Aquifers: Learning from greedy oil tycoons

Living in southern California, occasionally i hear news of water shortages in our savannah and desert cities. But, as soon as i imagine forgoing long showers and my domestic best friend the dishwasher, the issue seems to magically evaporate from my head.

The truth is that we are desiccating our aquifers, month by month, and leaving them irrevocably damaged in the process.

A recent article by Todd Jarvis of Oregon State University suggests--We can learn something from another group of greedy people who learned their geological lesson decades ago: the oil industry.

"The "race to the pump" serves no one's best interest, whether the concern is depleted resources, rising costs of pumping, or damaged aquifers."

The oil industry's 'race to the pump' backfired on several occasions when pumpers found incessant drilling damaged and collapsed rock surrounding an oil deposit. The oil could be drawn, but, where it would normally resurface overtime into it's natural holding chamber, it now had no place to go.

Collapsed rock meant that the oil reserve became a one-hit-wonder when, if managed correctly, it could have been a self-renewing pool of fuel.

As it stands, aquifers are being drained at a comparably rapid rate:

"Aquifers that took thousands of years to fill are being drained in decades, placing both agricultural and urban uses in peril...massive lawsuits are already erupting and the problems have barely begun."

Now, I don't feel terribly guilty for my personal water usage--i always turn off the faucet when im brushing my teeth-- but i do feel fairly sure that policy-makers could learn a thing or two from the oil industry's plight. It takes a state-wide plan for water regulation to really make a difference.

The LHC and Fate: recent NYT article

I've been dying to chime in amongst the raucous of commentary surrounding Dennis Overbye's NYT article "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate." The bloggosphere has chewed this one up and spit it out a few times, and today, the article came up in a phone conversation between me and a physicist friend.

Is this for real?
"...I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...."

It sounds like a farce. Then, on the second reading, i realized what the article was really about: the wonky-craziness of theoretical physics and how genius often involves going way out on a limb in your thinking. (At least i hope this was what it was about--the theme was a bit buried. So buried that, in my opinion, the article seemed to give too much credibility to the bizarre, unpopular, and certainly untested theory.)

Fairly, my physicist phone-buddy wanted to go over the facts of Neilsen's theory to judge if this was, in fact, nonsense or whether it was simply a creative interpretation of a plausible concept.

There is conflicting commentary all over the web...

from phsyicscentral
"The Collider, the Particle, and a Theory About Fate" goes out on a limb—a really long limb—and discusses a fringe idea..."


Physicist Sean Carrol, quoted in the article, from Cosmic Variance.
"The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing. And an occasional fun essay about speculative science in the Times is not going to send us back to the Dark Ages, or even rank among the top ten thousand dangers along those lines."

Comment below the Times article, MM from Chicago
"What I find most most amazing reading these comments is the scientific illiteracy of people who otherwise are probably well educated. Examples: (1) comments that entropy is a fundamental law (its not fundamental), (2) comments that the universe is deterministic in nature (physics stopped believing that over fifty years ago), (3) comments that traveling backwards in time is impossible (not at the quantum level).

People, there has been a revolution in physics. Its came out of quantum mechanics and from the theory of relativity. The old science you learned in high school was not entirely accurate. Pick up a good book on modern physics. You will be awed."

In theoretical physics, it's often difficult to draw the line between what is creative and what is just plain crazy. Everyone has their own definitions.

Fear of flying

Tomorrow, after spending a glorious weekend in Utah--where some surprise snow dumped on our women's journalism conference, keeping me from hiking and biking in the mountain air--i will descend 4,000 feet in a rusting white shuttle-van to get to the Salt Lake City airport.

But, i don't want to come down the mountain.

It's not because Im unsure about the skill level of the shuttle driver--surely he's maneuvered plenty of icy turns in his years as Canyon Transportation's official valet. It's not because I've finally acclimated to the 8,000 foot elevation and finally want to take a tram further up to the lookout point. It's also not because I want to hit up the eucalyptus steam room and rooftop hot-tub one more time.

It's because i've grown afraid of flying.

Somehow, i can no longer lessen my fears by repeating the oft cited mantra--driving around Los Angeles in a car every day is much more dangerous than air travel. Doesn't work anymore--I need specifics! As it turns out...

"Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline's flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country, your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn't matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year.

In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident. Nineteen thousand years!"

And, compared to cars...

"A sold-out 727 jet would have to crash every day of the week, with no survivors, to equal the highway deaths per year in this country."

And here's the kicker...

"You are more likely to die from a bee sting than from a commercial flight."

The bee sting thing really does it for me--that's what ill be thinking about on my flight home to LA tomorrow. Well, that and how much i miss Wayne and Jake.