SpaceX’s Big Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Finally Reaches the Launchpad – The New York Times
January 27, 2018Big Data Comes to Dieting – The New York Times
January 27, 2018The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil
January 27, 2018The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil
https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-dark-bounty-of-texas-oil The development of #fracking & horizontal drilling by Mitchell et al. is perhaps not appreciated as a major tech success of late 20th century (up there w/ the web & iPod!) but it did radically change the #energy economy
QT:{{”
“In 1954, Mitchell obtained a contract to supply ten per cent of Chicago’s natural-gas needs. However, the producing wells operated by his company, Mitchell Energy & Development, were declining. He needed to discover new sources of petroleum, or else.
…
A safer and more precise method, developed in the seventies, was to use jets of fluid, under intense pressure, to create micro-cracks in the strata, typically in limestone or sandstone. Expensive gels or foams were generally used to thicken the fluid, and biocide was added to kill the bacteria that can clog the cracks. A granular substance called “proppant,” made of sand or ceramics, was pumped into the cracks, keeping pathways open so that the hydrocarbons could make it to the surface. The process, which came to be known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, jostled loose the captured oil or gas molecules, but the technology had a fatal flaw: it was too costly to turn a profit in shale.
In 1981, Mitchell drilled his first fracked well in the Barnett shale, the C. W. Slay No. 1. It lost money, as did many wells that followed it.
…
To cut costs, one of Mitchell’s engineers, Nick Steinsberger, began tinkering with the fracking-fluid formula. He reduced the quantity of gels and chemicals, making the liquid more watery, and added a cheap lubricant, polyacrylamide…
…
Mitchell combined his new fracking formula with horizontal-drilling techniques that had been developed offshore; once you bored deep enough to reach a deposit, you could direct the bit into the oil- or gas-bearing seam, a far more efficient means of recovery. In 1998, one of Mitchell’s wells in the Barnett, S. H. Griffin No. 4, made a profit. The shale revolution was under way. Soon the same fracking techniques that Mitchell had pioneered in gas were applied to oil.”
…
The world economy
was in danger of being held captive to oil states that were often intensely anti-American. Then, around the time that Barack Obama became President, U.S. production shot back up, approaching its all-time peak. On Fowler’s graph, it looked like a flagpole. “In the span of five years, we go from 5.5 million barrels a day to 9.5 million, almost doubling the U.S. output,”…The difference, Fowler said, was advanced fracking techniques and horizontal drilling. …
The town used to be called Clark, but a decade ago its mayor made a deal with a satellite network to provide ten years of free basic service to the two hundred residents, in return for renaming the town after the company. Satellite dishes still sit atop many houses there, and even though the agreement has expired the town’s name remains: dish.
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Google Sells A.I. for Building A.I. (Novices Welcome) – The New York Times
January 27, 2018$GOOG Sells AI for Building #AI
https://www.NYTimes.com/2018/01/17/technology/google-sells-ai.html QT: “Humans must label the data before the system can
learn…once images…labeled…[it] operates w/o human
involvement…It can build a model from scratch.” How can one preview this? Will it be integrated into gphotos?
QT:{{”
Initially, Google will open this service only to a small group of businesses.
…
But sometimes, there is no substitute for good old human labor. With Google’s new service, humans must label the data before the system can learn from it. …
Google says that once images are labeled, its new service operates without human involvement….Given more time, it
can build a model from scratch, specifically for the problem at hand.
If you are a zoologist who wants an algorithm that identifies jaguars and giraffes, said Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist inside the Google cloud group, all you have to do is supply the right images. “You upload jaguars and giraffes,” she said. “And you are done.”
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TunnelBear: The Easiest VPN For Protecting Your Privacy
January 27, 2018Jim Simons, the Numbers King
January 27, 2018Jim Simons, the Numbers King
https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the-numbers-king Highlights the new @FlatironInst & one of its new hires, Nick Carriero, who co-wrote the original Yale pseudogene pipeline, PseudoPipe (Pseudogene.org/pseudopipe) HT @Anne_Churchland
QT:{{”
“Our discussion turned to the Flatiron Institute. Renaissance’s computer infrastructure, he said, had been a central part of its success. At universities, Simons said, coding tends to be an erratic process. He said of the graduate students and postdocs who handled such work, “Some of them are pretty good code writers, and some of them are not so good. But then they leave, and there’s no one to maintain that code.” For the institute, he has hired two esteemed coders from academia: Carriero, who had led my tour, had been recruited from Yale, where he had developed the university’s high-performance computing capabilities for the life sciences; Ian Fisk had worked at cern, the particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva. Simons offered them greater authority and high salaries. “They’re the best of the breed,” he said. Carriero and Fisk sometimes consult with their counterparts at Renaissance about technical matters.
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The Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Is Real—and You Can Build One
January 27, 2018The Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Is Real – & You Can Build One
https://www.Wired.com/story/the-magnetohydrodynamic-drive-is-realand-you-can-build-one/ Great illustration of the cross product & the weird way #magnetism makes things curl around
QT:{{”
“In the diagram, I have a magnet with the north side pointing down. This produces a magnetic field that also mostly points down (as indicated by the red arrow). Now for the awesome physics part. If you have an electric charge moving in a magnetic field, there is a force on that charge—the magnitude of this force depends on the strength of the magnetic field, the value of the electric charge, and the velocity of the charge. This magnetic force can be expressed as the following equation:
If don’t have a degree in physics, there are three things that are crazy about this equation. First, there is this weird arrow symbol over some of the variables. Nothing to be alarmed about—this just means these are vector quantities so that the direction also matters. Next there is this vector B. This represents the value of the magnetic field. Honestly, I’m not sure why we (physicists) always use B for the magnetic field—but we do. Lastly, there is that big “X”. That is not the sign for multiplication, that is the sign for the cross product. I guess I should also point out that “q” is the symbol for the electric charge.”
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