Category Archives: Knowledge

There is gas in them hills

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I don’t know about the rest of the readers of the Ethereal Voice, but I have been hearing of gas companies paying top dollar to various individuals plus the promise of royalties. The talk from people that know is that the price being paid out is 2500 dollars an acre for the right to drill for gas in the hill country around here plus the promise of big royalties should stuff be taken out of the ground. As this article notes….

Geologists and energy companies have known for decades about the gas in the Marcellus Shale, but only recently have figured out a possible — though expensive — way to extract it from the thick black rock about 6,000 feet underground.

Like prospectors mining for gold, energy executives must decide whether the prize is worth the huge investment.

“This is a very real prospect, very real,” said Stephen Rhoads, president of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association. “This could be a very significant year for this.”

The shale holding the best prospects covers an area of 54,000 square miles, from upstate New York, across Pennsylvania into eastern Ohio and across most of West Virginia — a total area bigger than the state of Pennsylvania.

It could contain as much as 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, according to a recent study by researchers at Penn State University and the State University of New York at Fredonia.

From what I hear, this is rapidly turning into a gold rush and I hope it does not all end in tears. That 50 trillion cubic feet sounds real cool. But it relies on expensive technology describe in this Oil Drum article that has never be tried out on a large scale before.

Stuff we already know

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Its an article of faith amongst most people that grid can be hacked by any half way competent hacker, so I am not sure this is really news. Still, it is nice to know that some things that everyone knows are really true. This from Network World…..

Cracking a power company network and gaining access that could shut down the grid is simple, a security expert told an RSA audience, and he has done so in less than a day.

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company’s desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

Essay of the Week: 4/6/08 – 4/12/08

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Winston Churchill is one of those secular saints that everyone is taught to love. Everyone knows that Winston Churchill was one of the good guys of World War II. And almost nobody has read the speeches that made him famous.

There is absolutely no excuse for this state of affairs. The speeches of Churchill were given only 70 odd years ago and they are perfectly understandable today. When you read them, you understand something about the man and his times that you could not get from reading a dozen chapters in various history books on his time period.

Take Churchill’s speech on the Munich Agreement for example. It is one thing to read in the history books about how Churchill opposed the Munich Agreement and it is quite another to read the actual speech in which he opposed that appeasement. In the history books, Churchill comes across as a man who was on the right side of the argument. But when you read the man’s actual speech he comes off as eerily prophetic (appropriately enough, it ends with a quote from the book of Daniel). If you had infallible prophetic vision of what the future would hold, you could have hardly come up with a better speech then the one Churchill gave.

Why does this matter? Because hearing the prophetic nature of Churchill’s speech and contrasting it with the speech that Neville Chamberlain gave is receive a lesson on the human nature that is far more powerful than any text book recap. Especially when you listen to the cheers that greeted his speech.

Really Dangerous Stuff

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I am always surprised to find out how dangerous certain chemicals can be. In his latest post Derek talks about a chemical so dangerous that it can set metal on fire just from contact. The whole post was fascinating, but the best part was where Derek quoted John Clark as saying….

”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

News From Spiegel

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We have not been keeping up with the news in the way we should. Here are some links from Spiegel that we should have posted when they came up.

First, a large treasure find?

Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

If this is true, Indian Jones was wasting his time. Who wants a holy grail when you can find this much gold?

Also fish with weird dangly things?

“We had some of the world’s experts on Antarctic fish, and they were completely, completely flabbergasted,” said Martin Riddle, the lead researcher of the Australian ship, Aurora Australis. “Many of the fish had very large eyes…[and] fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths.” The fish experts on board, Riddle said, “were unable to name them.”

Who knew that dangly things was technical term that cold be applied to biological phenomena? Not that we are casting stones. In fact, we heartily approve of this approach to learned discourse. Shortly, we shall all sound educated.

Moving on to more boring news, Germany’s state own banks are having problems….

Matthäus-Maier’s bank KfW has already had to provide IKB with close to €5 billion in a series of three bailouts. With KfW itself gradually running out of cash, the federal government has now contributed another €1.9 billion.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has injected €1 billion into WestLB, another state-owned bank, as well as providing the ailing bank with another €3 billion in loan guarantees. The situation is even worse in Saxony, where the state has issued €2.73 billion in loan guarantees to Sachsen LB, that state’s Landesbank, as Germany’s state-backed regional banks are known. The other state-owned banks are providing another €14 billion in guarantees. Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank urgently needs €1 billion in fresh capital, while BayernLB last week reported a €1.9 billion write-down as a result of subprime exposure. BayernLB announced Tuesday that the bank’s chief executive, Werner Schmidt, will be stepping down as of March 1 as a result of the crisis.

The situation for Germany’s public banks has become so dramatic that it threatens to topple what has been one of the key pillars of the country’s banking system. The state-owned banks are supposed to bail each other out when necessary, but the problem is that many are in trouble themselves and hardly in a position to help their peers. And things could get even worse.

Germans used to be known for the soundness of their banking system. But now a days, everyone is sub-prime.

Speaking of the world being turned up side down, who would ever have thought that Europeans would be telling America that we are underestimating the likely hood of Iran getting the bomb? This from a group of experts who work for the European Union……

As part of a project to improve control of nuclear materials, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy set up a detailed simulation of the centrifuges currently used by Iran in the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium. The results look nothing like those reached by the US intelligence community.

For one scenario, the JRC scientists assumed the centrifuges in Natanz were operating at 100 percent efficiency. Were that the case, Iran could already have the 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary for an atomic device by the end of this year. Another scenario assumed a much lower efficiency — just 25 percent. But even then, Iran would have produced enough uranium by the end of 2010.

For the purposes of the simulation, the JRC modelled each of the centrifuges individually and then hooked them together to form the kind of cascade necessary to enrich uranium. A number of variables were taken into account, including the assumption by most experts that Iran isn’t even close to operating its centrifuges at 100 percent efficiency. What is known, however, is that the Iranians are operating 18 cascades, each made up of 164 centrifuges. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself said last April that the country had 3,000 centrifuges in operation. At the time, most Western observers discounted the claim as mere propaganda. But the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Ahmadinejad’s assertion in November.

This would not be news, except for the fact that EU is telling the US that it might not be hawkish enough.