Buy Oasis Oil Right Now -- Zacks -- October 14, 2018

Zacks: buy Oasis right now.

Before I forget -- disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. To continue, check one:

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Now back to that Zacks article in which you are told to buy Oasis Oil right now. It's Sunday so you may not be able to buy Oasis Oil right now. The writer probably meant that metaphorically, or figuratively, and not literally. Sort of like a Trump tweet. From the linked article:

Over the past 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the company’s 2018 earnings per share has been revised from 45 cents to 47 cents. The same for 2019 earnings moved up to 98 cents from 92 cents over the same time frame. Moreover, the upstream energy player managed to beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in each of the prior four quarters, the average positive earnings surprise being 81.4%.

Oasis Petroleum is among the leading oil and natural gas explorers and producers with focus primarily on the Bakken shale play and Three Forks formations. With significant acreage positions in those unconventional resources along with huge inventory of drilling locations, the company is well positioned to boost oil and gas production.

More, but not much more at the link.

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Word of the Day

I'm not sure whether this is a "word" or a "phrase."

Mutatis mutandis.

But I'm teaching Sophia to say it. And she's doing pretty well.

From wiki:

Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning "the necessary changes having been made" or "once the necessary changes have been made".

It remains unnaturalized in English and is therefore usually italicized in writing.

It is used in many countries to acknowledge that a comparison being made requires certain obvious alterations, which are left unstated.

It is not to be confused with the similar ceteris paribus, which excludes any changes other than those explicitly mentioned.

Mutatis mutandis is increasingly replaced by non-Latin equivalents, such as "without loss of generality," but is still used in law, economics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy. In particular, in logic, it is encountered when discussing counterfactuals, as a shorthand for all the initial and derived changes which have been previously discussed.

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For Dinner Tonight

Shrimp cocktail; grilled octopus; and, lamb burger sliders.

Every Saturday noon, after Sophia's gymnastic lessons and swimming lessons, we all go to Central Market (Southlake, TX) for lunch; and, then we explore the store. Not often, but as a treat, our older daughter and I will buy an octopus. She will boil it and give me a tentacle or two for an hors d'oeuvre. She says she was told that boiling lobster with a cork makes the octopus more tender.

Yesterday, Central Market was offering something I had not seen before: lamb burger. The butcher said it was Texas grass-fed lamb, of a variety that was bred especially for its meat. (I guess other breeds are bred for their milk?) I thought he said it was "Norbert" or something to that effect. I can't find it on the internet, but there are a lot of sites for Texas grass-fed lamb. So, we will have lamb sliders tonight.

I don't know if octopus and lamb go together, but it is what is is. I don't drink alcohol any more -- stopped completely about six months ago -- May, 2018, or thereabouts. Not saying I won't go ever have wine or Scotch or a martini again some day,  but for the past six months or so, nada, nothing, zilch. Okay, to be honest, one beer about two weeks ago.

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The Book Page

More on particle physics.

I'm really enjoying Jeremy Bernstein's 2013 A Palette of Particles. It's due back at the library in a week or so; I might have to buy a copy for myself (from Amazon); it's that good. I think any layperson who has an interest in particle physics and has sort of kept up with the subject over the last ten years might enjoy it. It's a small book. It's footprint is about 5 inches by 8 inches, and it's only 212 pages including the index.

I hate books on physics that start with Aristotle and the Greeks. Bernstein jumps right into modern physics; I don't think there's even much about Einstein. 

Note: I generally understand less than 1% of anything I read about particle physics itself, but I feel quite comfortable with the language, the words, and to some extent, the concepts. To put that into context, I probably understand about 2% of everything I read about drilling for oil, and about 4% of what I read about the Bakken.

Bernstein likes only to talk about "facts," or at least what almost physicists agree upon and not get into speculation. Interestingly enough he does not include a graphic of the Standard Model. There may be a reason why he chose not to include a graphic of the Standard Model. I assume a graphic could easily go out of date which would immediately decrease the value of the book; and, some might argue that whatever graphic he chose for the Standard Model, he could have chosen another.

This is the one I like:

There's at least one "aha" moment on every page, and often two or three or four. The one that caught my eye today is on page 188, Appendix 2. The author is talking about coupling constants. It's much more complicated than this, but for me, an example of a coupling constant is the charge of the proton (+1) and the charge of the electron (-1).

From page 188:

Moreover, there is no explanation for these constants. For example, why is the magnitude of the proton charge (1) the same as that of the electron (1) even though the electron was probably produced by the Big Bang while the proton was created from bound quarks later? 

Wow. That is interesting.

I am reading Howard Bloom's 2016 The God Problem at the same time. The latter is a book on metaphysics and takes off where Bernstein ends. As noted, Bernstein does not want to get into speculation, but that's what Bloom's book is all about.

It appears (in foreshadowing) that Bloom has some trouble with the second law of thermodynamics.

• thermo: heat
• dynamics: energy
• thermodynamics: the way energy and heat are related

From livescience.com:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the quality of energy. It states that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted. The Second Law also states that there is a natural tendency of any isolated system to degenerate into a more disordered state. 

Bloom notes that out of the chaos following the Big Bang, the universe did not become more chaotic; it became more ordered. And that was without the need for a "theory of evolution."