text:
North Dakota is booming. Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the country, 3.7 per cent, and so many people have moved there for jobs that last year local officials declared a housing crisis. The new workers have been drawn by the Williston Basin, in the western part of the state, which holds the largest accumulation of oil identified in North America since 1968, when the Prudhoe Bay field was found, on the North Slope of Alaska. Oil companies have booked motels within two hours' drive for a year in advance; last summer, relocated workers converted the lawn of a town park into a tent city.
About a hundred new wells are blasted into the ground every month. Seen from a distance on U.S. Highway 2, the derricks form a straight crease—giants reduced to props by a landscape that the novelist Larry Woiwode described as a vast plane, "its flatness tugging the sky tight at every horizon, as if it were tied there." One day a few months ago, beside a trailer parked near the center of the basin, half a dozen men prepared to send enough explosives underground to dismantle an armored tank. The firepower consisted of twenty-four "shaped charges"—little cone-shaped shells housed in foot-long metal cannisters called perforating guns. When the charges were detonated by an electrical signal, each shell would explode into the surrounding rock, forming corridors through which oil could flow into the well.
The workers, who were mostly in their twenties or thirties, wore hard hats, steel-toed boots, and coveralls stained to the chest with crude oil. One of them screwed four perforating guns together, attached them to a heavy wire, then lowered them into a hole bored in the ground. As the wire unspooled from an enormous drum mounted on the back of the trailer, another man, inside, used a joystick to control the guns' descent. It took almost an hour before the guns neared the far end of the L-shaped wellbore, an underground trip of nearly four miles, and began to withdraw. A third worker knelt on the floor of the trailer like a preacher and studied a column of numbers written on a window, down-hole distances where the men were to set off the explosions: 19,971 feet, then 19,909, then 19,850. On closed-circuit radio, a voice from a trailer across the lot addressed the worker on the joystick: "Steady, keep it steady."
"He's got to have a doctor's touch on that drum wire," the engineer in charge of the well, Russell Rankin, said. Rankin, who was clean-shaven and had on a class ring and a carefully ironed golf shirt, works for Brigham Exploration, based in Austin, Texas, one of some hundred and fifty oil companies that have entered the basin since 2006. "Everybody sent up here is on the same mission, which is: Solve the puzzle of this place," Rankin said. "We know there's oil there. But how much of it can you get out of the rock?"
The rock is the Bakken formation, a layer of the basin that geologists believe holds a twenty-five-thousand-square-mile sea of oil. (The formation is mostly beneath the surface of North Dakota, but it extends into Montana and Canada.) The head of the state's department of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently estimated that the region could contain eleven billion barrels of oil that can be obtained using current technology, nearly enough to supply the United States for two years. That assessment has doubled since a 2008 United States Geological Survey study, and the amount that will eventually be recoverable is the subject of intense speculation. "The Williston Basin is still relatively underexplored and poorly understood in terms of its geology," Helms said. "It's a subterranean detective story."
A hundred and thirteen million barrels of crude oil were produced in North Dakota last year—more than five per cent of the country's domestic output. (The U.S. produces slightly less than half of the oil it consumes.) The increase is well timed. Last month, with oil prices rising, President Obama announced the goal of reducing by one-third America's reliance on foreign oil by 2025. But the restrictions on offshore drilling that followed the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill have limited domestic oil production, and the disastrous blowup at Japan's Fukushima plant last month has made an increase in nuclear power politically untenable. Meanwhile, the past two years were the first since 1991 in which domestic oil production increased, owing substantially to North Dakota's contributions. Geologists believe that Williston could be at the beginning of a twenty-year boom.
When the perforation guns were lined up at the proper depth, the man on his knees placed his hands on a wall panel that held knobs, dials, switches, and a key in a keyhole. "Plug it?" he asked. Rankin nodded, and he gently turned the key. A few seconds later, the needles of a meter bounced abruptly. A worker who stood hugging a vertical pipe near the wellhead gave a thumbs-up, to indicate that he had felt a rumble from the faraway explosion. In the trailer, all was quiet.
Oil companies often name their wells after the family that owns the surrounding land, and, because this part of the state was settled overwhelmingly by Norwegian immigrants and their descendants, the well names have a certain uniformity of character: the Erickson, the Sorenson, the Mortenson, the Tjelde, the Bakke, the Brakken. Rankin's new well was registered with the North Dakota Industrial Commission as the Abe, after Abe Owan, a local businessman, on whose property Brigham had already installed the Owan, the Abe Owan, and the Owan-Nehring. "Abe's got a lot of land, and we're starting to run out of names," Rankin said.
Rankin is the principal engineer and overseer of Brigham's wells in the Bakken. In 2010, he was made responsible for much of the company's four-hundred-million-dollar budget and was put in charge of hiring all the rig contractors and work crews involved. By August, he and his wife and sons had moved from Austin to Williston. For the time being, they live in a trailer in the company's equipment yard. Rankin considers his wells "not exactly like my kids, but let's say close enough." In a span of just four days a few months ago, he met with dozens of service providers—pipeline construction, solids disposal, right-of-way acquisition, electrical supply, pumping units—along with the mayor of Williston, the director of economic development, and officers of the state land department. One morning, he told everybody he hadn't yet seen to meet him at the big table at Trapper's Kettle for breakfast, and they took turns sitting next to him.
Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and broad in the beam. He has a high forehead and wears large eyeglasses, which together give the appearance that he is always about to ask politely if you've got a minute. He grew up in Marietta, Oklahoma, where his father worked as an insurance agent and his mother taught business math to middle-school students. He liked fossils: "I was always picking things up on camping trips—small crustaceans, because Oklahoma was once a shallow sea, during the Cretaceous period." He wanted to become a military pilot, and applied to the Air Force Academy, but his vision wasn't good enough. "The people who don't see well, they usually make them into computer programmers, so I got an engineering scholarship to the University of Oklahoma," he said. "Pretty quickly, if you're studying engineering in Oklahoma, the oil companies come for you."
