And the Ing-Nobel in Geology goes to...

JOHN R. BAUMGARDNER, Ph.D. for his paper, COMPUTER MODELING OF THE LARGE-SCALE TECTONICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GENESIS FLOOD.

Abstract

Any comprehensive model for earth history consistent with the data from the Scriptures must account for the massive tectonic changes associated with the Genesis Flood. These tectonic changes include significant vertical motions of the continental surfaces to allow for the deposition of up to many thousands of meters of fossil-bearing sediments, lateral displacements of the continental blocks themselves by thousands of kilometers, formation of all of the present day ocean floor basement rocks by igneous processes, and isostatic adjustments after the catastrophe that produced today's Himalayas, Alps, Rockies, and Andes. This paper uses 3-D numerical modeling in spherical geometry of the earth's mantle and lithosphere to demonstrate that rapid plate tectonics driven by runaway subduction of the pre-Flood ocean floor is able to account for this unique pattern of large-scale tectonic change and to do so within the Biblical time frame.

Monday Post and Run

The Independent reports that an article to be published next week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters will show that the melting of the Greenland ice sheets are occurring more rapidly than previously expected. Example: "Helheim glacier, a river of ice that grinds down from the inland ice cap to the sea through a narrow rift in the mountain range on the island's east coast. Professor Slawek Tulaczyk, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the IoS that the glacier had dropped 100 feet this summer. Over the past four years, the research adds, the front of the glacier - which has remained in the same place since records began - has retreated four and a half miles." Nice eh?

Ronalihno is the greatest soccer player in the world. Had the good foresight to have Laura tape the Real Madrid - Barcelona game Saturday. Barca went into the Galacticos house and administered a monumental spanking. Ronaldihno's two solo goals on 60 and 30 yard runs were things so sublimely awesome that even Madrid's home fans stood and cheered. 23 shots by the Catalans to Madrid's five. While the result was never really in doubt, this was the most entertaining game of the year. Truly why soccer is the beautiful game.

Oh, and Celtic humiliated Rangers at home 3-0 to put fifteen points between themselves and the men in blue. This victory combined with the money-fueled resurgence of Hearts and and just plain solid play by Hibernian means that there is a very good chance of something happening in Scotland this year that has not happened since 1986: a member of the Old Firm may win the Scottish Football League.

More later if I can squash a few lingering bugs that have been giving me fits.

When Oil Sheikhs Turn To Wind Power

While we are on the subject of preconception-destroying notions of oil and oil states, how freakin' cool is THIS

Danish engineers retrofit the already stunning Bahrain World Trade Center with three 29m diameter, 225KW wind turbines.

The work began half a year ago, when the British engineer firm Atkins contacted Norwin, who decided to integrate Rambøll in this pioneer project. Since then the two Danish engineer firms have been working close together on solving the many technical challenges on the world’s first integrated turbine and building project.

One of the challenges has been the safety, which has to be first class as the turbines are close to humans. The second challenge is that turbines between two buildings in contradiction to normal turbines can move up and down as the bridges are flexible. “The conventional calculation system from DTU, which simulates how the turbine behaves, is not capable of doing these calculations. Therefore we had to create new calculations and today we are the only ones who can that on turbines that jump” says Per Lading. This sensational project is ready in the summer 2006.

Sensational!

Kuwait's Largest Oil Field Peaking

There are still lots of otherwise very intelligent-seeming people out there who still express doubts about the reliability of the "theory" of peak oil -- the past examples of Texas and the North Sea apparently are not rigorous enough examples for them. Well here is another.

AMEfn, a very reliable middle-east news site reports:

It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.

The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field's 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki told Bloomberg.

He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate. Kuwait will now spend some $3 million a year for the next year to boost output and exports from other fields.

However, it is surely a landmark moment when the world's second largest oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost 60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait's proven oil reserves.

Here's your oil futures graph from the last year. Click on image for larger version. Anyone wanna bet that oil will go below $50bbl again?

TGIF Post #1

My company is doing its semi annual flushing of e-mail down the memory hole, deleting all mail prior to October 1. So, I have to go through say, 800 messages and see if there is anything really important and either print or save as text. So, that's my morning shot right there. Going wardriving this afternoon with a Clinton Herald reporter. She's doing an article on WiFi security. Birthday festivities for my wife and my mother this weekend. MLS Cup Saturday. Can't really be bothered as I positively hate both the Galaxy and the Revs. Watching the USA "Euro" squad play Scotland in a friendly should be entertaining and it's on at a reasonable 11 a.m. here in the states.

