Amateurs Sleuthing Oil Data - WSJ -- May 24, 2017

From today's WSJ: "Do Dishes, Then Track Oil Data."

On a recent Sunday evening, Samir Madani had dinner with his family in suburban Stockholm, did the dishes and put his two children to bed.

Then he opened his laptop and started crunching U.S. oil import data late into the night.
Mr. Madani, a technology executive who trades and researches crude as a hobby, is part of a growing group of oil sleuths who have sprung up to sate the market’s voracious appetite for data and intelligence.

“So much of oil data is hidden and we’re trying to make it accessible,” said Mr. Madani, who runs a free oil data website from his house. “Besides, there’s so much drama in oil.”

Dramatic gyrations in the price of oil in the past three years have boosted demand for such services, intensifying competition in a market that for years had been dominated by governments, oil companies and a handful of big data providers.

The Million Dollar Way blog has no agenda to predict oil prices but nonetheless, my wife found the WSJ article interesting. LOL.

This blog is to help me better understand the Bakken and put it into perspective with global events. Again, this is not an investment site.

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The Apple Page (Sort Of)

From MacRumors: Intel Looks to Broaden Thunderbolt 3 Adoption by Integrating Into Future CPUs, Eliminating Royalties.

From wiki:

Thunderbolt is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Apple and Intel that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. The interface was originally intended to run exclusively on an optical physical layer using components and flexible optical fiber cabling developed by Intel partners and at Intel's Silicon Photonics lab.

It was initially marketed under the name Light Peak, and after 2011 as Silicon Photonics Link. However, it was discovered that conventional copper wiring could furnish the desired 10 Gbit/s per channel at lower cost.

This copper-based version of the Light Peak concept was co-developed by Apple and Intel. Apple registered Thunderbolt as a trademark, but later transferred the mark to Intel, which held overriding intellectual-property rights.

Nice.

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The Literature Page

Travels with Henry James, Henry James, foreword by Hendrik Hertzberg and introduction by Michael Anesko, c. 2016

Henry James: Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, and The Turn of the Screw. 1843 - 1916. American, then British citizen.

When thinking Henry James, think also Edith Wharton.

Wrote during the Gilded Age: between the US Civil War and WWI.

A born traveler. Most of his time in the US spent in Boston, Cambridge. Father inherited $8 million (in today's money) and freely gave whatever his children needed.

Leon Edel: the definitive Henry James biographer.

Theodora Bosanquet: his faithful amanuensis.

Known for paragraphs taking up a whole page (or more) and containing only one sentence.

A nice collection of "travelogue" essays, some of New England and then most in Europe, and, of  those most from Italy.