An out-of-town oilman in North Dakota can be met with a degree of suspicion, and Rankin says that the people he meets often "expect J. R. Ewing in a designer suit and cowboy boots, with a big-shot belt buckle." But he retains the deferential manner of a mid-level petroleum engineer. Sometimes, on the way to an appointment, he'll check his reflection in the car mirror and declare, "That's good enough for the girls I go with."
At Brigham's headquarters, in Austin, Rankin's superiors regard his earnestness with amusement, smiling at one another when he enters a brief meeting armed with giant maps, delineated by seismography, topography, and land-ownership. He is so compulsive about the execution of his wells that, before the ground is broken, he has all the thirty-foot joints of steel pipe that will make up the wellbore stacked neatly in the order that he plans to install them—from one to seven hundred, give or take. Brigham is gambling a great deal on the success of these wells. It has acquired the rights to nearly four hundred thousand acres in the Williston "play," as oil prospects are called, and has a roster of more than a thousand new wells to drill between now and 2021. "Since the end of 2008, we've moved about ninety-five per cent of our money out of projects in Texas and the Gulf Coast and into the Williston Basin," Ben (Bud) Brigham, the company's founder, said. "We've kind of taken the all-or-nothing position."
Around noon on April 4, 1951, Andrew (Blackie) Davidson, the drilling superintendent on a wildcat well east of Williston, set fire to a rag and flung it in the air. He watched as its trajectory met an invisible stream of natural gas that emanated from the ground, sending a flare thirty feet into the sky; by nightfall, it could be seen ten miles away. There was oil in North Dakota.
This was the state's first producing well, the Clarence Iverson No. 1. Davidson had been sent up from Oklahoma by Amerada Petroleum, and he and his crew became local heroes. "I never thought I'd be so important in my whole life," Leon (Tude) Gordon, who bottled the state's first pint of oil, recalled. "Blackie and I could've run for mayor if we'd wanted." Time devoted a cover story to Amerada's find, and by the end of the year prospectors had secured leases on almost two-thirds of the land in North Dakota. The Clarence Iverson No. 1 recovered nearly six hundred thousand barrels in the next three decades, and enabled Clarence Iverson himself, the wheat farmer who owned the land and the drilling rights beneath the well, to "pretty much retire" at the age of forty-four, his son Cliff told me. Of his parents' activities since then, Cliff said, "They went to visit their relatives in Minnesota is about all they done."
More discoveries followed, and several formations within the Williston Basin were identified as oil-bearing zones. But, because the world was then running a surplus of crude oil, the state imposed strict quotas on North Dakota's wells. "We have oil running out of our ears," an Amerada executive said at the time. Later booms worked out no better. In 1973, panic over the OPEC embargo set off another short-term drilling bonanza, and a large share of the local population took jobs in the oil field. "The second boom was bigger, but it ended much worse, because of all the locals who decided to join up," Ed Grandbois, an equipment salesman in Williston, told me. "When the companies pulled out, a lot of people said, 'I'm leaving, and if I can get a steady job I'm not coming back.' "
In Elwyn Robinson's definitive "History of North Dakota," the author notes a recurring pattern of geographic disappointment: the land has always fallen short of people's expectations. Early settlers mistook the subhumid Missouri Plateau, which occupies the western half of the state, for the same fertile ground that was being farmed successfully in the East. The state was built virtually overnight by overeager railroad lines and by Minnesota's flour-milling corporations. They brought prosperity, but also higher land prices than many farmers could afford. All of it created resentment; the state was a "colonial hinterland" of the Twin Cities, Robinson wrote, its resources and citizens "patronized and belittled." The population, estimated at sixteen thousand in 1878, grew to almost six hundred thousand by 1910 and has remained more or less constant ever since.
In 1953, J. W. Nordquist, a geologist for Phillips Petroleum, established that there was oil in a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-year-old formation which he named for the Bakken family, whose farm, near Williston, was the site of his discovery. He took note of the formation's unusual, three-tiered composition, which he characterized as "an Oreo cookie": sandwiched between two layers of black shale was a thin and elusive layer of dolomite, where the oil lay. But for decades the Bakken was ignored. The shale was considered too "tight," or lacking the adequate porosity, to justify the expense of drilling.
A commercial breakthrough came in 2000, after Richard Findley, an oil explorationist who had analyzed old well logs, became convinced that large sections of the Bakken on the Montana side of the basin contained considerable amounts of accessible oil. He persuaded a small outfit called Lyco to drill. "Dick called it 'Sleeping Giant' when he brought it to us," Michael Lewis, the project's supervising geologist, told me. Although the play, which became known as the Elm Coulee field, has since produced about a hundred million barrels of oil, most people in the industry considered it a one-off, Lewis said. "Nobody thought the rest of the Bakken was anything like it."
The most influential dissenting opinion came from Leigh Price, a geochemist at the U.S.G.S. field office in Denver, who produced a radically optimistic assessment of the Bakken's total reserves. Price had studied the formation for decades and had come to regard it as fundamentally different from other petroleum sources. One theory of modern geology holds that most of the world's hydrocarbon reserves were generated in six vast "source rock" formations—typically, layers of the ocean floor where, during six distinct geologic periods, organic matter was subsumed rapidly into the earth, and eventually matured into oil or gas. Historically, prospectors were able to recover oil only after it migrated away from source rock; although much of the oil simply dispersed, a relatively small amount trickled upward into reservoirs, nearer the surface, where it can be more easily recovered.
