The Energy And Market Page, T+231 -- September 8, 2017

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MLPs with safe (?) yields greater than 5.5% -- from Barron's:

Here's the list of six MLPs with sustainable yields above 5.5%:

• Enterprise Products Partners (EPD) at 6.4% 
• Oneok (OKE) at 5.5%, 
• Williams Partners (WPZ) at 6.1% 
• Enbridge Energy Partners (EEP) at 9.1% 
• Spectra Energy Partners (SEP) at 6.4% 
• MPLX (MPLX) at 6.6%. 

The yield on the Alerian ETF (AMLP) is 7.9% and CreditSights' MLP coverage has payouts ranging from 3%-12%.

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Notes to the Granddaughters
 
Splat Ball and Poincare's Conjecture

Book Of Mathematics
The New York Times 
edited by Gina Kolata
c. 2013
DDS: 510NEW 

Last night I was watching Sophia, the 3-year-old, playing with a splat ball that her oldest sister had given her. One throws these splat balls hard unto the floor, deforming them beyond recognition, and they return to their original shape, generally a sphere (and technically always a sphere based on Poincaré's conjecture).

I happened across that oddity (?) while reading The New York Times' collection of math-related essays it had published over the past 100 year. On page 119, an elusive proof and its elusive prover (sic).

It turns out that Grigori Perelman solved the century-old Poincaré conjecture and then retreated back into the Russian woods, turning down both a $1-million reward and the Fields Medal (the mathematics equivalent to the Nobel Prize). Also left hanging, is another $1 million offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, MA, for the first published proof of the conjecture, one of seven outstanding questions for which they offered a ransom back at the beginning of the millenium.

Poincaré''s conjecture can sound either daunting or deceptively simple:

It asserts that if any loop in a certain kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is equivalent to a sphere.

From the article:

The conjecture is fundamental to topology, the branch of math that deals with shapes, sometimes described as geometry without the details. To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar, and a rabbit's head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.

In effect, what Poincare suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere.

In the video below, a youngster throws a splat ball on the floor and it turns into any number of deformed, unrecognizable, indescribable shapes, but in the end ... every one of those deformed, unrecognizable, indescribable shapes turns out to be a sphere. 

It's a long, ridiculous video ... skip ahead to 1:10 or 1:50 in the video to see what I mean.