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Recent Entries

2009-07-15:
Karl Denninger: Bad Math, Bad Statistics: Trying to get a blogger to admit a mistake

2008-07-04:
Drilling in ANWR

2008-03-05:
Delegate Math

2007-09-27:
Typo in the Constitution?

2007-05-27:
An ffmpeg tutorial

2007-05-22:
How to make mod_rewrite strip a query string

2007-05-09:
New Site

Karl Denninger: Bad Math, Bad Statistics: Trying to get a blogger to admit a mistake

2009-07-15

Sometimes someone on the internet is just so wrong that I become engulfed with rage and have to write about it.

In this case, an article was linked to on reddit about "Economic Fundamentals."

The point of the article... (4 comments)

Drilling in ANWR

2008-07-04

Are people still talking about ANWR?

Because this is the thing to remember:

With respect to the world oil price impact, projected ANWR oil production constitutes between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030, based on the low and high resource cases, respectively. Consequently, ANWR oil production is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices. Relative to the AEO2008 reference case, ANWR oil production is projected to have its largest oil price reduction impacts as follows: a reduction in low-sulfur, light (LSL) crude oil prices of $0.41 per barrel (2006 dollars) in 2026 in the low oil resource case, $0.75 per barrel in 2025 in the mean oil resource case, and $1.44 per barrel in 2027 in the high oil resource case. Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) could neutralize any potential price impact of ANWR oil production by reducing its oil exports by an equal amount.
Source: EIA Analysis of Crude Oil Production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Translation: drilling in ANWR will provide only 1.2 percent of the world's oil in the best case scenario, an increase in supply that OPEC can compete with by reducing its exports. And that's in 10 years.

But what, you say, if we set aside all that oil just for use in the United States? More info:

In all three ANWR resource cases, ANWR crude oil production begins in 2018 and grows during most of the projection period before production begins to decline. In the mean oil resource case, ANWR oil production peaks at 780,000 barrels per day in 2027. The low- resource-case production peaks at 510,000 barrels per day in 2028, while the high- resource-case production peaks at 1,450,000 barrels per day in 2028.

To put this into perspective: total US consumption is 20,687,000 barrels a day. (Source: EIA Oil Facts) ANWR drilling would therefore represent only 2.5 to 7% of total oil production in the United States, and that is its peak in 2028. And the name of the game is gas prices, yes? So if they had been allowed to drill in ANWR, that might've lowered the prices, what, 20 or 30 cents? And that's assuming it was all put into direct US use by the federal government, Venezuela-style.

This is all not to mention that oil producers in the US have 68 million acres that is already set aside for drilling but is not being used. So if we're in such a rush to start drilling everything in sight, why aren't these people being asked?

So why is (was?) this a big deal for Republicans? I would suppose that simple politics is the answer: they can frame the issue as if Democrats are trying to protect the stupid environment like little girly liberals instead of saving America from financial crisis. The other, more cynical view, is that the Republicans are stumping for oil companies to add more onto their bottom line. I'm actually not that cynical, I think it's the former reason: the other day, I heard Sean Hannity screaming that we ought to let the federal government drill in ANWR and sell the oil directly to the people. Big government controlling oil? That doesn't sound like the Sean Hannity I know.

In conclusion, the media has absolutely failed the public in this regard. I hope that people figure out how stupid the whole debate was, because this issue seems like it's disappearing fast. This entry may already be old news.

(2 comments)

Delegate Math

2008-03-05

This primary has been giving me a heart attack recently so I'm going to try and make myself sane by posting something on the Internet. I'll admit right up front that I'm a big Obama supporter, and I would have voted the old John McCain over Hillary Clinton (but not the new, party-line-toeing, I'm-just-as-conservative-as-Bush-I-swear John McCain). This is basically because I don't like Hillary's closed-door politics, I don't like her relative silence on wiretapping and other civil liberties, and I don't like her position on Iran. Obama is also the most tech-friendly candidate out there. Hell, Lawrence Lessig supports Obama.

Why I like Obama and why I think the media might hurt his campaign (1 comments)

Typo in the Constitution?

2007-09-27

I can't stand it when people mistake "it's" for "its". That's why I was outraged to see the same typo on Cornell's transcript of the Constitution. (Specifically, Article I, Section 10.) Here's the passage in question:

No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws...

How could they make a mistake? Unless it was in the original...

hmmm (3 comments)

An ffmpeg tutorial

2007-05-27

I wrote a tutorial on how to use ffmpeg a library that can read movie files and encode and decode them pretty much transparently. This allows you to work with video files a lot more easily because you don't have to worry about all the different kinds of crazy formats. This tutorial goes over how images are encoded for video (not RGB but YUV!), threading, and how to sync digital audio and video. I submitted this to reddit where it fared pretty well, and someone else submitted it to digg, too. Overall, the reaction has been very good, which is awesome.

(8 comments)

How to make mod_rewrite strip a query string

2007-05-22

In dealing with my shared hosting account, I had some issues with the PHP settings forcing the session functions to use URL sessionids instead of cookies, so all my links had ?dranger=234fad4c710be etc., on them. This makes Google give me icky looking URLs, so I went in and fixed it by changing the URL rewriting function in PHP.

Unfortunately, Google had already crawled my URLs, so now it has a whole bunch of repeated links in its index of my page (e.g. index.html AND index.html?dranger=234fad4c710be). So I needed to go in and set mod_rewrite (which I'm already using heavily to make my other URLs pretty) to strip the query string of get variables from the request and return that as a 301 Redirect (moved permanently). I didn't see anything described like this in the mod_rewrite docs. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as:

RewriteRule (.*)?dranger= /$1 [R=301]

because the text that RewriteRule is checking doesn't contain the rewrite rule. In addition, this doesn't work, either:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} dranger=
RewriteRule (.*) /$1 [R=301]

because when it rewrites the URL, it appends the query string onto the rewritten URL. What a drag. But I did notice that this:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} dranger=
RewriteRule (.*) /bob.html?x=44 [R=301]

will remove the previous get variable. So I tried this out:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} dranger=
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.dranger.com/$1? [R=301]

which not only stops the query string from being added but removes the single question mark — which is exactly what we wanted!

(7 comments)

New Site

2007-05-09

Finally, two or three months after I figured I'd have it done, I finally have got my site up and running more or less how I want it! http://www.dranger.com is my place to put all my internet stuff that I want to public to see. But why did it take so long? I got overambitious:

What's here (11 comments)