In 1994, the Williston region's oil industry was focussed on such a reservoir: the Madison, a limy formation that sits on top of the Bakken. Most geologists believed that the oil had seeped up from the Bakken, directly underneath. But, as Price and Julie LeFever, a geologist for the state, began comparing rock samples from various locations in the Williston Basin, they found themselves unable to correlate the Bakken and the Madison; the two are "compositionally distinct," Price and LeFever wrote. They could only conclude that the oil Nordquist found in the Bakken had never migrated anywhere; all of it remained enclosed. In 1999, Price submitted for peer review a paper that calculated an astonishing mean of four hundred and thirteen billion barrels of oil in place. The Middle Bakken layer—the filling of the Oreo—was full of natural fractures that appeared to hold oil the way a sponge holds water. In an unsupported bit of speculation, he estimated that at least half the reserves could be cost-effectively recovered—an amount close to the combined capacity of Iraq and Kuwait.
The findings were controversial. Price, an avid weight-lifter who wore his hair in a ponytail, was regarded by colleagues as arrogant, and it didn't help that, in the article, he boasted of its "staggering conclusion." Wallace Dow, a geochemist who had done influential research on source rock in the Bakken, said, "I never bought his computation methods; they were too high, but he liked to be the radical." Though he and Price were friends, he said, "people worried that Leigh and I were about to come to fisticuffs once at a petroleum meeting when we argued about it. I told him, 'You're out of your mind.' " The U.S.G.S. declined to publish the paper. Price died in 2000, of a heart attack.
By coincidence, a short time later Robert Coskey, a geologist in Denver who was developing software to build models of oil basins, phoned the local U.S.G.S. office to inquire about the available data on the Williston Basin. "I just wanted some demo data to plug in for a formation—I wasn't even looking for oil," Coskey recalled. "I asked for Price, and they said, 'You just missed him.' " The U.S.G.S. allowed Coskey to look through files in Price's office, where he discovered the research on the Bakken. Coskey told me, "When I plugged in his numbers, it didn't even look like an oil field, they were so huge."
For Brigham Exploration, the decade before Coskey's analysis had often been frustrating. The company had drilled five hundred wells, with a discovery rate more than three times the industry average, but it struggled with volatile energy prices and an overly ambitious drilling schedule. "The history of our company seems like we were always one big well away from success," Rankin said.
Bud Brigham is a slight, gentle man of fifty-one, with a boyish mop of straw-colored hair. He grew up in the oil-patch town of Midland, Texas, where his father was an oil-and-gas attorney and his mother worked for Cy Wagner, a high-profile wildcatter. At the University of Texas, he discovered Ayn Rand (a sticker on his Audi S.U.V. reads "Who Is John Galt?") and geophysics. He went into business with his wife, Anne, a geologist and a lawyer, and built a reputation for skillfully deploying a mapping technique called 3-D seismic imaging to pinpoint hydrocarbon deposits in areas with little margin for error.
In 2005, as Brigham labored at traditional exploration work—"searching hunt-and-peck," as he put it—other operators were having success in natural-gas fields. These were "resource plays"—large formations, easy to find but stubborn to extract from—that had recently been made viable by new recovery technologies. Brigham said, "If you can unlock the reservoir, it becomes more like mining or a factory." He was envious, he told me. "We were watching our peers get rich off it."
That year, he instructed his staff to scour the country for a resource play, and in the summer a Brigham delegation attended a trade show in Houston and found a booth advertising a deal in the Bakken formation. A company from Denver wanted to unload forty-six thousand acres. Oil resource plays like the Bakken are rare, Brigham said—more lucrative than natural gas but also more challenging, because oil molecules move less easily through rock fractures. "We ended up getting it for about a hundred dollars an acre," Jeff Larson, Brigham's head of exploration, said. "The Bakken was a little too wild for them."
It was a gamble. Around that time, the director of a research center at the University of North Dakota got hold of Leigh Price's paper and posted it on the Internet, where it began to attract interest. But nobody had successfully drilled that part of the Bakken. Elm Coulee, the Montana discovery, was forty miles away, and its oil was contained in a neat rock trap at the edge of the basin. "Our acreage was in the center of the basin, no traps," Pat Medlock, a Brigham geologist, said. "But that gave us a nice thickness of Middle Bakken"—the promising center of the Oreo.
The next year, Brigham drilled three wells in North Dakota, and the results were discouraging. "They were poor wells," Rankin said. By Brigham's estimate, a Bakken well needs an initial production rate of four hundred barrels a day in order to be viable. These came in at around two hundred, and, Rankin says, "we cooled down in a hurry." Many in Williston thought the company's acreage was barren. Rankin recalled, "People kept asking us, 'What the hell are you doing there? It's a graveyard.' "
At the time, the industry was combining two innovative techniques to extract oil from difficult sources like the Bakken. One, hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," involves pumping water and chemicals into a well under such pressure that cracks form in the surrounding rock and release hydrocarbons. About three million gallons of water and chemicals are injected into the bore over the weeklong course of a fracturing treatment, along with four million pounds of "proppant"—sand and tiny ceramic beads that get inside the fractures and prop them open to allow oil or gas to flow.
The other technique, horizontal drilling, prepares a well for fracking by extending the wellbore laterally through the pay zone—the oil-rich part of a rock bed. The Middle Bakken layer is thin—between ten and fifty feet thick through most of the basin—which makes it all but impossible for a vertical well to gain purchase. At a restaurant one night, Rankin demonstrated the principle for me, using a drinking straw from a glass of iced tea. "This here's the wellbore, and this is vertical," he said, sinking the straw down through the face of a quarter loaf of garlic bread, which represented oil-bearing rock. The straw was in contact with bread through only a small area, from the top of the piece to the bottom. "Now, if I'm a horizontal well and I'm making a long lateral, look at this." He poked the straw sideways into the bread and out the tapering heel, permitting the well to tunnel the long way through the pay zone. "You get two miles of pay."
