LifeItself

First the good news. Lacking leadership, guidance and resources, most of my fellow Americans are stepping in, wearing those masks and practicing social distancing. Here in Texas, Governor Abbot abandoned pretending that he is a blind fool, and ordered mandatory masks, $250 fines for not wearing them (including a text message on my phone from the Texas disaster warning system), and bar closures. The Houston Medical Center, where I recently went, looked like a ghost town. We need to think a lot harder about reopening schools, rather than bars. In my Hayes county, practically everyone wears masks in stores, even in Home Depot, whose pro-Trump CEO does not seem to get this simple message: if you care about the economy, wear a bloody mask and make sure that together we will not be overwhelmed by the fear of the virus, and will resume sending our children to school, visiting doctors and dentists, start flying, visit hotels and  frequent outdoor restaurants. Right now, this broad attitude...

Who would you rather believe, a renowned professor at BI Norwegian School of Management and consultant to IMF, The World Bank, the governments of Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S., etc., or your own lying eyes? If you follow the April 2012 issue of the World Oil, the good professor wins . After having read the convincing "Peak Oil? - Not in Norway" piece in the World Oil, you may want to recalibrate your senses by looking carefully at the four graphs below. Click on each one of them if you want to see a high-resolution image. Oil production rates from the North Sea and Norwegian Sea oilfields on the Norwegian continental shelf are a set of 65 approximately independent random variables. The total production from these 65 fields is then a random-sum process that yields a Gaussian distribution, in this context known as a "Hubbert curve" or "Hubbert peak." The thick blue line is the rate of oil production from Ekofisk. The Ekofisk production curve has ...