Clearing Out The In-Box -- Mid-Day -- Two's Day -- 2-22-22

Apple: this is quite clever. I think most folks are missing the big reason for doing this. Bowdoin College will provide every student -- I read that as "every" student -- not just incoming freshman -- with a 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip, an iPad mini, and an Apple Pencil with pre-loaded software. Link here. With tuition, fees, room and board well north of $75,000 (?) per year, this is a "rounding" error for parents. 

The real reason for this: it simplifies things for the IT department. Tech support doesn't come cheap for the college. The IT department only has to manage one vendor. This is brilliant. Our oldest granddaughter was specifically told by her university NOT to bring a printer. The university would provide all printer support. This was done for one reason: the IT department would otherwise be overwhelmed with printer installations and maintenance. Of course, with small dorm rooms, it's also wonderful that students aren't cluttering their rooms with two or three printers.

European natural gas: 70% supplied by three countries -- US, Qatar, and Russia. EIA. 

Russian sanctions: Nada. Zilch. Zero. Link here. 

Water: Tesla, Berlin, and no vehicles. Link here.

Devon. Look at social comments here. This might get one or two Bakken readers excited.

Spare capacity: link here.

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The Book Page

I'm in my paleontology phase, re-reading a new book on "how mountains grew" by John Dvoak and re-reading several older books on paleontology, evolution, dinosaurs, etc.

One of the things that strike me is how long events take -- LOL. I don't think journalists and politiciians today get it. Global warming was going to "wipe us out" in ten years. LOL. 

In broad terms, every era was punctuated with periods that either saw an explosion or flourishing of life followed by a period of mass extinction of some kind or another. And these periods lasted millions of years. Think about that. Even if they only lasted thousands of years that would be immeasurable from a single person's lifespan. Even if periods lasted a thousand years, that's a hundred times longer than ten years. 

And these periods did not last a thousand years, or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. They lasted thousands of thousands of years. 

A thousand-thousand years is one million years, and these periods lasted fifty million years. 

And interestingly enough, it was the "snowball" earths that caused the most damage for living organisms. "Warmth" and rising CO2 levels actually were incredibly beneficial for life. 

The Permian Basin? Fifty million years for eleven (or more) oil formation plays to be laid down. Fifty million years. And that period went back and forth between flourishing life and dying life. And the Permian ended with the largest mass extinction of all, the Permian-Triassic "great dying." From wiki:

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the End-Permian Extinction and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 251.9 million years ago. 

It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. It was the largest known mass extinction of insects.

There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.

The scientific consensus is that the causes of extinction were elevated temperatures and in the marine realm widespread oceanic anoxia and ocean acidification due to the large amounts of carbon dioxide that were emitted by the eruption of the Siberian Traps. 

It has also been proposed that the emission of additional large volumes of carbon dioxide generated by the thermal decomposition of hydrocarbon deposits, including oil and coal, by the Siberian Traps and emissions of methane by methanogenic microorganisms contributed to the extinction. The speed of recovery from the extinction is disputed. 

Some scientists estimate that it took 10 million years (until the Middle Triassic), due both to the severity of the extinction and because grim conditions returned periodically for another 5 million years. 

However, studies in Bear Lake County, near Paris, Idaho, and nearby sites in Idaho and Nevada showed a relatively quick rebound in a localized Early Triassic marine ecosystem, taking around 3 million years to recover, suggesting that the impact of the extinction may have been felt less severely in some areas than others.

Ten years. LOL.