Plan to celebrate the new year in traditional fashion this year – that is Our tradition, which is to stay the Hell home and avoid all the crazies.
I might have a drink, and I might stay up until midnight, at least midnight Eastern Standard time. Then again, I might not.
I read the other day that the word Set has more definitions than any other word in the English language. That’s one of those little factoids that is almost impossible to check, but it just might be true. According to the Wiktionary, Wikipedia's dictionary, set has 19 definitions as a verb, 20 as a noun, and 7 as an adjective – not to mention about a gazillion derivative meanings.
Just for fun, how many definitions can you think of? Can you come up with a complete set?
The picture I used at the beginning of this piece is a Julia Set – part of a Mandelbrot Set. Mandelbrot Sets use mathematical equations to form some beautiful pictures. You’ll find an explanation HERE .
They play. They giggle. But, then, say some angry consumers, the You and Me Play and Giggle Triplet dolls say "OK, crazy b****."
The adorable-looking dolls, clad in their pajamas with matching nightcaps, make babbling sounds and move their heads and are made exclusively for the Toys "R" Us brand, reported NBCPhiladelphia.com on Monday. The store defended the product and said what customers claim they are hearing is a misunderstanding.
Toys “R” Us spokeswoman Jennifer Albano said,"Obviously we would not sell a doll that uses profanity. What you’re hearing is just baby babble...There are no plans to pull it off the shelves,"
If you want to decide for yourself….
Today marks Honey’s and my forty-seventh wedding anniversary. Wow! Forty-seven years seems like a long time, but time flies when you’re with the one you love. I wrote her a little poem to commemorate the day:
I know that I was single once, I know that, but some days
It seems we've been together forever and always.
Success and failure, joy and tears
Built up through forty-seven years,
You are a vital part of me, my best in many ways.
From the Houston Chronicle:
After decades of fits and starts, Houston is pushing forward with plans to move Trinity River water nearly 30 miles to Lake Houston. The lake, located on the San Jacinto River, is the primary water source for millions of people in the region.
Planners say the Luce Bayou project, a nearly $300 million pipeline and canal, would provide water to the ever-swelling city and suburbs while helping with the area's planned conversion from groundwater. The newly adopted state water plan identifies it among the key strategies to slake the region's thirst in 2060.
The Luce Bayou project has been a dream of water planners for decades. A task force first identified the meandering stream as a way to provide Trinity water to Houston in the 1930s.
Two decades later, the city obtained a permit that allows the transfer of up to 940,000 acre-feet of water from the Trinity to the San Jacinto River basin each year. One-acre foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Texas families for a year.
In the 1960s, Houston built a pumping station and canal system to send a portion of the water to purification plants on the east and southeast sides of the city. Still, the city never has fully utilized its rights to Trinity water.
Luce Bayou resurfaced as an option for moving more water westward in the early 1980s, but the project stalled in part because of a sagging economy.
Since then, the proposal has changed significantly, with the Trinity water no longer flowing through the natural channel to reach Lake Houston. The surge of new water would have caused flooding and wiped out natural features along the path of the stream, said Donald Ripley, executive director of the Coastal Water Authority, a quasi-governmental body that is developing the project for the city of Houston.
"It is clear that plan was not environmentally sensitive," Ripley said. "If we had asked for a permit on that application today, it would have been dead on arrival."
Now, from a proposed pumping station on the Trinity, just north of the Liberty County town of Dayton, the water would flow about four miles by pipeline to a settling basin. From there, it would travel 24 miles under gravity by a high-banked, earthen canal to Lake Houston.
The proposed project would harm 200 acres of protected wetlands, mostly bottomland hardwood forest. To offset the damage, the water authority has purchased a nearby 3,000-acre tract for the Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge.
As primary steward of the nation's wetlands, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying the project's potential environmental impacts. A draft analysis should be complete in early 2012, said Sandra Arnold, a Corps spokeswoman.
If the project meets the Corps' requirements, the federal agency would grant a wetlands permit, which often is the most significant obstacle to building. The Coastal Water Authority's Ripley said the pipeline and canal are on a schedule to be completed by 2020.
Luce Bayou would deliver up to 450,000 acre-feet of water a year. The city of Houston already has agreements to sell some of the new supply to water districts in north and west Harris County and Fort Bend County.
