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I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

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Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#131

Post by strictnein »

SixSigma wrote: post #82
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress" I was intrigued enough to follow this up, although I didn't listen to the podcast. From wikipedia: During the hearings, the Commodity Exchange Authority stated that it was the perishable nature of onion which made them vulnerable to price swings. Then-congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan sponsored a bill, known as the Onion Futures Act, which banned futures…

> since they were used as a condiment rather than a staple food such an unstaple food that The Times of India has a page dedicated to track the price of onions http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Onion-prices

My first snarky response was: "Do they also track beef prices?"

But yes, they do (sort of): http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Beef-prices

But then I wondered if those pages were auto-generated, so I tried other things: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Taco-prices

Ok, how about non-food: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Obama-prices

Yeah, it's kind of free form: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Why-Am-I-A-Pickle

The first time you specify something unique, it takes a little bit to load, but then it's caching it.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#132

Post by VLM »

aroch wrote: post #108
esaym wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"For those who do not know, H2S is also a key part of the vile smell in flatulence, so strictly speaking it's a rather common substance in nature albeit in "safe" concentrations." Funny story and probably TMI. I used to work in aviation maintenance on large military aircraft. We regularly had to enter into "confined spaces" (fuel tanks, wings, ect) and were required to take a hand-held "air sniffer" with us that wou…

CO is produced by bacteria in your gut, just like H2S.

The short version is more likely CO2, not CO, and the detector was probably fooled by methane. In more detail:

I was motivated to google, and much like radioactivity or electric current its possible to measure "scary" things to low levels that don't usually matter, and according to a 1982 gastroenterology paper that I found, aerobic fecal fermentation will produce an irrelevent yet measurable extremely low CO output while the anerobic fecal bacteria find CO to be a yummy fuel and will rapidly consume it. Unfortunately they cannot consume CO fast enough to scavenge your blood clean if you're suffering from CO poisoning, which is too bad. Carbon monoxide being known as that thing that gives you massive gas would be far preferable to being known as that poison that kills people, but thats how it goes, can't win em all, so despite our helpful fecal bacteria CO does kill people. The paper theorized the anerobes protect the host by eating the extremely small level of CO that normal aerobic gut flora output.

From fooling around with chemical sensors in my youth, quite a few work by heating up an oxidation catalyst and measuring its temp very closely given the carefully measured outside air temp and electricity fed into them. So feed it a fuel like carbon monoxide and it gets microscopically, yet measurably, hotter. You can play molecular weight games to get a catalyst that preferentially responds to light stuff like methane or CO, or heavy stuff like vaporized wax. My semi-educated guess is the aviation CO sensor got fooled by methane in the guy's gas. Methane isn't a serious threat in an airplane fuel tank so its unlike bowel gas analysis was a high priority in the specs. This is in the class of proving things by ruling them out, and you can't rule out a heated oxidation catalyst sensor getting fooled by low molecular weight methane, its a believable scenario.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#133

Post by aroch »

VLM wrote: post #132
aroch wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO is produced by bacteria in your gut, just like H2S.

The short version is more likely CO2, not CO, and the detector was probably fooled by methane. In more detail: I was motivated to google, and much like radioactivity or electric current its possible to measure "scary" things to low levels that don't usually matter, and according to a 1982 gastroenterology paper that I found, aerobic fecal fermentation will produce an irrelevent yet measurable extremely low CO output…

Quite possibly, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was actually CO. The western-fatty diet, a.k.a the stereotypical US diet, winds up promoting CO output by not only your gut commensals, but by your epithelial cells themselves.

Not really on topic but human microbiota papers from before the late 90's/early 2000's aren't the best -- especially when dealing with metabolic processes and outputs. Available technologies and techniques at the time made studying many commensal anaerobes very difficult.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#134

Post by brazzy »

digi_owl wrote: post #98
mikeash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic." I've seen this article before, but I will never get tired of reading it again.

Given that a number of tests listed beforehand are with compounds that have their own "won't work with" articles, yeah one do wonder about the sanity of the chemist behind the paper.

> very glad I don't live anywhere near Dr. Klapötke's lab.

