Maybe We Should’ve Been Indelicate

[Grain of salt statement: This is something of a rant. It is my unqualified opinion, as I’m not an oil man and the only floating oil rig I’ve ever been on had been converted to a space launch platform. This post is for entertainment and stress-relief purposes only: primarily my own entertainment and stress relief.]

I fail to understand why British Petroleum hasn’t written off the failed Deepwater Horizon as a total loss and taken steps to entomb it forever in order to stop it from leaking. Instead, it seems to me, they’ve been working hard to save their equipment and preserve this particular access point by trying small-scale, piecemeal fixes. (Here’s a nice article about some of the methods they’ve tried.)

Note that I don’t fault them for their statements to the press or misunderstanding the magnitude of the problem. Long ago I learned from one of my commanders that in the first hours of any major crisis, nothing is correct. Nothing you know, and usually nothing you do, will be correct until the situation begins to sort itself out.

So I understand that the first thing for BP to do was to try to activate the so-called “blowout preventer” — the device that was supposed to keep a disaster like this from ever happening. But once that failed, and especially once the amount of oil emerging from the well was known to be far greater than anticipated, it seems it was time to stop pussyfooting around and squash the thing like an undersea bug.

The nearest metaphor I can come up with is that the Deepwater Horizon wellhead is like a coffee straw sticking out of a Dixie cup at the bottom of a really deep swimming pool, and we’ve been trying to plug that straw by dropping grains of sand into it. The objective should have been to leave the thing sunk and bury it forever.

I understand that forced-in drilling mud (which is a special mineral slurry used in oil extraction) could overcome the well pressure and stop the flow, and I understand that now they’re drilling relief wells (see this article) in order to pump in mud and eventually concrete, but those are delicate operations at a time when brute force seems necessary.

Maybe we — BP and all of us — should’ve been indelicate. It seems to me that we have seen too much footage of smart bombs going through windows, and have forgotten (or no longer believe) that sometimes overwhelming force is required to solve an intractable problem.

Why not drop something big and cylindrical like a farm silo down over the thing, right over the blowout preventer, stand it up on the ocean floor and dump concrete in it until the concrete spills over the top. If that doesn’t stop the oil from coming out — if the oil bubbles up through the concrete as it’s setting — build a bigger cylinder and drop that over the first one and fill it up, and so on until the thing is encased in as many cubic yards of concrete as it takes to stop it from leaking into the ocean. If we have to build a five-hundred-foot-tall mountain of concrete on the ocean floor to seal the thing up, it seems a lot better than hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil spreading across the water.

They could’ve cut their losses, learned a big lesson, and moved on to the next project. Instead, we’re all learning some much more difficult lessons ….

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Economic Recovery Blues

Introducing my second foray into songwriting: “The Economic Recovery Blues,” the 2009 Industrial Extension Service (IES) Song, now available on YouTube.

And now, the story behind the song …

Friends from the Titan System Program Office at Vandenberg AFB may remember that I penned quite a few Titan-related lyrics to Beatles tunes, but “The Economic Recovery Blues” was only the second time I’ve tried to write lyrics and something of an original tune. Back in late 2008, my first attempt was “The I-E-S Song” — I wrote the lyrics and had the basic tune in mind, and Mark Minervino (my Pastor at North Cary Baptist Church) fleshed out the music. He also did all the instruments and the background vocals — his versatility is boundless — and I just sang the main lyrics. Then I put together a video montage and showed it off at our annual Christmas luncheon.

The original “I-E-S Song” was a big hit with the folks at work. Several of us wanted it to go on YouTube, but the humor was a little too sharp — mostly self-deprecating, but it got in digs at some other North Carolina institutions of higher learning. Maybe the powers-that-be will change their minds one of these days.

I had so much fun doing the first “I-E-S Song” that I figured, why not do another one? So in December 2009 the process repeated. I had the lyrics and the beginning of a tune, and Mark figured out (and performed!) the rest. Because I didn’t get started as early as the first one, we didn’t get this song done in time for the IES Christmas luncheon, so at that I sang another song — this one a work-related lyric sung to “Oh, How I Love Jesus” — and then finished up “The Economic Recovery Blues” over the holiday break. The video montage is rougher than the first one,* but the office folks decided to post it “as is.” So this is the first song I’ve done to be posted online. Hope you enjoy it, if you go in for that sort of office-related-silliness thing.

Meanwhile, if you know of anyone who needs some business consulting in lean manufacturing, “Six Sigma” statistical process control, ISO quality management standards, safety and health, or growth services, point them at the Industrial Extension Service — and at “The Economic Recovery Blues.”

Ah-one, and ah-two ….

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*A note on the video montage. For the first one, we purchased some nifty graphics off the web; for the new song, I used Creative Commons images and put attributions in the credits at the end of the song.

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Mississippi Damned

This weekend’s “proud papa” moment: seeing the movie MISSISSIPPI DAMNED — for which my daughter Stephanie was the “Key Set Production Assistant” — at the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington. It’s a moving and sometimes disturbing portrait of a family trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse, and was filmed in the little town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. The acting was extremely good; for a sample, here’s the YouTube trailer.

The producers are looking for support to get the movie into theaters, but that probably won’t happen until next year. Keep an eye out!

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Blog Link: The Next Dimension

The Next Dimension

To me, “The Next Dimension” is a VIB — Very Important Blog.

