LifeItself

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...

For the record, the ambiguous title of this blog could also be read as "Shame on the US."  I could not bring myself to publish this short blog for the last 5 long months, but here it is. The dual nightmare of tRump and his Jan 6, 2021, brutal insurrection, that prompted me to start writing is gone.  But otherwise little has changed. We are still the same completely confused, mostly blind and illiterate animals that call themselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens ( Wise wise man !).  My cat has more common sense and sees nature around him more acutely than most of us. May 28, 2021. According to my friend Brian, some dudes in Nevada got curious about a bristle cone pine tree. It was really big. They cut it down. It was the oldest formerly alive tree in the world, ca. 6000 years. This tree was older than the oldest recorded dynasty in Egypt. It was older by at least 1000 years than the oldest surviving wood structure inside of an Egyptian pyramid. Eighteen years ago, that wooden s...

Yes, it all happened in Seattle, dear friends, as  this harsh  documentary shows, but the COVID-19 pandemic is like an X-ray machine. It displays all t hat is broken and hidden.     I'll start my detailed explanation of the multiple causes that underlie urban decay in the US from this beautiful quotation by a friend:  Many saints grew in holiness to the point where, by God's grace, they restored around them the original harmony with creation which Adam enjoyed in Paradise. One thinks immediately of St Seraphim of Sarov and St Sergius of Radonezh who befriended wild bears, or of St Paul of Obnora who was beheld surrounded peacefully by forest animals. Even in our own time there are testimonies of monastics living in the wilderness peacefully with wild deer and even mountain lions. Elder Herman is remembered for a gentle ermine who was utterly devoted to the Saint. When asked what he thought of the animals, a recent American monastic elder replied, "They...