Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Saudi Arabia, Facing Dwindling Oil Income, Raising Government Fees, Fines -- WSJ -- August 10, 2016

Active rigs:


8/10/201608/10/201508/10/201408/10/201308/10/2012
Active Rigs3372193184200

RBN Energy: important article on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG - propane and some butane) export cancellations.

Saudi Arabia raises government fees and fines to raise revenue -- The WSJ.
Saudi Arabia, faced with dwindling oil income, has sharply increased government fees such as visa charges as part of a range of measures aimed at raising revenue from non-oil sources.
Under the new rules approved by the Saudi government, foreigners will have to pay $800 for a six-month visa, six times the current cost.
The government also announced hefty fines for traffic violations that include drifting, a practice that involves intentionally skidding and spinning at high speed—a popular pastime for men in a country that notoriously lacks entertainment options. First-time violators will face fines of 20,000 Saudi riyals ($5,332). It also more than tripled the fees it charges to advertise on billboards.
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For The Archives

Nothing will come of this, but important for the archives. From Townhall on the recent DNC staffer deaths.

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The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt
William Nothdurft with Josh Smith
c. 2002
DD: 567.909 NOT  

The Bahariya Depression, western Egypt.
First explored by Ernst Stromer, 1910 - 1914
Stromer's isolated cone-shaped hill: Gebel el Dist

Geology
  • Cretaceous Period: anywhere between 66 and 144 million years ago; really rich dinosaur deposits
  • badlands of the western US and in Canada
  • In Cretaceous times, many of these areas were on the shorelines of great shallow seas -- exactly what one sees when looking at geologic maps of Egypt's Western Desert
Dinosaur background
  • Sir Richard Owen, 1842, coined the term "dinosaur"
  • Vertebrates: fish and tetrapods (limbs)
  • Tetrapods: amphibians and amniotes (former return to the water to reproduce; the latter figure out how to keep embryos moist on dry land)
  • Amniotes: synapsids (led to mammals) and reptiles (led to dinosaurs) 
  • Saurischchians would come to dominate the Bahariya 95 million years ago just as ornithischians would predominate in many other areas of the Northern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period
  • Dinosaurs distinguished themselves from all other creatures on the Earth roughly 230 million years ago: by standing upright on two strong hind legs; their center of gravity in front of their hip junction; counterbalanced by a long and heavy tail
  • The dinosaurs split into two groups: ornithischians and the saurischians; both names misleading
  • Ornithischian: "bird-hipped"
  • Saurischian: "lizard-hipped"
  • Refers to orientation of one bone in the pelvis, the pubis
  • Ornithischians: pubis points backward beneath the hip (as in modern birds)
  • Saurischians, in most cases: pubis points forward (as it does in modern lizards)
  • No one knows why the different orientation
  • Ornithischians evolved into three broad groups: Thyreophora, Marginocephalia; and, Ornithopoda; all were herbivores
  • Thyreophora: spikes and plates across their backs; stegosaurs
  • Marginocephalia: thick, bony skulls and horns; Triceratops (which by the way --> birds)
  • Ornithopoda: mostly bipedal beaked and duck-billed dinosaurs
  • Saurischians: again, predominant form in western Egypt; two primary groups: the sauropods and the theropods
  • Sauropods: like the ornithischians, herbivores; small heads, long necks, equally long tails; grew so big, they had to walk on all fours; the largest, the titanosaurs, may have weighed as much as a hundred tons
  • Theropods: get all the attention; fearsome carnivores; feet with three functional toes; abundant throughout the Mesozoic Era; ranged in size from 43-foot-long Giganotosaurus to the pigeon-sized Microraptor
  • Theropods: the only kind of dinosaur that survives today -- as birds
  • "Our story": not the theropods, but the sauropods (look liked "brontosauraus")
The 1999 - 2000 expeditions
  • Josh Smith, Jennifer Smith, and Robert Giegengack, University of Pennsylvania
  • At el Dist
  • bones everywhere
  • no paleontologist had been there since Stromer
  • everything Stromer had found had been lost in destroyed museum during WWII
Chapter 10: the importance of western Egypt; a a theory of why this particular dinosaur ended up here
Epilogue: the dinosaur found -- a tidal giant and a new genus and species of dinosaur, never before known
  • second largest dinosaur to date: Paralititan stromeri (Argentino, among others, are larger)
  • "Paralic": tidal (compare "riparian" -- a term I first learned of while blogging about the Bakken)
  • "Titan": obvious (enormous beast)
  • "Stromeri": obvious
Reader's Digest version in The New York Times
Bottom line
  • Order: Saurischia
  • Suborder: Sauropodomorpha
  • Clade: Neosaurapoda
  • Clade: Macronaria
  • Clade: Titanosauria
  • Genus: Paralititan

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