SpaceX’s test of their three booster, 27 engine rocket was an astounding success. The three side-by-side Falcon 9 boosters worked perfectly together. The two side boosters successfully separated, which I think is the highlight of the test.
Both of the side boosters were recovered. See astounding photo above.
Image in public domain, courtesy of SpaceX
The payload was successfully lifted into the Van Allen radiation belt and continued to operate. Apparently that is a major milestone (my little brain doesn’t understand why that was a tremendous deal to NASA).
Abundance of refrigerated fresh meet at your conveniently available grocery store. Not an option for anyone on the planet 200 years ago, to say nothing of the 10,000 years prior. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Johan Norberg describes the tremendous progress in the last several hundred years in so many areas, such as life expectancy, health, sanitation, liberty, education, and equality in his book Progress: 10 Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Here are a few more tidbits I found fascinating.
Consider the scarcity of food in the past and the drop in cost to feed a family in the last 150 years.
Food
Look at just a few of the statistics on availability of food:
Johan Norberg describes the tremendous progress in the last several hundred years in so many areas: life expectancy, health, sanitation, liberty, education, and equality. He discusses these wonderfully delightful trends in his book Progress: 10 Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. I will highlight merely a few of the many things I found fascinating in the book.
Life expectancy
Book provides the following estimates of life expectancy, which I graph above:
the combined gross national product of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, this also equals the total global gross domestic product (GDP).
I got curious about the world-wide GDP after thinking about two previous posts:
What would happen if you multiplied the drastic increase in population with the radical increase in per capita income? I made a feeble effort to multiple the two data sets and quickly realized that wouldn’t work. Poked around a bit on the ol’ internet thingie and found the answer at Wikipedia – gross world product is what I was looking for.
27,000 year time horizon – Check out the graph at top of this post for the estimated gross world product on a very long time horizon, specifically from estimates back in 25,000 B.C. through 2014 A.D.
Copyright notice: Graphs in this post are based on data in an article titled “Gross world product” by Wikipedia, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. As a result the following tables which are derived from this information are licensed for use by anyone under the same CC BY-SA 3.0license. Any use of these graphs must in turn be distributed under the same license.
I will show the raw data at the end of this post.
With that 27,000 year time horizon, there is a radical turn in the 1900s, at which point the graph appears to goes from horizontal to straight up vertical.
That is too long of a time horizon to understand, so I broke it out into smaller blocks.
Last 2,000 years – To remove the many earlier millenniums of slow growth, time horizon was revised to 1 AD through now. Notice there is still a radical change in the 1900s. With the dramatic changes in the last 200 years, the line from earlier looks like it is flat, but it isn’t.
Production of crude oil increased 12,110 bopd in November, or 1.02%, going from 1,182,810 (revised October) to 1,194,920 (preliminary November).
The record high production was 1,227,529 average bopd in December 2014. Production in November 2017 is 32,609 bopd below the high in December 2014. It will only take another 2.7% increase in average production to clear the previous record. I’ll guess that will happen in December 2017 or January 2018, before the winter start to cut into production. (That is not a very bold prediction since Mr. Helms thinks the record production level will easily be surpassed regularly in later 2018.)
Above is a graph of average production in the state since 2004.
Check out the following graph for production from only Bakken formations and total for the state since 2008:
The big increase of 78,154 bopd to 1,185,499 bopd follows 4 months of over 1.5% increase each month. That is a 14.8% runup in fourth months.
The record high production was 1,211,330 bopd in June 2015. There have only been four months when the average daily production was higher than in October 2017.
Another 27K bopd increase would put the state at a new record for production. With November and December production stats to go before the weather turns really nasty, that level of increase is likely. (Notice how lame that prediction is? A forecast two months out that is a mere 2% increase, when 8 of the 13 months have seen greater than 1.5% increase and 5 months saw a decline.) For perspective, at mid-December the couple of snow falls received so far haven’t outlasted the sunshine.
In my next post I will scratch my head wondering why the production jumped so much in one month.
Here is the monthly production, with a breakout of oil from the Bakken formation (which also includes the Sanish, Three Forks, and Bakken/Three Forks Pools formations):
For a longer term perspective, here is the total production in the state since 1990:
For our freedom, I offer up a humble thank you to all who have gone before standing endless watch, slogging through the jungle mud, freezing in a foxhole, shooting Nazis with a machine gun at 30,000 feet, doing yet another round of dreary maintenance, brought home a life-long injury, or paying the ultimate price fighting to defeat the Confederacy.
Because of millions who did what had to be done, I can say what I wish without fear of being thrown in jail.
