Chesapeake Utilities Beats; Chesapeake Energy With Huge Earnings Miss, 2Q16 Earnings -- August 4, 2016

Chesapeake Energy Misses Big, Chesapeake Utilities Beats

Here's Chesapeake Energy, from a reader, see first comment.

Chesapeake Energy drops after earnings miss, asset sale plan: Shares of Chesapeake Energy fell more than 3 percent Thursday after its earnings were worse than expected and it raised its asset sales target. 

Chesapeake now expects to sell more than $2.0 billion in assets this year, well above the upper end of the prior $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion range. The firm said that it plans to sell "selected" Haynesville Shale acreage, located in northwest Louisiana. 

The second-largest producer of natural gas posted a bigger-than-expected adjusted quarterly loss of 14 cents a share. Total revenue fell more than 50 percent from the same period last year to $1.62 billion and missed estimates of $1.93 billion. 

The energy company also raised its full-year production forecast by about 3 percent. As of Wednesday's close, shares were up 17.5 percent year-to-date but nearly 34 percent lower over the last 12 months.

Chesapeake Utilities Corporation:

Link here. Chesapeake Utilities Corporation (CPK) reported second-quarter 2016 operating earnings of 52 cents per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 49 cents. Reported earnings also grew 26.8% year-over-year on the back of higher earnings from the Regulated and Unregulated Energy segments.

Vertical Integration

From Fortune on why MuskMelon wants Tesla and Solar City to merge. The solar panel industry and the batteries in EVs use inverters to convert DC to AC, but that, to me, doesn't make, at least to me, this acquisition a "vertical integrated company." It simply means that instead of having one team over at Solar City working on inverters, and another team over at Tesla working on inverters, Tesla-Aluminum Siding Corp can have one team working on inverters.

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Visions Of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems, Ian Stewart, c. 2013

The best thing about this book, so far, is that it starts off with "primes." In the "pop science genre," it seems incredible all the articles written on primes. I find it intriguing that a property that seems so simple, so unassuming, can be so important to mathematics. And here it is again. In a 17-chapter book on the great math problems, the book starts out with primes.

Something tells me that after this chapter, I won't be able to understand anything else. I will therefore savor this chapter, and look forward to discussing it with Arianna on our rides to water polo practice and tournaments.

Two fascinating tidbits from the chapter on primes which might be of interest to middle school students:

• the author demonstrates a clever way of finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers
• why the number "1" is considered neither a prime number nor a composite number; it alone is a special number -- this was only "decided" by mathematicians in the "last century or two" -- that the number 1 is "special"

The next "problem" area was "squaring the circle." I first came across this problem when I was in "junior high" -- what we now call "middle school." I remember it vividly because I read about it during Mr Thue's study hall. It was in a biography of our 16th president. President Lincoln, before he became president (and perhaps while he was president) spent hours trying to "square the circle" -- something that is impossible, simply because pi is irrational -- or at least that's what I thought. There is much more to it than that. When a mathematician proved that pi was irrational, that same mathematician in that same paper conjectured that pi was transcendental (which was later proved): pi "transcends" algebraic expression. Pi does not satisfy any polynomial equation with integer coefficients.

Another famous curious number in mathematics, e, is also transcendental.

It turns out that one cannot "square the circle" because pi is transcendental.

Enough for now.

By the way, I'm beginning to think one can see similarities in politics. Not only are some politicians irrational, but they succeed because they transcend human frailty.