Author: Jim Ulvog

More background on huge Eagle Ford field

Check out the graph of production in Texas, which shows output …

roughly doubled in just the last three years, from 1.08 million barrels of output per day in September 2009 to 2.05 million barrels per day in September of this year.

That observation and cool graph is from Prof. Perry’s post Eagle Ford Shale: the most profitable oil field in the world with dozens of “monster wells” producing up to 5,000 bpd.

He points to another article by Jennifer Hiller, Finding the sweet spots of the Eagle Ford at Fuel Fix blog.

Two fun tidbits from the post.

Continue reading “More background on huge Eagle Ford field”

Want to start your own educational institution? Go for it.

The educational frontier is wide open. Want to start your own institution of higher education? With today’s technology, some time, and a few dollars, anyone can do it.

Continue reading “Want to start your own educational institution? Go for it.”

“Deck the Halls with Macro Follies” – Economists sing your favorite holiday carols

(cross-post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)

Remember the rapping economists we saw here and here?  They’re back!

Just in time for Christmas, EconStories imagines their fantasy Christmas album featuring the classic hits from Keynes, Hayek, and other renown singers you know and love.

Enjoy the greatest collection of economic hits ever aggregated.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=7uKnd6IEiO0#t=41s]

Continue reading ““Deck the Halls with Macro Follies” – Economists sing your favorite holiday carols”

Battle of the 4 big tech giants

Wow. If you want to keep up with the rapid change around us, you really need to keep an eye on The Economist.  I’ll have 2 posts and a comment in another post based on ideas in this week’s edition.

Magazine cover has four deep-sea monster squids fighting each other. Nearby is a bathysphere with two little people watching the battle.  Labels identify the giants of the deep as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Continue reading “Battle of the 4 big tech giants”

Record passengers at Williston airport after Delta and United flights begin

KFYR-TV in Bismark has the report:  Williston Airport Breaks Record.

It is about a month that United and Delta have been flying into Williston.  The article reports 5,000 passengers through the airport in November. That is the record, surpassing the previous record of 2,000.

Continue reading “Record passengers at Williston airport after Delta and United flights begin”

Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation

Sometimes the change around us is grim, like having nine countries with nukes.

When the world had the U.S. and Soviet Union staring at each other with nuclear weapons, we focused clearly on the implications. Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which reduced the nuclear war risk, the conventional war risk, and the overall level of suffering & misery around the world) we’ve spent less time thinking about how nukes affect everything else.

That is a mistake, thinks Paul Bracken, in The Second Nuclear Age.

Continue reading “Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation”

700,000 barrels of oil a day out of North Dakota is no big deal. It’s all hype. – Peak Oil #14

Bruce Oskol, writing at Million Dollar Way, gives some background why he started that blog:

Again, one of several reasons for starting the blog a couple years ago was to counter the naysayers.

The original naysayers doubted the Bakken even existed — hard to believe, I know; and then, when the numbers started coming out of the Bakken, the naysayers said the Bakken was good for North Dakota but that was about it.

I particularly enjoy citing this post from another blog as an example: “Don’t believe it. There’s some oil to be gotten out of Bakken, and it’s going to be exploited. But the “bonanza” is nothing but hype.” — June 25, 2010.

“Some oil to be gotten out of the Bakken … Nothing but hype.” Wow.

I checked on the link and found Bakken Oil Hype at The American West at Risk blog.

Wow is right.

Continue reading “700,000 barrels of oil a day out of North Dakota is no big deal. It’s all hype. – Peak Oil #14”

Under what economic model did the pilgrims almost starve? What different economic model allowed them to thrive?

Here’s the arrangement the Pilgrims used when they first landed:

“Although they planted household gardens almost from the start, they collectivized initial field and livestock operations. The settlers had some agricultural successes, but they were unable to grow corn in their common field. Within six months of reaching Plymouth, almost one-half of the population had perished from disease.

That’s a quote from Professor Robert Ellickson in Prof. Don Boudreaux’s article The Pilgrims’ economic progress.

A collectivized farming system didn’t work too well.  Starvation was the result.

So, they changed their plans: Continue reading “Under what economic model did the pilgrims almost starve? What different economic model allowed them to thrive?”

Hours of labor to buy basic home appliances – 1956 and 2012

Café Hayek takes a leisurely tour though his newly acquired copy of the 1956 Fall/Winter Sears catalog and shares the preliminary results in The Future: Back to the Past.

Maybe things weren’t so great in the good ol’ days.

Continue reading “Hours of labor to buy basic home appliances – 1956 and 2012”

“Top of the first inning” in education reform

There is radical change taking place in the education world. Where will it go? How will we handle on-line cheating? What’s the credential going to look like? 

Nobody knows. And that’s okay.

Huh? That’s okay?

Yeah. Continue reading ““Top of the first inning” in education reform”

Old catalogs available online, or, how about a cell phone for $2,700 in 2012 dollars?

Carpe Diem points to three places to find old catalogs on-line: Vintage catalogs back to 1933 now available online

  • WishbookWeb.com has an assortment of Christmas catalogs from Sears, Spiegel, Penney and Wards from the ‘40s through 1988. The oldest are a 1933 Spiegel and 1937 Sears catalog.

Radio Shack Catalogs has two sets available:

So what can you do with these old catalogs? Consider this:

Continue reading “Old catalogs available online, or, how about a cell phone for $2,700 in 2012 dollars?”

Three of the six biggest oil fields ever found cannot exist – Peak Oil #13

I make it a high priority to avoid corrosive humor, such as sarcasm or ridicule, in my writing. But when it comes to the foolish Peak Oil concept, laughter seems to be the only appropriate response.

factual background

In a 1949 article, Dr. M. King Hubbert was able to calculate the total amount of oil that exists on the earth.  Don’t take my word for it.  See page 105 of “Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science” [scanned, 260 kb]. Won’t link to any specifics, but the ability he had to calculate the total amount of oil that will ever be known is a skill still present today.

Continue reading “Three of the six biggest oil fields ever found cannot exist – Peak Oil #13”

Go beyond the optimism or pessimism – look at the complexity

On my other blog, Nonprofit Update, I have a post describing an essay that talks about the wild swings between optimism and pessimism of our perceptions about what is taking place in Africa.  The underlying circumstances can feed either optimism or pessimism as you choose.

If we want to understand, we need to go beyond our mood swings and learn of the complexity that exists.

Why mention that post on this blog? Because it addresses at a deep level how we can deal with the change surrounding us.  We need to go beyond our emotions and look at the underlying complexity.

Why post it on that blog? Because the main focus is an encouragement to address the unseen complexity in order to create change in the place where an NPO is working.

Check out It’s complicated, Africa version.