Horizontal drilling has become extraordinarily precise. "If your house was ten thousand feet underground, these guys could bring a drill bit through the front door and out the back," an oil-industry blogger wrote last year. Increasingly sophisticated sensors provide hundreds of calculations per minute as a drill bores ahead, dictating the angle at which to adjust the bit in order to maintain a graceful curve that won't kink the pipe. Still, a lot of guessing is involved with a new play. "It's science, but it's also an art form," Rankin said one day at the Boots, another well that he was putting in. We were watching members of the mud-logging crew, who followed the drill's progress by analyzing the rocks it spit out. With every wormlike advance of thirty feet the wellbore made, one of the crew members was sent to collect fresh cuttings, which were expelled from a pipe and collected in a metal tank called a possum belly.
"The cuttings tell us where the bit is—whatever just reached the surface, they're the last thing the drill ate," the mud-logging supervisor, Kathy Neset, told me in her lab, a trailer stationed beside the rig. "Oil-bearing rock will glow if we put it under ultraviolet light. A good well, the sample bag will be dripping oil." She handed me a gray nugget of Middle Bakken rock that had been kicked to the surface. It was dense, heavy, and generally unremarkable; it didn't look as if it could possibly be porous enough to contain oil. "You see what they mean by tight rock?" Neset said.
Neset, a handsome blond woman, may be the only mud-logger in the state to wear gold earrings and a cashmere cardigan sweater on a rig. She had arrived in the Williston Basin in 1979, after she graduated from Brown with a geology degree. "I remember Meridian Exploration coming in the eighties and trying to drill an early horizontal," she said. "Horizontal was so secretive then. They sent a guy out here with a briefcase of drilling instructions and he wouldn't let it leave his hand." She said the most difficult part now isn't finding the pay zone but staying in it for the length of the lateral. "The Middle Bakken doesn't follow a truly flat line, because there are up-dips and down-dips—a wavy line," Neset said. "If the bit moves out of the pay and you're getting back Oreo-cookie shales instead of the center, it's tough to know if you need to correct high or correct low." If you miss your target, a driller on the Boots said, "you have to bring out your 'big gray eraser.' That's cement."
When Brigham entered the Bakken, its staff was made up mostly of exploration men—geologists and geophysicists—and some of them dismissed resource plays as the abandonment of the wildcatter spirit; Jeff Larson, the Brigham explorationist, derided the engineering work as "a lot of blocking and tackling." Rankin was assigned to the Bakken project because he was one of only half a dozen engineers at the company. To complement his technical knowledge, he hoped to enlist Mitchel Brown, a freelance horizontal-drilling expert he had worked with briefly a decade earlier.
Brown is a sawed-off shotgun of a man, with a high, excitable voice and mismatched eyes—one blue and one eggplant-colored, since an accident, in 1990, when a hose on a rig collapsed and sprayed hydraulic fluid in his face. "Shredded iris and retinal detachment," he told me. "Four months' workers' comp." Brown held his first job on a rig at fourteen, in Oklahoma, where his father was a professional trap-shooter. Later, on deployments to Alaska, the Ivory Coast, and the Indian Ocean, he specialized in snubbing—forcing pipe into a well, against pressure, to perform repairs. Now, with his own consulting business, he earns more than three hundred thousand dollars a year, working eight or nine months. At first, Brown wasn't interested in joining Rankin in North Dakota. "It's too cold," he said. But he finally assented. He had been hearing about the unrealized potential of the Williston Basin, he said, and "I decided I like a challenge."
The two of them made an odd couple. Where Rankin obsessed over weights and measures, Brown, who is forty-five, relied on an intuitive ability to visualize the physical relationship a wellbore has to its setting. "You've got to put yourself in the hole," he told me. "I had an old guy tell me that once, and I thought, Now, how the hell does he do that?" He once ran a video camera down a wire to diagnose a damaged well. "It was just like your eyeball was in the wellbore. The water was flooding right past." Brown described Rankin as "one of the most open-minded drilling engineers I've met"—a rather backhanded compliment. But, he acknowledged, "Russell is one of those people that can put himself in the hole."
Both men were frustrated by their initial drilling in the Bakken. "I fought with the first few wells," Brown said. He worried that Brigham was going to pull out, and told Rankin to let his boss know that they needed time and money to experiment. Brigham agreed to budget them sixty million dollars for a year of drilling. Brown and his wife, Helen, moved their R.V. from Oklahoma to Williston, and, eventually, his son and son-in-law joined them. "We're gypsies, anyway," Helen Brown told me.
The low production of the wells, Brown said, indicated a need for not only more muscle but also more precision. They were trying to frack the entire lateral portion of the wellbore at once, with a single burst of pressurized fluid. Rankin explained, "The action is ten thousand feet underground, and you have no idea where in the whole thing the fractures are."
To solve this problem, operators had attempted to divide a wellbore into segments, using fibreglass plugs, so that each stage could be fractured separately. But multistage fracks were unreliable, Brown said: "People called them fancy fracks, because they cost more but didn't work." Plugs got stuck in the well, or they failed to hold their place. He added, "You'd try them and still couldn't be sure if they did a damn thing." Indeed, the next four wells that he and Rankin built in 2006 used seven stages each, but their production was not significantly better.
