LifeItself

 Dear Friend, I do not mention your name, for you can be anyone on the whole Earth. You could have any color of skin, and belong to any tribe and clan. You could give offerings to any Gods and believe in any myths. In modern impersonal terms, you could be of any race, nationality, religion and political creed, and be of any sex whatsoever.  It took us a million years to develop that big, complex brain of ours. Some 100,000 years ago, in the harsh, frigid climate of Europe and Asia, there were perhaps a few hundred of us left on the brink of extinction.  But we did not go extinct then and here we are, my friend and brother, all 7.8 billion of us. Gregory, John Walter 1896 - 1968, The Great Rift Valley. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. This Sketch by Gregory from his expedition to East Africa in 1892-3. shows "Mount Kenya from the Kapte Plains west of Machakos". Learned people say that we must have come from Africa, mostly from the Great Rift Valley : "Our species, Hom...

In the first week of August 2020, I was back home from the famous cancer hospital in Houston, MD Anderson, in which I received a brutal chemotherapy to control my lymphoma.  How the lymphoma ran away is a separate story of poor decision making by a junior doctor at MD Anderson, and me not dumping him two months earlier and starting on Acalabrutinib that has kept me alive until today.  Because of the rather sloppy administration of the support IVs, over four days they pumped into me a net 10 kilograms of liquids, and I was swollen like an elephant. How do I know this?  Because I weighed myself each day and at the peak I gained 10 kilograms. The doctor who burst in for a 5 minute visit, disputed my finding, arguing that it did not agree with the nurse's notes about my urine production. More about notes soon. I asked him quietly if mass conservation did not hold in medicine?  He was somewhat embarrassed, but then again, he was busy running from one patient to another, a...

Here is the welcome visited upon us by one of our neighbors.  After arrival at our home in Austin, TX, on July 10, 2021, we found three adult foxes, one male and two females, and a young fox poisoned with a rodent poison, possibly laced with arsenic. Later we found two tiny newborn fox babies lying by their dead mother. Through tears, I posted to the neighborhood group bulletin this gentle reminder:  "No matter how you feel about wild animals, please note that putting out rat poison is very dangerous to your pets, dogs and cats. If they eat it or bite on a poisoned mouse, they can die too. Poisoned mice and rats, when eaten by other wildlife - foxes, racoons, coyotes and birds of prey – will kill them too, and so a cascade of deaths will continue. These foxes have lived happily on our property for at least two years."  This male fox had been our companion during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, and brightened our days. He was smart and funny, and approached us with certain...

 This is a continuation of the previous list of 29 papers and 1 patent: 30. Zhu, W., Khirevich, S., & Patzek, T. W. (2021). Impact of fracture geometry and topology on the connectivity and flow properties of stochastic fracture networks.  Water Resources Research , 57, e2020WR028652.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR028652 Natural fractures usually comprise complex networks and control many physical properties of rocks, including stiffness, strength, and permeability. Therefore, they significantly impact many engineering fields, such as hydrology, waste disposal, geothermal exploitation, and petroleum reservoir exploitation. In a low permeability formation, fractures play a dominant role because the contribution of the matrix to fluid flow is almost negligible. Connectivity of natural and induced fractures thus determines the overall capability of fluid flow of subsurface rocks. Commonly used approaches to evaluate the connectivity (percolation method, connectivity ind...

I've been receiving recurring requests for the links to our publications on shales.  Thus, I have decided to put our shale story together, and update it in the future as the new papers are published. So far, this story consists of 29 papers and one patent published, and eight papers are pending.  Our goal is to describe the well-by-well histories and possible futures of all major US shale plays, starting from the earliest one, the Barnett. To achieve this goal, we have been using a physics-based scaling of individual well production and the generalized extreme value (GEV) statistics for spatio-temporal cohorts of wells.   As an aside, out of 15 or so, only  three of our paper submissions to the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conferences have been accepted since 2017, and we have given up on the SPE, of which I am a Distinguished Member with 38 years in the Society under my belt.  It is quite sad for me personally, but SPE has been in disarray for sev...

And here is a third blog I did not bring myself to publish for exactly one year.  It's as fresh today as it was 365 days ago. The feeling of grief  permeates everything these days, but there are happy moments. Let me paint for you our act of random wildness . We were coming back from an early morning walk, when behind a road curve we heard the loud shrieks of a scared deer and the much fainter shrieks to the right. When we approached the curve, this is what we saw: On our side, a young doe was running back and forth and shrieking her lungs off. To the right, behind a wire net fence was a new-born fawn of the size of adult cat, trying to join mama. But how could she? The fawn was pursued by a large black labrador, who was visibly upset and confused, and tried to sniff her. Finally, the fawn hid behind a bush on the side on the fence with the dog behind the bush, standing there and doing nothing. We talked to the dog trying to calm her, and my wife, Joanna, was able ...

Here is another short blog I started writing a year ago.  Nothing has changed. Well, over forty years, one-half of a long human life can happen for starters. Forty years ago, on July 6, 1980, my extraordinary wife, Joanna, and I were married in a small ceremony in Warsaw. Poland was a communist country, the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, but a social movement, Solidarity, to which we dedicated our young lives, was burning fast through the very foundations of the powerful Eastern Block. Who would expect that 10 short years later, the Soviet Union was no more, Germany was unifying and the eastern European countries were tossed like leaves onto their paths to democratic modernity? With some adventures, we left Poland in January 1981 (me) and in April (Joanna) to settle in Minneapolis, where I was hired as a postdoc at the best Chemical Engineering department in the world, working for the top professor there. The infamous general Jaruzelski was never tried and sentenced unti...