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Wednesday, June 25
Saskaboom
by
Jason
on Wed 25 Jun 2008 10:54 PM CST
No, not the catchy Feist song...
Instead, "Saskaboom" was the name given to a feature that CBC's "The National" aired last night on Saskatchewan and our booming economy. The piece included a feature on Weyburn and the impact of the oil sector on the local economy. So if you want a taste of the city where I've spent most of the past year and a more positive spin on the Peak Oil idea that I wrote about the other day, watch the video clip. It was interesting to hear the Mayor of Weyburn talking about losing city employees to the oil patch. We're seeing something similar in our library region. I would say that traditionally, the bulk of our branch librarians were stay-at-home moms and housewives who were married to farmers or other people earning an average (or below-average in the case of most farmers  ) income. Now, with the booming natural resource-based economy, it's harder for us to find women wanting to supplement their family incomes because their husbands are making around six figures in "the patch". Or, if the wives do want to work, they can find higher paying employment with longer hours fairly easily since many gas stations and restaurants are offering $10-15/hr with all the hours you want just to get workers. (And lest anyone think I'm being sexist by talking only about female employees, I will mention that of the approximately 100 employees that SRL has out in its rural branch network, fully every single one of them - ie. 100% if you like easy math - are of the female persuasion. Sadly, the only males in the entire organization are the four professional librarians, our van driver and our shipping/receiving clerk.) In related news (to the "boom", not to the issue of "who has boobs"  ), Shea and I drove out to Stoughton, a town half an hour east of Weyburn for the local library's presentation on "Surface and Mineral Rights" as this is something that is of personal interest to both of us.
(I'll preface this by saying "as I understand it", since I always tend to get these things slightly wrong. But, basically, surface rights are where an oil company pays the landowner an annual fee for the right to be on your land as they explore for oil or for continued access after a well has been drilled. Mineral rights are when you earn a percentage from any producing wells that are found on your land. Mineral rights are, by far, the more lucrative although someone with a few producing wells on their land could make a decent annual wage, just from the surface rights.) Now, a quick quiz - what's the most successful library program you've ever attended? How about 150 people in a community hall where said community has 653 people according to the last census? Of course, they'd advertised quite widely and a lot of attendees, including Shea and I, were from out of town. But still, that'd be like getting 45 000 people out to a library program in Regina! (Hmm, maybe the RPL should become the RidersPL?)There's definitely a lesson in there about running programs that meet your community needs no matter the size of your community. Plus, the opportunity to promote the library and its services is huge, especially for a non-standard program like this. (Although it was embarrasing to hear one Government employee who was presenting ask, "Do you have Internet in the library here? I know we do in Regina but I'm not sure about here." Ouch!)
Anyhow, I'm off to sing myself to sleep...
Old dirt road,
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
knee deep snow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
o-o-o-o-old
Saturday, June 21
A Peek at Peak Oil
by
Jason
on Sat 21 Jun 2008 09:37 PM CST
Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket. It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards. This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to "never" depending on which study you read. (The "never" people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)
MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil
supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current
production.On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped. But with massively increasing demand from China, India and other developing nations, the odds are that either technology or the promise of massive profits inherent in $200 (or $300 or more) barrels of oil still won't be enough to meet demand. (Oil is at $135/barrel today which is an increase of about 35% since the start of 2008, nearly double what it was at this time last year and seven times the $20/barrel price that oil hovered for most of the 1980's and 1990's.)So instead of gas that's $1.39/litre (~$4/gallon in the US) today, you could be looking at $4-5/litre gasoline ($15/gallon) in the very near future.The other related issue is, of course, climate change. Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment. (A digression - "fossil fuels" is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards. The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage. A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.)Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops. (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.)The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either. In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.) Why am I writing this now? I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact - economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. - but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-. (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year - a place I never thought I'd find myself!)Recent studies have declared that there is a "Saudi Arabia of oil" under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957). I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area. The landscape now looks like the moon - instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of pumpjacks.
I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later. I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do!
Saturday, December 29
More Than Babble: Baby's First Words May Be Key To Origins of Spoken Language
by
Jason
on Sat 29 Dec 2007 09:49 AM CST
Pace is babbling up a storm these days (what's the line? "You spend the first few months of their lives waiting for them to talk and the next eighteen years wishing they would stop!"  ) with lots of "da da", "ga ga", "blah blah, blah" (seriously!) and grunting noises.
So I did some research (okay, a Google search for "typical baby first words") and found this article which will be of interest to both parents and any librarians who work with children.
Wednesday, November 28
Six Ideas That Will Change The World
by
Jason
on Wed 28 Nov 2007 10:21 PM CST
Six Ideas That Will Change the World(I also fixed the broken link in yesterday's post if anybody wants to see my paper and presentation on e-branch services for public libraries. Thanks to John M. for (gently) pointing out the mistake!  )
Tuesday, July 24
How To Suck The Air From Your Lungs, Saskatchewan Style
by
Jason
on Tue 24 Jul 2007 07:05 PM CST
I did a post like this during the coldest part of the winter so I'll do another one during the hottest day (so far) of the summer... We set a record today in Weyburn - I just did this screen cap below now but the highest point reached today was 42 degrees. (Does anywhere else in Canada experience 80 degree swings in temperature during the course of a typical year?)