That summer, word spread through the basin that EOG Resources, a company from Houston, had sunk an enormous well seventy miles southeast of Williston. When EOG submitted the results to the state, as required by law, Rankin saw that the well had an initial production estimate of about a thousand barrels a day—and that it had been fractured in five stages. EOG had pulled off a fancy frack better than anybody else. But how? "Their guys are very tight-lipped, and for a while nobody could find out," Rankin said.
The oil industry accepts a certain amount of corporate espionage as part of doing business: companies spy on one another's wells to see which areas are producing and what methods work. The Brigham land department began to follow where EOG was leasing, and obtained the rights to small portions on the same lots—sometimes as little as an acre within a two-square-mile parcel. Because the two companies technically shared the lots, EOG was legally obligated to allow Brigham to buy into its wells—and thus had to provide details of how the wells were administered. "They still weren't easy," Rankin recalled. "I'd ask for their report and I'd get, 'Oh, I have a call in on that,' or 'Let me see if it's ready yet.' But eventually they have to comply."
It took a year for EOG's secret to emerge. "We found out they were using swell packers" to divide the well into sections, Brown said. Swell packers are spongelike tubes, not much larger than a rolling pin, coated in a rubber compound that swells when it comes into contact with hydrocarbons. As they expand, they seal the wellbore more efficiently, increasing the pressure of the fracking fluid. "We went and redid an early well that we'd abandoned—as a seven-frack instead of a one-frack—using the swell packers," Lance Langford, a Brigham executive, said. The cost of the well went up by fifty per cent, but its production increased nearly fourfold. "When we saw the flow, we shut it down after six hours," Langford said. "We didn't want anybody to see how big the flare was until we bought up more acres."
Brown and Rankin's wells continued to utilize more stages—ten, twelve, and more. Rankin said, "The wells weren't getting longer—the frack sections were getting shorter." Their production rate jumped again when they extended the horizontal section of the wellbore from five thousand feet to ten thousand and continued adding more frack sections. Rankin said, "A year ago, people said it was too risky to have a twenty-frack job. Now we're doing forty." Last year, Brigham's wells had an average initial production rate of nearly three thousand barrels a day—the highest among its competitors. The utility of combining a multi-frack with a long lateral has become an article of faith in the Bakken. "Now everybody here copycats us on that," Rankin said.
The public playground in the middle of Williston recently underwent a four-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar upgrade, courtesy of the oil companies. The new equipment includes a jungle gym with towers designed to look like Halliburton oil derricks, a seesaw that resembles a Brigham pump jack, and a tunnel for children to crawl in that bears the name and logo of Enbridge, a pipeline operator. Williston's downtown is quiet—a dingy precinct of Victorian-era limestone storefronts—but the business routes that stretch toward the drilling fields are lined with proliferating warehouses, dispatching centers, and equipment showrooms. Kyle Hexom, whose family owns a well-site-construction business, told me, "Between booms, there were some really lean times for my dad." Now, he said, the company didn't have enough trucks for the jobs it was offered.
The town's population has grown in the past decade from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand, overwhelming Williston's housing stock. "We've got two new developments that are being built," Ward Koeser, the town's mayor, said one morning at city hall. "The rest of what we want to do for now is a combination of short-term residences and medium-term." These are euphemisms for "man camps": motels or clusters of trailers that house laborers in large numbers. Eight have recently gone up around Williston.
The man camps are a source of some tension between the oil industry and established residents—the Williston Herald regularly gets comments from readers lamenting the town's "ghettos" and their constituency of "oil-field trash." But they are a familiar sight in Williston, and workers say that the atmosphere is largely peaceful. "In your twelve hours off, after you do your clothes and eat supper, all you do is sleep anyway," Jon Grounds, who lives in a three-hundred-bed camp, said. He was walking from his quarters—a long trailer containing twenty single rooms, each with a flat-screen TV mounted above the bed—to the chow hall. Grounds, who is thirty, works as a roughneck for fourteen consecutive days, then drives several hours to Zap, North Dakota, to spend two weeks at home. "It's not that hard—except when you're up on the rig you've got to eat a sandwich on a string," he said. "I think I'm gonna make a career out of it."
Leaving aside the risk of auditory damage—hearing aids are ubiquitous among rig workers over forty—and the threat of injury from mishandled explosives, the work is attractive. Sammy Farnham, a lanky, red-faced man who operates perforating guns, arrived with his wife three years ago, when he was having a hard time finding construction work in South Carolina. "We got here on a Saturday, and I had a job Tuesday morning," he said. Farnham made seventy thousand dollars in the first five months of the year and was expecting two bonus payouts of as much as thirty thousand dollars each, "when things get really busy." He had already paid off his house and car. "My manager made three hundred and twenty thousand dollars last year, just for running the truck."
One afternoon, as Rankin and I drove through the Parshall oil field, east of Williston, he pointed out a big contemporary house with a vaulted glass entryway. "New home," he said. "New car, new boat. New wife, probably." Residents claim that Bakken money has largely been spent on modes of transport or reinvested in the land. More than one person expressed interest in buying a new combine, which can cost three hundred thousand dollars. Richard Nelson, a sixty-six-year-old construction company employee, told me that he'd started playing mineral rights when they were a dollar an acre. "Now," he said, "I've got a few acres with multiple wells. I could show you some checks in my car."
Much of the basin is under contract, but people who still hold parcels can lease out their mineral rights for annual payments of as much as three thousand dollars per acre, in addition to a twenty-per-cent stake in the oil that's produced. A moderately productive plot of two square miles could bring the owners—typically, groups of relatives and speculators—a million dollars up front, and five hundred thousand dollars a year for two decades. Ron Gerwien, who owns a sandblasting operation, said that "a changing of the weather" occurred when a major oil field began producing near Stanley, an hour's drive from Williston. "Up until now, the two families that had all the money were always the banker and the telephone-company operator."
