Working in Edmonton and all points west this week --The stuff that Sheiks are made of

Good morning folks and folkettes,

I will be working in Edmonton today and tomorrow and then on to Calgary for Thursday and then a quick dash out to Kelowna to see my grandson and his mommy and daddy :)

I don't know how many of you, like me, were cc'd on the threads about oil production, peak oil and how the oil in the ground came to be, but what the hell.. I have a few minutes to kill on this flight, let's take a plunge shall we?

Oil, black gold, Texas tea, Alberta Spit, it's the stuff that can cause the President of arguably the heaviest armed country on the planet to fall on bended knee in front of a white linen wearing dude that for not the reserves of oil under the sand would be a goat herder.   Not that goat herder is not an honourable profession, it just rarely invokes a genuflect.

Crude oil is effectively just a mixture of long chain carbon - hydrogen molecules.  Element numbers 1 and 6 (easy when you keep a Periodic Table in your wallet, or in this case it was me and in my wallet) as well as molecular compounds containing Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Sulfer; just for fun deposits often also contain Iron, Nickel, Copper and Vanadium.

The long chains consist of bonded Carbon atoms with Hydrogen atoms hanging off the Carbon atoms through an electron bond.  What crude oil is not.   It is not Fairy Dust, or a prize left at the end of a rainbow by a Lucky Leprechaun.

A short segue, I have a friend that is a Creationist, he says that God (the large G god as apposed to the lessor small g gods) made the oil and put it in the ground for us to find later and pollute the atmosphere.  What he cannot explain to me is why God put all of the American's oil under the Saudi's sand..  but that is the mystery of God's works.

And we're back..  

Now then, if we wanted to make some crude oil for ourselves.. we would need an abundant supply of carbon rich gooey material, we could start with that bubbly stuff that emanates from the neighbor's 2 year old boy's nose, but we need more!   

Vegatable matter!  grass clippings, plankton, crustacean carcasses, trilobites, zooloplankton, algae, sewage, we can use it all.   Oh and some pressure or heat.  You see they are really interchangeable, but if we have both we can really speed up this process.

Take all of this Carbon and Hydrogen rich material and squeeze it together and wait.....

Eventually the mixture will transform into a dark, waxy substance called Kerogen.  If our temperature / pressure is too low, we'll have Kerogen forever, if our temperature / pressure is too high, we'll break our molecules down too far and make natural gas.  A great place to do this job is under the ocean under layers of silt and sediment and anywhere between 3 weeks and a few hundred thousand years and Shazaam..  The stuff that Sheiks are made of.

Have a good day, burn up some ancient algae.

Working in Ottawa today --Sandlance, Chameleons and Mayors

Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa today.

Have you ever thought about the benefits of your binocular vision, specifically in its ability to perceive distance to objects?    I apologize in advance to Derek, long time reader and one eyed.  Derek lost one eye while run-jumping over a fence with a pool cue to the sounds of his mother yelling, "don't run with a pool cue, you'll put someone's eye out!".  dark days man.

But what about having your eyes in a non-yoked together manner.  Like the Sandlance or the Chameleon you could have one eye scanning your surroundings looking for predator, wife or traffic cop while your other eye tracked some prey, go-go dancer or read your newspaper while driving.

Now I am sure that you are thinking, "but Uncle Daniel would the benefit be out weighed by the loss of depth perception?"

A very good question indeed, but worry not!  It turns out that creatures with independent moving eyes like the late Marty Feldman and the above mentioned Chameleons solved the problem the very same way.  They retain a parallax capacity by shifting the nodal point way forward of the axis of rotation of their eyes as well as maintaining a complete 360 degree visual memory and update it through subsequent optical input.  Cool.

So what does this have to do with Mayors?  Enter.. Mayor Rob Ford.  Now you may be thinking, "What the hell Bam Bam, haven't you already included Mayor Ford in you column 2 or 3 times?".   I would have to respond, yes.  But if I jump on the plane and draw a blank for a topic, I can always rest assured that Ford will have said or done something to provide ample fodder.

Bam Bam?  Yeah.  Rob from Leak Pro (fixes windshields and generic wind and rain leaks in vehicles --fixed my Jeep's windshield a few months ago, nice job btw) plays Racquetball some Wednesdays and some Sundays calls me Bam Bam in the court because of my wicked line drive return shot.  Has been known to cause opponents to hit the deck to avoid being decapitated by it.  Fun for all :)

Back to Ford.  He was recently photographed driving on the Gardiner Expressway while reading a newspaper.  He defended his actions explaining that he can simultaneously read and keep one eye on the road.

I figure he must be a lizard or a type of coral fish.

Have a good day, I'll keep an eye out for ya!