Sea Ice

It seems some research soon to be published by Ken Golden at University of Utah and Hajo Eicken at the University of Alaska shows that permeability in sea ice is anisotropic and both temperature and salinity dependent. I am wondering if this means that someday we may be analyzing 4D seismic data to understand the properties of gas hydrates?

The Carbon Lifecycle

Just off of Interstate 45 on the Freestone-Leon County Line, there is a place where you can see the entire anthropogenic carbon cycle in a single vista. Pull off at exit 180 and take the service road on the west side of the highway north about 5 miles. You will pass turn-ins for producing oil fields operated by operated by XTO, Pinnacle, and Anadarko. At the top of a rise just before the power lines cross the highway, you can pull into entrance 52 of Texas Westmoreland Coal Co.’s Jewett Mine, though not into the mine itself (mind the No Trespassing signs!) Walk to the fence and look down into the creekbed to your left and you can see slowly decomposing mats of leaf litter and other organic material in a slow-running stream, that left to their own devices, in many millenia, could be the source rock for a future gneration's hydrocarbon resource. Then look up and across the fence to the 35,000 acre lignite dragline operation that is continuously and voraciously scooping up the results of that process from the Eocene, and out to the horizon where the Limestone Electric Generating Station burns that stored energy to generate electricity and returns much of the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2. listen to the hum of the electricity in the high-tension wires over your head as the result of that energy process flows out to the cities and towns of southeast Texas, much of it to power equipment in the pumping oil wells that you passed just down the road. Now allow yourself to think about how much organic content is burned up every hour and how long it will take to renew, and you start to get a feel for the geologic time scale and how quickly we are altering it... I recommend that every Texas school child whose education is financed by oil and gas revenues have the opportunity to see first hand this cycle at work ...

What, me Worry?

At the PNEC Data Management conference here in Houston this week, the organizers left out at everyone's seat on the first day a copy of the Digital Energy Journal highlighting a quote from Bob Bloom of National Oilwell Varco, saying "I don't worry about the 'great crew change'". I wondered why he wasn't worried so I did a little research and found that while he was headed off to this Drilling Conference in Amsterdam, rumors were swirling about layoffs of more than 100 people at Varco's production facility in Texas. So of course Bob wasn't personally worried. He was, in the words of one attendee commenting on similar recent layoffs at Schlumberger, "paving the way for his next job" by forcing cuts of experienced workers close to being vested in their pension plans. So as noted by one of the speakers at the conference, don't worry about the great crew change, it will come and find you... and it won't be so great!

Political Amoebas

Does anyone else find it humorous that the latest stunning evidence for evolution, a giant colony of clonal amoebas (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090311131608.htm), chose to take up residence in a cow pasture in Texas, the state that can't seem to decide if it agrees with Charles Darwin yet? So now things are evolving from the microscopic all the way to microprocessors. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a High Performance Computing workshop at Rice University. There I learned that engineers working on the new Petaflop machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory are having to shield the dense cluster of chips from cosmic radiation that could impact its calculations (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-039-s-Chips-to-Save-Mankind-From-the-Cosmic-Rays-Threat-83000.shtml). Wait a minute! Small incremental mutations to an encoding scheme, caused by random cosmic radiation, leading to changes in behaviour? Hey, that supercomputer is trying to evolve! Leave it alone and let's see if it learns to make an amoeba...

fixing your laptop...

My laptop plasma screen has developed a split personality. At first I thought maybe it was the fact that I recently had to switch to my backup pair of reading glasses due to an unfortunate act of gravity at the Rockets Game on Wednesday (don’t ask). But then I looked at some small font hardcopy as a control, and had other family members who do not wear glasses take a look, and yes, the image on my screen now has a doppelganger, a conjoined twin, a co-located nearby companion. The oxymoronically named IT Help Desk told me to make sure that my computer was out of range of any magnetic fields. I pointed out that would require moving outside the heliopause, a trip that took Voyager over 20 years, and I really needed the problem fixed sooner than that…

Predicting Flu Season...

Did you know that last year the people who track search trends at Google were able to predict the onset of flu season two weeks earlier than the Centers for Disease Control? This is because people started searching for health related information about flu symptoms online even before they started to make appointments with their doctors or miss work. This same kind of trending analysis is being looked at by large companies with internal search engines to try to determine other types of trends.

Inside the Mind of a Scientist

It's hard to explain to someone not of a particularly scientific bent how an analytical mind works, but I found myself trying to explain the other day to my wife, who is definitely more artistic...

What if, I explained, when you looked at your iron supplement pills in the morning, the first thing that went through your head was "I wonder if they contain ferrous sulfate because if they contained ferrous oxide they would just turn to rust?"...

Or if when you heard an interview with Ron Wood in which he said that any two of the Rolling Stones could have formed a band equally as good you immediately think "ok, so how many potential bands is that? Let's see, 4 factorial, but no because Jagger and Richards is the same band as Richards and Jagger", but then you hear the rest of the interview and he says only if he was one of them, so that removes the last factor, and then when you pose the question to your 15-year old son he wants to know how many of them are dead before he answers, and you think "good point".... anyway it's about 5 days before you really think about what a band composed of only Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts would actually sound like ...

Or you almost step on a stinkbug on the sidewalk and the first thing you think is, "What possible evolutionary advantage could there be to be shaped like an irregular polygon?"...

Now, who wants to be inside MY head?