It seems so insufficient, but I’ll say it anyway – – Thanks.
“It is the soldier, not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,
who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag and whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Kingdom Tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
As pointed out in the last article mentioned below, few articles on Saudi Arabia are going for the idea that the current wave of high-profile arrests is really about fighting corruption. There is a far deeper effort. Here are my comments on a number of articles from the last few days. Sort it out for yourself.
11/6/17 – Karen House at Wall Street Journal – The Strategy Behind the Saudi Strife – Article provides a more nuanced background on the arrests. One entertaining point, which I mentioned in earlier post, is that with the widespread malfeasance, misfeasance, and flat-out corruption, every Prince and every official is vulnerable to charges of corruption. I’ll guess every person with any government or business power has created massive amounts of electronic evidence.
Article speculates this is a part of the effort to modernize by MBS. Going after a huge number of corrupt senior royals, high-level businessmen, and a wide variety of government officials not only sends a very powerful message that the corrupt old days are gone but puts fear into everyone that hasn’t been arrested yet. It won’t take long for realize that they either play along and keep quite or go to jail. Article says this will have the benefit of increasing his popularity with younger people.
More importantly, consider this in relation to the dramatic efforts for social change over the last year. Granted there needs to be humongous social change to catch up with the 20th century, but there has been a dramatic amount of change in the last year. If those efforts create individual freedom, the current anti-corruption campaign makes corruption a bad thing, and the social guard rails of the religious police go away, then there might be a chance, slim though it may be, that the country could actually modernize and move beyond its deadly addiction to oil.
All these pieces fit together as a crash course in modernization, according to Ms. House’s theory in the article. The main idea is that personal freedom could lead to financial responsibility which could lead to entrepreneurialism and a vibrant, expanding economy.
11/7/17 – The Guardian – “This is a revolution”: Saudi’s absorb Crown Prince’s rush to reform– Article also makes the point that the massive arrests are part of a major effort to transform the country. The super elite, who are untouchable until last weekend, will now be removed or warned to get out-of-the-way.
Article points out the changes so far this year have been radical. The religious police have lost much of their power. More social changes on the way. Another article mentioned below says a lot of clerics and activists got arrested in September.
Flag of Saudi Arabia on flagpole. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
I had been thinking that there might be enough news out of Saudi Arabia for an update every few days.
Silly me.
This is my second post of the day, my third since news of the crackdown broke on Saturday.
Another Saudi prince died over the weekend. During a gun fight. With government forces. While the government was trying to arrest him.
11/6/17 – Zero Hedge – Second Saudi Prince Confirmed Killed During Crackdown – A prince was killed during a firefight between his security team and the government. The government team (military? Security agency? Police?) was trying to arrest him.
Flag of Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
The purpose of dozens of arrests on Saturday in Saudi Arabia is becoming clearer. It was not a coup attempt and not a counter-coup. Picture now emerging is of a purge, removing opposition.
For more background, check out post from Saturday night.
Article says Saudi Arabia was, up until this point, ruled by consensus with the king having final authority on decisions.
Article also says unnamed analysts have explained that the senior level princes were untouchable up until now, meaning they didn’t worry about having to follow the law.
Looks like a coup. Oh, wait. A coup is when the out-of-power people toss out the in-power people. This is a case of the in-power people deposing a bunch of other in-power people because, um, I don’t know.
Maybe it is power consolidation. Maybe it is a counter-coup. Maybe I don’t have any idea what it is and neither does anyone else with a byline. Another option is purge.
As mentioned in previous post, articles keep popping up on the systemic academic fraud at UNC Chapel Hill. Trying to hold my posts to under a thousand words each means there need to be multiple updates.
Reporter says the UNC scheme was widely known
UNC grad, class of ’92, explains the reason UNC claimed as legitimate classes they previously confessed were fraudulent. Also says this fiasco shows him the UNC leadership chose money over honor.
10/13/17 – Duke Basketball Report at SB Nation –A Pitiful Victory– Article goes over a long list of warning signs of systemic cheating and fraud at UNC. After most of the points, the writer makes some comment along the lines of they knew, or we knew, meaning there was common knowledge of cheating.
Apparently there was a massive scandal at UNC back in the ‘60s and the school made a strong commitment to play clean. Article shows that commitment to integrity only lasted until somewhere around 1990.
Author says the rest of the ACC, and maybe everyone in college sports, should be upset with the lying and cheating. I agree. The NCAA isn’t able to find anything in the rule book to say academic and athletic fraud is actually punishable. (Next article says they removed from their rulebook the rule that said academic fraud is punishable.)