I do. If I ever hear a huge explosion followed by a smoke column north of the city center, I know what my first suspicion will be.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#135

Post by VLM »

cfontes wrote: post #90
33W wrote: post #60

Planet Money had a recent podcast titled "The Onion King", where someone took physical control of onion futures, and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/10/14/448718171/episo...

There is an awesome book "Reminiscence of a stock operator" by Edwin Lefevre, the story is about one guy and he does that with coffee in the US, not one, but 2 times. The government actually had to come in and take it from him... The book is a mixture of fiction and real life and it's just great! One of my favorites

It is an awesome book and its an extremely thinly disguised biography of Jesse Livermore.

Its interesting to read up on why its thinly disguised. Its widely believed the author both got, and planted, stock tips for Livermore, but the author wanted no written legal document connecting them in case things went wrong and he ended up in court discussing his documented long financial relationship w/ Mr Livermore. Legally on paper he can say he has never had anything to do with the guy, etc. Everyone knew exactly what was going on, of course.

Fred Schwed's "where are the customers yachts?" is another investment classic.

Another classic comedy was Ben Graham's Security Analysis; its a comedy in the sense that market prices currently have no relationship to fundamentals from a Graham perspective. When I was young and dumb I thought I'd spend my life making wise investment decisions based on fundamentals using Mr Graham's techniques. Instead, my entire adult life has been spend in central bank bubbles. In that sense the book is useless today. But in your grandpa's day, or great grandpa's day, this is how investment decisions were calculated, and its kinda interesting historically.

It would be amusing some slow day to have a HN article along the lines of "books recognized as cool, that have nothing to do with computers". I think we've had them in the distant past, years ago.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#136

Post by semi-extrinsic »

flyinghamster wrote: post #113
mikeash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic." I've seen this article before, but I will never get tired of reading it again.

His article on chlorine trifluoride was an absolute classic as well, and some of his articles make me very glad I don't live anywhere near Dr. Klapötke's lab. The FOOF article pointed out one other nasty problem, namely, how easy it is to game search systems: "But I do note that if you run the structure through SciFinder, it comes out with a most unexpected icon that indicates a commercial supplier. That would be the…

Yeah, the (usually Chinese) spammy chemical suppliers have an interesting selection. I've seen several offering to sell you 99% pure isopropane, which is a bit like offering a RESTful service that keeps track of state on the server.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#137

Post by joshschreuder »

shocks wrote: post #97
bigethan wrote: post #6

Relatedly(?) When I had a diesel car, I bought and stored a small barrel of biodiesel in the basement of our apartment (saving like $0.05 a gallon!). I was told that diesel doesn't burn except under extreme pressure, and that you could throw a match into an open cup of diesel and it would just go out. Never actually tested that out.

You might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nL10C7FSbE

Great video, thanks. There's an interesting fact in there about them putting dye in heating oil to stop people putting it in their cars and avoiding diesel tax.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#138

Post by joshschreuder »

MrJagil wrote: post #75

How is it possible for the workers in There Will Be Blood to hack through a foot of oil to get to the vein, if a few seconds of exposure kills you?

Or this Three Stooges clip: https://youtu.be/ZHk_-YLQAhU?t=890

I imagine it's artistic license :)

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#139

Post by VLM »

MrJagil wrote: post #75

How is it possible for the workers in There Will Be Blood to hack through a foot of oil to get to the vein, if a few seconds of exposure kills you?

Its not a contact poison but a breathed in poison, so given even the lightest breeze you're probably OK. In a sealed tank, of course, you're dead.

Also there is no such thing as the crude molecule or atom. Its like dirt, and I assure you not all dirt is equal. And some crude has so much sulfur you'd think it should be yellow like paint. Some has about none.

If you've ever heard economic discussion about "sour crude" now you know what they're talking about. If you build a refinery to process oil you don't waste money on a hydrotreater to eat the sulfur if you don't have to, then if the market floods with cheap worthless sour crude you can't process it without buying/building a hydrotreater cycle process. And they aren't cheap or built in a day, either.

Re: I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

#140

Post by CamperBob2 »

Morpholemew wrote: post #76
LoSboccacc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then there's FOOF https://web.archive.org/web/20150825171826/http://pipeline.c... (Webarchive since original seems down)

Original has moved to a new host: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...

Bummer, more ads, more whitespace, larger text, and harder to navigate. :(

Probably just as well, that blog usually costs me several hours of work.

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