Miscellaneous thoughts on politics, people, math, science and other cool (if sometimes frustrating) stuff from somewhere near my favorite coffee shop.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Sen. Nelson release of BP leak video 4
This is one of four videos released by Senator Bill Nelson (Florida) of the apparently on-going submarine blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Note in the right column, second line, "17/05/10." This would have been early yesterday morning (the third line says "01:05:41," and the clip runs for five minutes), a day after BP's much touted "success" at emplacing the diversionary pipe and blocking flanges. The first, second, and third are at the links, but they appear to predate BP's "success."
This is infuriating; here we are a month after the blast and release, and we still don't know 1: what the flow rate is; 2: how many leak points are in the broken riser and blow-out preventer; and 3: therefore have no way to judge what, if any positive effect BP's efforts have had. What we do know is this: 1: BP refuses to provide any information or allow any others to gather it; 2: BP has an apparently unending supply of ad hoc, ad lib strategeries, all of which they are confident will succeed... until they don't; 3: when they don't succeed, it's not really a failure. It's a success of sorts in that they learned something; 4: BP is a kabuki grandmaster, insisting that they will pay for the repercussions of the mess they created, while at the same time making sure that there is no firm data on the mess they created, so their lawyers can stand soberly in court and say the looming dead zones are the result of agricultural runoff. After all, no one really knows how much oil spilled.
Goat sodomizers, every one of them.
And boy-oh-boy, look at this widget I found at Nelson's website:
Followup: The widget isn't showing up for me, though it does show up in preview. Previous experience tells me this may or may not sort itself out, and that it may or may not show up for others. The source is at PBS. It shows the amount of oil estimated to have leaked to date, with an adjustable slider to set the assumed rate of escape.
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