For the third day in a row, there was also a blackout lasting at least half an hour (yesterday was a similar length and Sunday was two full hours.) Who knows what tomorrow may bring - brimstone? Volcanoes? Melting pavement? Melting Jason? Probably all of the above. Interesting trivia o' the day: Yellow Grass, which is just west of Weyburn, shares the record with Midale, half an hour east of Weyburn, for hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada: 46 degrees. (Not sure if they were set on the same day and if so, how come Weyburn which is between them only sets a record today of 42 degrees?) (Edit: thought I'd add the "winter" graphic listed in the first line of this post to make the comparison easier. Oops, -27 that day but felt like -41. I guess technically that's not an 80 point swing. I lied.)
Monday, July 23
Around the Horn: Highlights From Other Blogs I Read
by
Jason
on Mon 23 Jul 2007 07:06 PM CST
 Similar to my FFL last week, Michelle L. links to another article slamming the impact of the Potter books. If you're going to buy her book, don't buy it for half price at a
supermarket. As an example of a world gone mad, you couldn't do much
better than this: a writer whose sales have actually fulfilled a
publisher's wildest dreams is indirectly responsible for large-scale misery among independent bookstores. This is not JK Rowling's fault. It's a consequence of the deregulation of the book market.John M. has a very thought-provoking post on what we want to do before we run out of oil? Three choices come to mind …
1. A great pleasure ride. We can eat and drink and drive like no one
has ever done before. I think one could consider it a sin if we had the
opportunity for so much pleasure, and didn’t take advantage of it. Oil
promises that.
2. Invent new energy sources. Could the old energy source of oil
help us to invent new energy sources that would not have otherwise been
possible?
3. Find a new planet with more oil. Use our current oil supply to
resource a fantastic project: the locating of another planet with
untapped oil, and the construction of a space ship to get there and
transport the oil here, or live there. (Of course if there is oil
there, then there must have been life there, or maybe still is. Would
we have to buy the oil? Okay, my real opinion is getting a little more
than obvious.) Quinn D. links to a TechCrunch story about Facebook's first major acquisition - Parakey - which is a "web operating system". Another pretty strong indication that Facebook wants to take on the Microsofts and Googles of the world - not be acquired by them.There's lots of other blogs I follow but those are some recent posts that stood out for me.
Friday, July 6
Friday Fun Link - Earth Portal (July 6, 2007)
by
Jason
on Fri 06 Jul 2007 11:05 PM CST
The worldwide series of concerts known as Live Earth have started today in Australia and Japan and will be moving around the world for the next 24 hours.
Although not directly related to Live Earth, there are a couple relevant sites you might want to check out:
- Earth Charter
is “a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just,
sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century. Created
by the largest global consultation process ever associated with an
international declaration, endorsed by thousands of organizations
representing millions of individuals, the Earth Charter seeks to
inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared
responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the larger
living world. The Earth Charter is an expression of hope and a call to
help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. ”
- The Earth Portal
is “a comprehensive resource for timely,
objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a
means for the global scientific community to come together to produce
the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource
on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on
the role of environmental issues in human affairs. It contains no
commercial advertising and reaches a large global audience.”
- And as always, there are pledges to be found - the good folks at Avaaz have one which they’re trying to get 50 000 signatures on (27 055 at this point).
Sunday, July 1
Eulogy For Grandpa Peet
by
Jason
on Sun 01 Jul 2007 05:52 PM CST
(I mentioned a couple weeks ago that this eulogy had gone over very well and that I would post it when time allowed. A long weekend is ideal for catching up on all those loose ends and so here it is...) more »
Sunday, June 17
How Fatherhood Affects The Body and The Brain
by
Jason
on Sun 17 Jun 2007 12:31 PM CST
I'm not a big fan of the Hallmark holidays - those ones that you just know were made up at some point in the past, mainly to sell greeting cards. But anyhow, happy first Father's Day to me! Most of us know the ways that parenthood affects mothers. But in keeping with the theme of the day, here's an article from Slate magazine outlining some new findings about how parenthood affects fathers (er, if you're a marmoset):
There's also preliminary but tantalizing evidence that fatherhood can change the brain. A 2006 study
found enhancements in the prefrontal cortex of the father marmoset.
After childbirth, the neurons in this region showed greater
connectivity, suggesting that having young children could boost the
part of the brain responsible for planning and memory, skills parents
need when having kids gives them more to keep track of. The neurons
also had more receptors for vasopressin, a hormone that has been shown
to prompt animal fathers to bond with offspring. (Receiving an
injection of vasopressin, for instance, prompts a male prairie vole to
cuddle and groom a youngster.) (Thanks to Heather M. for the pointer to this article)
Saturday, June 16
Smaller: The Story of the Disposable Diaper (The Perfect Innovation) - Malcolm Gladwell
by
Jason
on Sat 16 Jun 2007 11:37 AM CST
Doing my third diaper change of the morning reminded me of this excellent Malcolm Gladwell article I read a year or two ago. In it, he looks at the history of disposable diapers, their science and the impact various elements have had on the economic aspects of the product.
Shea and I did the cloth v. disposable debate and like all good neo-hippies of the world, we were going to go with cloth. But someone (Quinn? Ian?) showing me a Wired article about how each is equally bad for the environment (PDF) in its own way along with the extra complications of trying to do cloth while maintaining two separate households, tilted the pointer towards convenience.
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