Ken Cohen posted this on Exxon/Mobil’s Perspectives website:
This may seem like a strange question to ask, considering iPhones obviously are charged with electricity, not gasoline.
But the answer speaks to why gasoline and other liquid fuels will remain an important part of the energy mix in the future.
In ExxonMobil’s recently released Outlook for Energy, we predict that by 2040, about 90 percent of the global transportation fleet will still be powered by liquid petroleum fuels – that is, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
When asked why that’s the case, Bill Colton, ExxonMobil’s vice president for Corporate Strategic Planning, often starts the discussion using this fact to put it in perspective:
All of the energy concentrated in one gallon of gasoline is enough to charge an iPhone once a day for almost 20 years.
Clearly, there’s a lot of energy in a gallon of gasoline. And energy density is one of the key factors behind the reliability, affordability, versatility and convenience of any fuel. These are key elements that drive consumer choices today and will continue to drive consumer choices in the future.
So, let’s take a look at the role energy density plays in fuel choices, and how it affects consumer convenience and choice.
Consumers typically want to pay the least amount of money for the most amount of any product, energy included. So, the energy content of any fuel is a critical component of consumer choice. When it comes to transportation, though, another factor comes into play – namely that the energy to power a vehicle must be carried on the vehicle.
One of our top scientists uses the analogy of backpacking when talking about the importance of energy density: You want to buy the lightest, most easily carried food for backpacking, but it also needs to contain a lot of energy to keep you going. Likewise, gasoline and diesel are the lightest and most energy-dense fuels to carry for transportation. A typical car’s gasoline tank contains less than 100 pounds of gasoline but can power a 3,000 pound car for 400 miles at 60 miles per hour. This performance sets a high standard, and there are few transportation fuels currently on the market that are as light, energy dense and portable as gasoline or diesel.
Convenience
The energy density of a fuel also contributes to its convenience.
For example, contrast the 300 to 400 miles that a gasoline vehicle can take you with what it would take to do the same in an electric vehicle. Electric vehicle batteries have just a fraction of the energy density of gasoline, meaning they would have to be charged multiple times during a 400-mile trip. There’s currently no major infrastructure for charging electric vehicles on the road, and it can take hours for an electric vehicle battery to charge.
Consumers at times may take for granted the convenience and time-savings offered by the existing fuel station network. The technological processes that recover crude oil from the earth, transport it to refineries, refine it into gasoline and diesel, transport it to fuel stations and store it over time are so incredibly advanced that consumers can fill up with gasoline 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in as many quantities as necessary. That’s a convenience that does not currently exist with other transportation fuels.
Affordability
The energy density of a fuel also contributes to its affordability.
When gasoline prices are high, you may hear more discussion about introducing more biofuels, especially ethanol, as a means to reduce price. After all, some consumers see the lower E85 price at the station and (understandably) think it’s more affordable than regular gasoline. But a gallon of E85 contains roughly 25 percent less energy than a gallon of gasoline, meaning you end up paying more because you fill up more often – even though the E85 price per gallon at the pump is lower.
A few years ago, Edmunds.com did an interesting test on a flex-fuel SUV, driving it from San Diego to Las Vegas and back first on gasoline and then on E85 to find out the difference in fuel economy and cost. They found that fuel economy was 26.5 percent worse when using E85. That means having to buy more fuel to go the same distance, meaning this sort of trip using E85 could cost a consumer about $20 more than using gasoline.
Looking to the Future
Even though I talked about the current challenges of fueling vehicles with electricity and biofuels here, that doesn’t mean we don’t expect further technology advances in this area that will greatly expand the use of such vehicles. In fact, you might be interested to know that in our Outlook for Energy, we actually predict that hybrids and other advanced vehicles will account for nearly 50 percent of the vehicles on the road in 2040, compared to just 1 percent today.
More efficient vehicles will mean that global demand for fuels to power the light-duty vehicle fleet is likely to actually plateau and gradually start to decline about 10 to 15 years from now, while still meeting the needs of consumers.
There’s a lot more information about the future demand for transportation fuels, advances in vehicle efficiency and more in our 2012 Outlook for Energy – download a copy at exxonmobil.com or visit our interactive website for more data.
For those that didn’t grow up in the Oil Patch – the valves adorning the top of a completed well are known as a Christmas Tree.