The intermediaries whom oil companies rely on during mineral-rights transactions are called land men. Brigham's land department moved a team of seventy to Williston, and also keeps a local man named John Schmitz on retainer to handle sensitive land deals with townspeople. "I don't do geology—I do clan-ology," Schmitz told me one evening, when he and his wife, Cathy, brought me to their country club for dinner. "I'm third-generation Williston, from a wheat farm, just like them." Brigham called on him when an agreement with Abe Owan was endangered. Apparently, a young in-house land man, up from Texas, had tried to fast-talk Owan into accepting a low payment. Owan asked him to leave the premises. Cathy said, "The good-ol'-boy shit is not going to work here."
"Abe knew my dad for decades," Schmitz said. "He insisted on a higher price than I was allowed to say yes to, but I knew he wouldn't go lower." Brigham assented, and Schmitz closed the deal.
Both Schmitzes were standout athletes at Williston High, and Cathy is a prominent lawyer in town. "I started buying minerals for myself after the second boom, when nobody wanted them," Schmitz said. "I had a hunch it wasn't done yet." He began by courting the neighbors of his old family farm, which overlooks the Missouri River. "I knew these people, and none of them were particularly wealthy," he said. "I would tell them to sell me half and keep half for themselves."
"It literally is free money," Cathy said.
Oilmen often attribute the accelerated growth in the Bakken to what Bud Brigham calls North Dakota's "conducive regulatory climate." Hydraulic fracturing has become enormously controversial, and other plays throughout the country are being slowed by concerns that fracking accidents have contaminated drinking water. "Gasland," an anti-fracking documentary that was nominated for an Oscar this year, showed residents of Colorado whose tap water contained so much methane gas—apparently from leaking wells underfoot—that a cigarette lighter held to a spigot set the water on fire. The Environmental Protection Agency's last official study of fracking, in 2004, concluded that it poses "little or no threat" to water-supply safety, but the report was faulted for relying too heavily on scientists employed by the oil industry. The agency set up a new study and expects to deliver its initial results by the end of 2012.
Fracking's public image has probably not been helped by a regulatory loophole that, until recently, enabled the producers of fracturing fluid to keep its contents secret. According to a study commissioned last year by Tudor Pickering Holt, an investment bank that focusses on the energy industry, the fluid is "99.5 percent water." The rest is a combination of, among other substances, guar gum (used in cosmetics and ice cream), isopropanol (glass cleaner), potassium chloride (salt substitute), ethylene glycol (antifreeze), and various acids used to clean swimming pools.
Proponents point out that hydraulic fracturing has been common in oil fields for sixty years and is currently used in perhaps eighty per cent of America's gas wells. "The use of old, poorly cemented wells—not fracking—is what can cause stray gas to leak into the water supply," Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State who has often defended the technique, told me. "That's something you'll find with any type of underground well, even a water well." However, "there have been instances of chemicals spilling in aboveground accidents," he said. "The industry has to do a better job of mitigating risk."
Lynn Helms, the chief mineral-resources regulator in North Dakota, told me, "There are some legitimate risks to simply getting frack chemicals to the well. You've got thirty gallons of biohazard at a well site that can be very dangerous in its concentrated form." In November, after there were two spills at well sites in North Dakota (neither of which, apparently, contaminated the public water supply), Helms requested funding to hire twenty additional inspectors.
On the other hand, Helms said, because the fracturing of the Bakken formation takes place nearly two miles below the aquifers, the risk of underground contamination is "as close to scientifically impossible as anything can be said to be." Even some of the state's most prominent opponents of fracking concede as much, and, in any case, their concerns are outmatched by the prospect of so much oil money. "Oil is very popular, and the economy here is a long-suffering agricultural economy," Mark Trechock, the director of the Dakota Resource Council, said; the council has frequently called for fracking to be more strictly regulated.
Since the U.S.G.S. study in 2008, further estimates have begun to bear out Leigh Price's figures, suggesting total reserves of as much as three hundred billion barrels and, perhaps more important, increasingly optimistic recovery rates, which have swelled from one per cent to as much as ten per cent. "We've seen a massive change in just the past few months," Stephen Richardson, an energy-business analyst at Morgan Stanley, said. "It's the maturation of the play: twice as many rigs as a year ago."
Pete Stark, a geologist at the energy-consulting firm IHS, recently forecast that the output of the Williston Basin will double in the next five years. "We may not find another Bakken, but the techniques have led us into seven or eight new oil plays," in Texas, Colorado, and elsewhere, Stark said. Taken together, the new reservoirs are expected to raise domestic production by as much as two million barrels a day. "That's not quite energy security, but suddenly now you're talking about an offset of twenty per cent of imported crude," Stark said. "Every oil company in the country is looking at their source rock to see if they can crack the code."
Back at the Abe well, a radio system that connected the vehicles came on: "Pressure's up. We're ready to start the frack." Rankin flung open the heavy door of a trailer marked "Central Command" and took his place beside five members of the fracturing crew. They wore red jumpsuits and headsets, and they sat before a desk containing a double row of computer monitors and snacks for the twelve-hour shift: Goldfish, lemon coolers, peanut butter, a bag of precooked shrimp.
Outside, fracking equipment surrounded the hole in the ground in a tableau that resembled a split lobster: at the perimeter, the hard red shell of trucks bearing triplex pumps, mixers, and tanks; in the middle, the dirty green guts, composed of intercoiled pipes, hoses, and valves. A worker leaned over the wellhead and unceremoniously dropped in a black plastic ball not much bigger than a walnut. "Down the hole," Rankin said. The ball was going to be swept through the wellbore until, within the hour, its path was blocked by a fibreglass plug. "The ball will seat there and begin to divert the frack fluid," he explained. Then the fluid would enter the rock formation via the perforations made earlier by the guns. "You know the rest. Pumping fractures rock. Fluid invades fracks. Oil comes to Papa."
