ronnie Milsap