Oily Mitt Doesn't Know Jack

The Republicans show signs of weasels ripping their flesh, indications of self-inflicted wounds. Ultra-conservative pundits¹ of the right wing have suggested candidates use the issue of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a nursery rhyme framed talking point against John McCain. McCain has shown support for protecting the USA's Arctic land in the past. Romney, clearly showing the same poor business acumen as the lesser Bush, has repeatedly backed an irrational policy of drilling and thereby further driving our country into the ground.

ROMNEY: "I'm sure on many issues he does, and he's a good Republican. I wouldn't question those credentials at all. But there are a number of pieces of legislation where his views are out of the mainstream, at least in my view, of conservative Republican thought.

So, for instance, he's opposed to drilling in ANWR, I believe. If I'm correct -- correct me, Senator. He voted twice against the Bush tax cuts. Only two Republicans did that."

...

"Ronald Reagan would say, yes, let's drill in ANWR. Ronald Reagan would say, no way are we going to have amnesty again. Ronald Reagan saw it, it didn't work. Let's not do it again."

Republican Debate - 1-30-2008

I do not support McCain either but Romney simply spews:

"All of us on this stage are Republican.
But the question is,
who will be able to build the house that Ronald Reagan built -
who will be able to strengthen that house,
because that's the house
that's going to build the house
that Clinton, Hillary wants to build."
-- "Mother Goose" Romney - 10-21-2007

This Romney guy simply spews and he has no fundamental understanding of what comes out of his mouth. His butt-boy lackeys in the business world probably never had the courage to tell their boss how stupid he sounded during corporate all-hands meetings.

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¹ I heard this talking point suggested most recently by Hugh Hewitt, a talk show host/attorney who today said "I am the Best Endangered Species Lawyer in the United States". In other words, in the right-wing world of projection, he has the best skills at exterminating all life on the planet on behalf of corporate interests. He would lay waste to the Endangered Species Act and lay asphalt coast-to-coast, from the Gulf all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

SOTU wrap-up

My yearly run-down of the President's State of the Union address:

1. Corn-fed Nukular Batteries
2. Peru (.. but don't forget Poland)
3. Bush has "My Pet Zygote" on his reading list

Good thing we never have to suffer through this again.

The R/P metric and "pragmathematics"

A guest TOD post by Dudley Stark called The limit of the statistic R/P in models of oil discovery and production contains some very interesting ways at looking at the Reserve/Production (R/P) oil depletion metric.

Check out the comments as they also contain a high signal to noise ratio of interesting points and mathematical pragmatism, what I call "pragmathematics".


Use of a gaussian predictor to estimate reserves for USA.

I think DaveR on TOD is Prof. Dave Rutledge from CalTech. Kudos to guys like Rutledge who apply some of their engineering knowledge outside of their field of academic expertise. It really benefits us all.

Hybrid Rationale

Khebab posted on TOD a detailed and what I consider a significant modeling study on Saudi Arabia oil reserves. It complements an earlier pair of presentations concerning his Hybrid Shock Model (HSM).

I like the HSM for a few largely pragmatic reasons. For one, it couples the empirical Logistic model to the rate driven Shock Model. Khebab's mathematical connection to the Shock Model provides two-way insight on how to bridge the gap between the models. For my own edification, it revealed the critical link from the shock model's perturbed extraction rate to an equivalent Logistic extraction rate. And I would think that for others used to looking only at the Logistic model, it provides the path to injecting some intuitive first principles from the land of empiricism. I hope this spurs other depletion analysts to migrate away from a pure Logistic model.

Secondly the HSM allows one to inject an arguably more robust predictive capability to the base shock model. Khebab has rightly stated that the original shock model does not extrapolate extraction rate beyond the currently available discovery and production data, whereas the HSM at least suggests a Logistic-like growth beyond the current point in time. This causes a natural rounding in the HSM while the base shock model can start dropping off quickly if the extraction rate is extrapolated as a constant. With a good discovery model like Dispersive Discovery, I notice that the natural rounding returns, so I will not give up on a unified discovery/shock model just yet. Who knows, at some point we may get to a completely unified model that incorporates discovery, extraction (including quasi-Logistic dependence), and then the "enigmatic" reserve growth.