Something called "slick water" was the first substance poured in. "It's got an additive that cuts down on friction, so it moves faster," Rankin said. One computer screen listed, in various colors, the concentration levels of the compounds that would be mixed into the slurry. When the ball encountered the plug, a computerized graph indicated that pressure inside the well was spiking. Two workers pushed buttons that sent about twenty tons of proppant sand from a bus-size bin into the wellhead. The sand would be flushed into the fractures and would hold them open. In about fifteen minutes, pressure started falling off again. "That means the sand is hitting the perfs," Rankin said.
Outside, night was falling, and a set of portable stadium lights came on. Rankin had his men gradually increase the fluid's viscosity and the diameter of the grains of proppant, to create a better conduit for the oil to flow back out. "I like to bring it up from about a lotion to a molasses," Rankin said. Every time he altered the mixture, a first-year worker—a "worm," distinguished by his green hard hat—appeared, bearing a fresh sample in a plastic cup, and performed a test. First, he tilted the cup so that the frack fluid formed a rubbery lip, a couple of inches long, that hung suspended in air. Then he touched the lip to Rankin's hand, to see that his skin remained dry. Finally, he flipped the sample into another cup and checked that no traces remained in the first. By the time the concentration was at its highest level, the fluid was like an elastic peanut butter and could hold a lip nearly as tall as the cup. "That's a Gene Simmons tongue," Rankin said approvingly.
In another week, after the fracturing trucks were moved off, the Abe underwent three days of "flowback" treatment, to pump out the fracking fluid before oil recovery began. The first night, employees saw flares ten feet tall rising from the well. "If there's that much gas running through it before you're even pumping oil, usually you're getting a good well," Rankin said. The well came on line with an initial production of 1,847 barrels a day. "I'd say we're very pleased," Rankin said.
The land the Abe well runs beneath was once inhabited by a Norwegian family named Ellingson, which claimed six adjacent homestead plots. I learned from a visit to the records vault of the county courthouse that in 1907 the U.S. government had deeded a hundred and sixty acres to Ed Ellingson for the sum of two hundred dollars. Soon, four of his brothers—Sievert, Albert, Miller, and Ole—settled around him.
Life on the frontier was hard. In 1913, Ed was killed by a passing train as he tried to shoo cattle off the tracks. His father got his estate: the land, plus "one horse named Cooley, one old binder, household furniture, one old wagon, one bobsled, one hay rake, and blacksmith tools," according to a typewritten deed. Sievert's wife died the same year, while he was working in the fields. Sievert wanted to build up a herd of Herefords, "but the drought made all pastures inadequate," his son, Elmer, explained in an account published in 1975 by the county historical society. "Crops failed repeatedly. . . . There were years we had to borrow money for seed grain." Eventually, Sievert, his brother Miller, and their families moved to Minnesota. Another brother, Albert, ended up with many of the family's acres but failed to pay taxes on his property, and in 1942 it was repossessed by the government.
The land seemed to have given the Ellingsons little in return for their labor. But the last court filing, dated March, 2010—just a month before Brigham's drilling rig was in place—revealed that there was a holdout: a young housewife and mother who lives in Williston. (The woman asked not to be named, in order to maintain her privacy.) She was a descendant of Ole Ellingson, one of the five original homesteading brothers, whose family had retained a large share of mineral rights even after much of the property was seized.
The woman and two siblings had been given the rights by their grandmother, an Ellingson widow. "I didn't hear much about North Dakota from my grandmother growing up—she moved out of the state when I was very young, when her first husband passed away," she said. The woman leased the rights to Brigham. The arrangement will likely pay the family several hundred thousand dollars a year.
The family had attempted to sell the rights once before. "Around '98 or '99, my grandmother had a couple of medical procedures," the woman said. "She was going through a financially difficult time." The only buyer her grandmother could suggest was a tenant farmer who was taking care of the land. "I called the gentleman, but he wasn't interested," the woman said. "She was asking ten thousand dollars. I guess I can see how it didn't sound like such a great deal at the time." ♦


text:
When they asked me to review the Tragically Hip, I resisted at first. It was a little late for an old sports writer to become a rock critic. And how could I be objective?
The Hip are my favorite band. Gordon Downie is one of my heroes. I get choked up at some point whenever I see them live.
Eventually, I relented. Bruce Andriatch, the features editor, said it didn't matter if I knew about chord progressions or bass lines. It would work out fine.
He didn't tell me what to do if it rained.
Rain was inevitable, of course. At around 6 p.m., a hard wind was whipping through the outer harbor concert site, whispering of bad things to come. I told myself the storm would blow through, as I do before a big golf date.
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, the pride of Vermont, knocked 'em dead in a one-hour warm-up. Potter, resplendent in a white bathrobe and high heels, blazed through her standards, "Medicine" and "Paris (Ooh La La)." In a nod to Canadian rock, she did a stirring cover of Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl."
In a tribute to a late friend, Potter sang, "I can't look at the stars." I looked up anyway.
Dark clouds were moving over the venue and toward the south. Maybe we'd be spared, after all.
At 8:45, the Hip arrived on stage, as their faithful fans exulted. Thirty years and still the same five guys: Johnny Fay on drums; Gord Sinclair on bass; Paul Langlois and Rob Baker on guitars; Downie, the genius front man, singing, ranting and dancing around like a puppet come to life.
Downie was dressed in a seersucker suit, with a black tie and fedora. In exaggerated diva fashion, he wiped his head with a white handkerchief. He wiped his shiny belt buckle. As always, he treated the microphone like an animate friend.