To wrap up a week that has seen the Democratic party's first major victories since ... Jesus, since Clinton won a second term in '96, a dose of reality from the venerable Rude Pundit to take you into the weekend with the following words of wisdom:

The wolverine is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family. It's a crazed, vicious little fucker that can carry a carcass three times its size. Shit, it can bring down a caribou or a small bear, if it wants to. And its jaws can crush bones. Typically, all a wolverine has to do to drive away other predatory animals is growl, raise the hair on its back, and bare its teeth; that'll scare cougars and wolves shitless. And if you corner it, you better watch out: those bastards'll fight until they tear their way through your body, leaving you stunned and staring at your own viscera steaming on the snow below you. It's better to kill it than try to fight it. Or, if you're all scientific or protective of endangered species, put it into a deep sleep and cage the sharp-toothed weasel.

It is advice best heeded by Democrats in the coming months. For right now, the Republicans are wounded, corner wolverines, and Karl Rove has months of suppressed destructive urges to unleash on the Democrats for the 2006 elections. It's probably not gonna start in earnest until after the holidays, but wolverines do not hibernate. They troll the snowy countryside for deer and rabbits so they can sink their teeth in and taste that warm, comforting blood and soft, rubbery meat.

We do know that the White House is about to launch an offensive against Democrats on big issues like misuse of WMD intelligence. But that's just the start. 2006 is gonna be savage and bloody in ways that'll make 2002 and 2004 seem like prances through perfumed daisy patches. Remember: when the Republicans went after the blown-up limbs of Max Cleland and the corpse of Paul Wellstone, they were ridin' high poll numbers and majorities in Congress. Now, they know they're clinging on by their fingernails and there's only a couple of strategies available: bail on Bush or fight like large weasels.

Post and Run

Sorry love, no time for the old in-out, just here to read the meter. Big week for Great Places and Clinton Wireless meetings and I also have to keep those billable hours coming. Look for an article in the Clinton Herald this week on wireless security featuring yours truly.

For today just read the curmudgeonly but very intelligent blog of Col. Pat Lang (Ret.), Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 Colonel Lang is a retired Green Beret veteran of Vietnam as well as other conflicts. He is also an Arabic scholar having been the first Arabic professor at West Point. He has an impatience with fuzzy thinking and incompetence that is especially withering when coming from a man of both a senior military background and sterling academic credentials. He is especially good on torture.

With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the "authorities" had captured "Fulaan Abu Shuismuh" (so and so, the father of what's his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk. "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....." That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?"

"All the way," is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say. "OK," says I. "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,' so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you "in" for that?" Shocked silence follows. "Ah, I get it," says I. " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things." At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.

"Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?" This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).

Energy and the Next Recession

I'm working on a couple of more interesting and original posts but (lack of) time is the key factor delaying them. In the meantime, here is a quickie macroeconomics lesson on energy price and consumer spending.

It seems that increased energy costs, while taking a bite out of the consumers' wallets are affecting producer prices even more. In an article in the Gray Lady on October 18, we find the following report:

Wholesale prices surged at a faster pace than consumer prices last month, the government reported today, indicating that businesses are not passing on the full brunt of the energy price spike to customers but may soon start doing so.

The producer price index, which measures the prices received by producers of goods and services, jumped 1.9 percent in September, the fastest monthly increase since January 1990, as energy costs rose 7.1 percent, the Labor Department reported. Food prices increased 1.4 percent after falling for five straight months. Excluding the volatile energy and food categories, the core rate of the producer price index rose 0.3 percent.

Compared with September 2004, prices rose 6.9 percent over all and 2.6 percent excluding food and energy.

The latest report follows data released last week showing that consumer prices last month rose 1.2 percent over all and 0.1 percent excluding food and energy. Unlike producer prices, consumer prices include taxes, subsidies and distribution costs.

Economists were expecting a far smaller jump in producer prices - 1.2 percent over all and 0.2 percent excluding food and energy.

Prices rose even faster for raw materials (up 10.2 percent) and goods that are in intermediate stages of production (up 2.5 percent) than they did for finished goods.

So here's the problem for the economy: higher gasoline prices affect consumers by shifting their purchase decisions away from other items to compensate for higher day-to-day fuel costs. This causes a problem for producers who ordinarily when faced with higher production costs would pass those on to the consumer. But with consumers already nervous and cutting back on other purchases higher costs would simply cause them to further shy away from additional purchases. The result is that, at least for the time being, many producers are forced to eat the difference with short-term results of of decreased earnings and lower stock performance.

In the medium term (9-16 months say) look for the traditional recession-causing feedback loop to begin to rear its head whereby those lower profits and share prices begin to affect the other areas of the economy in the usual ways; through decreased investment, growing unemployment and so on. The big problem with any resultant recession is that we will be forced you to outside of the traditional fuel use channels. In other words, until we change our fuel use patterns, e.g. drive less, more efficient vehicles, move away from trucks and to rail for transport, we are going to have a difficult time recovering from a recession with one of the key components being oil/natural gas price and/or scarcity. And of course the doubleplus huge problem with a future recession is that the Fed will largely have its hands tied in its ability to use interest rates to prime the economic pump because of our national debt situation. But that's another post for another day.