To you, maybe, the adventures of a U.S. student studying abroad in Japan may not be so important, but to me it’s a great source of excitement and pride. Then again, I’m always excited about and proud of my children’s accomplishments — what parent isn’t?

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The (Solar) Farmer in the Dell

Here in the south, where the summer sun blazes and bakes man and beast and flowering field, growers often cover their youngest and most delicate plants with shade cloth.

A couple of weeks ago, driving to the Outer Banks, I saw a field full of shaded frame structures, under which appeared to be growing row upon row of young flowers. The shaded frames stretched off into the distance, and it occurred to me that if the cloth protecting those plants was photovoltaic, it could allow enough light through to promote photosynthesis (commercial shade cloth comes different grades, by percent of sun it passes) while generating some moderate amount of electricity. It might produce an appreciable amount by virtue of providing so much surface area.

I found a couple of web pages and recent articles that documented progress in developing photovoltaic cloth. Whether it can be made cost-effective, efficient enough to be worthwhile, and durable enough to withstand years of wind and sun and rain, remains to be seen. But if it could be made cheaply enough, farmers in hot spots around the world could benefit from it. I don’t know if it would generate enough electricity to sell, or just enough to run some of the farmers’ own devices, but in either case it seems like a beneficial arrangement.

If I had money to invest, I might invest in that kind of research.

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Image: “Corolla Sunrise,” by jvader33, licensed under Creative Commons, from Flickr

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Back to Grinding Stones …

… or something like that.

After my closest approximation to an actual vacation in many years (i.e., a trip away from home and Internet, during which I worked very little [on one or two days I didn’t do any work at all]), I’ve found it very hard to get back into the groove.

I’ve got to start turning the grindstone faster. So much to do …

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Lack of Security at the Department of Homeland Security

So the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that DHS would remove the “right-wing extremist” report from their web site.* The horse-and-barn-door metaphor seems appropriate, because it’s a meaningless gesture: the report’s been cached and will continue to be available on other sites (for example, the Anti-Secrecy Society … a.k.a. the Federation of American Scientists).

The real question is, why was it on-line in the first place?

I have a copy of the report, which I downloaded almost a month ago; I don’t remember whether I got if off the DHS site, but I don’t think so. Notwithstanding the other controversy surrounding its contents I was more disturbed by the fact that several of the paragraphs are not marked FOUO, but instead are marked LES. Most people can recognize FOUO as “For Official Use Only,” but LES may not be as familiar. LES means “Law Enforcement Sensitive.”

How sensitive? The paragraph in the report that describes the LES marking says,

This product contains Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) information. No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers. Release of this information could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.

Let’s see that again: “No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers.”

I got the report over non-secure Internet servers. Who put it there? A reprimand would seem to be in order.

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*According to this report.

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The World Owes Me Nothing

Not too long ago I had a brief conversation on Twitter* about whether the world owes us anything. I say, the world owes me nothing.

I’ve heard people say, “I didn’t ask to be born,” and proceed to demand recompense from the world.

I say, the world didn’t ask for any of us to be born. We owe something for what we have, and get.

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*See http://twitter.com/GrayRinehart.

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Bonus Entry on Taxes: Guest Post on Withholding

My series on taxes officially ended yesterday, but here’s a bonus entry submitted via e-mail by my college buddy David O’Nan:

Personally, although tax changes are needed badly, the first action that should be taken is to do away with withholding. Make every taxpayer pay a check to the government every month for taxes and another check for their FICA/etc (and quit allowing them to move surpluses from one to the other to hide their spending). It’s so “hidden” now that most only have general ideas and don’t feel the pain the same way they would if they consciously had to pay the taxes. And any changes are similarly “hidden.” If every time they made a change in taxes you had to change the amount you paid (up or down), everyone will know exactly the difference rather than relying on pundits and wonks and people with agendas to tell them a slanted view of the impact.

People will start to think twice about what they expect government to fix when they get slapped upside the head with the tax bill the first few times. Once that object lesson is learned, then you could make better headway in addressing some of the ridiculous stuff that doesn’t raise widespread ire because the consequences are out there in the ether somewhere.

In a separate e-mail, he wrote,

It would be a fun idea to implement, but even if someone has direct-deposit and banks online, they still get to see the impact on every bank statement (paper or online). Every taxpayer already has a taxpayer ID number so it can’t be any more difficult to track than tax returns. Have them pay their tax within a month of the paycheck (more than one paycheck a month, more than one tax payment and FICA payment a month).

I don’t know about having to write so many checks based on how many paychecks you get — for those of us with multiple jobs, that would be a real pain. But I do know that my tax burden became much more real when I started paying estimated taxes, since part of my income has no withholding and my income fluctuates from time to time. So with respect to making it more obvious just how much everyone is paying in taxes, David is certainly on to something.

Thanks, David, for sending that in and letting me post it!

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For Those Overloaded on Inauguration Coverage …

We all live through little slices of history every day, but not like today. More words will be spoken and written about today than we can ever count — especially with blogs and tweets and squirts and whatever-will-be-next-in-the-crazy-world-of-the-Internet — and certainly more than anyone will ever read. All the historians through all the years will never catch up with all the words written and to be written about today.

Because of that, I will only say: Congratulations, Mr. President, and good luck.

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