Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Speaks volumes how much clout the Biden administration and the EU have / has (my hunch: Biden doesn't care; US gasoline price coming down):

EIA weekly petroleum report, link here:

• US crude oil decreased by 3.3 million bbls;
• US crude oil now stands at 418.3 million bbls, 6% below the five-year average;
• US crude oil imports ... yawn
• US refiners operating at 92.7% of their operable capacity last week;
• distillate fuel in storage increased by 0.1 million bbls last week; remain 23% below the five-year average;
  
• jet fuel supplied was up 10.9% compared with same four-week period last year.

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The Science Page

Northernmost "city" in the world, what is its name, multiple choice:

• Sunallesnacht
• Longyearbyen
• Kaltallestime
• Freezinhere

Reminder: the name of the all-seeing, many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, link here:

• Argus Panoptes
• now, that god takes physical form as an array of 38 small telescopes in the mountains of North Carolina
• the array will monitor a slice of sky 1700 times the size of the full moon
• will be known as the Argus Array Pathfinder -- will register changes in the stars second-by-second.

Mama-mia: this makes my day.

• only once before on the blog have I mentioned the Yamnaya
• now, in the most recent issue of Science, we read about Yamnaya again
• one of four prehistoric groups that settled in the Southern Arc about 10,000 years ago 
• Southern Arc: from Greece to modern-day Turkey to Iraq
  
• the four groups spread the precursors of modern language and peopled Homer's epics

Another genetic contribution came from the east about 6500 years ago, as hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus entered the region. Then about 5000 years ago, a fourth group—nomads from the steppes north of the Black Sea, known as the Yamnaya— arrived, adding to the genetic picture but not fundamentally redrawing it. 

“The people of the Southern Arc are mostly coming from Levantine, Anatolian, and Caucasus components,” University of Harvard professor Lazaridis says. “The Yamnaya are like a layer of sauce, added after 3000 B.C.E.”

"A layer of sauce"?

Sort of like the Mexican tacos in San Antonio? I can't make this stuff up. What is it with folks in the northeast comparing Hispanics and Turks to tacos and salsa? 

I know when I was growing up in Williston, my Latino friends called me "lefsa," as in "I lefsa my books at school again."