Why I Love To Blog: Reason #6 -- Readers Send Me Such Great Links -- January 7, 2016

The top ten reasons why I love to blog could be re-arranged any number of ways. Readers sending me great links is listed as "reason #6" why I love to blog, but when I get links like this, it could easily be "Reason #1."

Reason #1, by the way, is that the blog gives me something to do while waiting to spend time with the granddaughters. LOL.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. A reader just sent me this link -- Whiting will present an inside look at how its completion techniques have significantly improved its results in the Williston Basin.

Hopefully the video is easy to access, and hopefully it will be made available at Whiting's website. From the very beginning I was impressed with how much Whiting shared with the general public. I discussed that years ago when I first started blogging but haven't made mention of it lately.

And only because I haven't said it in quite awhile, blogging about the Bakken has nothing to do with any interest in investing. This is not an investment or financial site. I often include such information only because to understand the oil and gas industry, sometimes one must "follow the money."

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A Note To The Granddaughters

Their grandmother loves to paint. Not houses, but pictures and landscapes. Somehow I happened to land on the wiki aniline site. With regard to dyes:

In 1856, whilst ["whilst" -??] trying to synthesise quinine, von Hofmann's student William Henry Perkin discovered mauveine and went into industry producing the first synthetic dye.

Other aniline dyes followed, such as fuchsine, safranine, and induline. At the time of mauveine's discovery, aniline was expensive. Soon thereafter, applying a method reported in 1854 by Antoine Béchamp, it was prepared "by the ton."  The Béchamp reduction enabled the evolution of a massive dye industry in Germany.

Today, the name of BASF, originally Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (English: Baden Aniline and Soda Factory), now among the largest chemical suppliers, echoes the legacy of the synthetic dye industry, built via aniline dyes and extended via the related azo dyes. The first azo dye was aniline yellow.

Aniline: from "gas-tar" or coal tar

• Mauveine: analine purple and Perkin's mauve
• Fuchsine: magenta when dissolved in water; as a solid, dark green crystals; causes bladder cancer in those producing fuchsine
• Safranine: a "counterstain" used in Gram stains in biology; all nuclei stain red with safranin (common spelling)
• Induline: blue, bluish-red, or black shades

D.H. Lawrence had a doggerel on the language used by Shakespearian characters, in which the last couplet read:

• How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are!
• Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.

D. H. Lawrence died too soon. He never heard urban rap.

I never knew the BASF backstory.