I was about 20 feet from the stage, right in the center. No VIP status or backstage pass for me. I wanted to be with the people. I was surrounded by kids and people in their 50s. Clutching my notebook, I felt like Bill Miller, the 15-year-old kid in the movie "Almost Famous."
The Hip began with "At Transformation," from their 13th and latest album, "Now For Plan A." The second line of the song is "Through the night it's been raining venom." I kept seeing omens.
Then it was "Grace Too," one of the Hip's signature concert numbers, which pulls inveterate Hip watchers right into Gord's orbit. I was right there with them, lifting my right arm toward the Buffalo skyline and singing along, "I come from downtown, born ready for you."
Did I mention my lack of objectivity?
They moved on to "Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin' Man," a quirky fan favorite that evolved into a live staple. Then Downie did "Man Machine Poem," another number off the latest record. Ask Jeff Miers if you want to know what it means.
At one point, Downie used the microphone stand to paddle himself across the stage. He has a thing about water. Two of the Hip's biggest numbers are "Nautical Disaster" and "New Orleans Is Sinking." Evidently, he sensed a nautical event was about to unfold.
The rain began at the very instant the Hip launched into their fifth number, "Love Is a First." It was dark by then. The rainfall came swiftly and suddenly, slanting sideways across the stage, splashing off the black floor and the instruments.
"A warm, pelting rain," Downie said.
Unfazed, Downie sang at the very front of the stage, letting the rain pour over him like applause. He held out his hat, collecting random raindrops.
The crowd was almost delirious, shouting the refrain to the offending skies, "This is as bad as or worse! As bad as or worse. Love is a curse!"
The weather was a curse. So be it. We're Buffalo fans. We endure. We get the Hip, and Downie gets us. He talked about our beautiful city. He chided the rain.
"Don't take any undue pride," Gordon said, "because we saw you coming."
They stopped the show for 15 minutes. Langlois came out, drinking from a red plastic cup and smoking a cigarette. Downie sat near the front of the stage, his hat between his legs. He clacked cups with Langlois.
A "Let's Go, Buffalo" chant went through the crowd. I doubt many of the 12,000 fans left. Downie delivered a couple of his rambling soliloquies.
"In a flooded world," he said, "it's the women who are the swimmers."
Downie said there were electrical problems, but he was confident the show would resume. Then he and Langlois did a two-man rendition of the lovely "Wheat Kings." The crowd helped him out, blaring out "Wheat kings and pretty things, let's see what tomorrow brings!"
That's when I started to cry. For more than 20 years, the Tragically Hip have been an emotional touchstone for me, one of those unforeseen benefits of moving to Buffalo and living next to Canada, along with hockey, wineries and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Downie and Langlois performed "Scared," a personal favorite of mine. At 9:45, Downie delivered the bad news. Even worse weather was coming. The show was over. People had to leave.
"Let's do it nice and orderly; slow, cool fashion," Downie said. "We'll all get safe and take a shower, and this will all be some strange dream."
He thanked the fans twice. Later, as the traffic jam snaked its way out of the parking lot, the Hip agreed to reschedule the concert, likely within the next month. Fans will be reissued tickets from their point of purchase.
Promoters said the Hip were under no contractual obligation. But they feel a commitment to the fans of Buffalo, who have stood by them all these years. There's a mutual love there, an almost sacramental bond.
In its own way, Friday was a show to remember. It was tough to walk away without hearing "Courage," "Ahead by a Century" or "Little Bones."
But I'll never forget Downie improvising his way through a rain delay. It's good to know the Hip will be back soon.
I plan to be there. This time, as only a fan.
email: email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Howdy All
Snowshoed from the tram to the peak yesterday with friends -- Cameron, Marilyn and Kalen. Starting temperature was ~34 F. There was a wee bit of snow over an icy crust.
We went up the traditional winter route, past the base of Miller saddle and continued on to the base of the gully by Jean. We deferred to Cameron as to whether we would continue up "Jean's gully" to the ridge or head back down to the base of the Miller Saddle. After Cameron tested the snow with an ice-ax, we followed him up to the ridge and headed towards San Jacinto. Gorgeous rime ice on the ridge but couldn't get my iPhone to work. Once at the peak, we met fellow San Jacinto hiking meetup members -- Kimla took these photos:
After lunch in front of the hut, we headed down.
Fortunately, the snow had softened a bit. Cameron observed that the "snow" on the north side was like ice-cubes that had melted and re-frozen. The "snow" on the south side was more like Styrofoam. Bottom line -- due to the "freeze-thaw" cycle, I will be hiking in the desert until the snow conditions improve.
Miles of smiles,


text:
Application InformationSign up to view
Amount Awarded
Application Deadline
Awarded By
ESA Foundation
Award Amount
$1,000 annually, non-renewable. The award may be applied toward tuition, registration fees, books, dormitory fees, or any other college fees or academic expenses. The award will be made payable to the college or university of the recipient's choice. If the college or university of original choice is changed, the scholarship director must be notified immediately. No special consideration will be given to previous winners.
One award offered annually.
Additional Information
Please note: The required $5 application fee is used to cover the costs of running the scholarship program. Any fee monies remaining after costs have been covered are put back into the general scholarship fund to support future scholarship awards. Applicants are selected based on the following criteria: leadership/service; financial need; and scholastic ability. Winners will be notified by June 1.
Deadline Info
The application deadline date has not yet been finalized for this year, but is expected to remain the same as last year. The deadline date shown here is tentative based on last year's date. Please che ... sign up for full scholarship deadline information.


text:
- Home
- Editor's Desk
- Features
- Columns
- Arts & Culture
- Special Editions
- Advertising
Monday October 21, 2019; 08:39 am EDT
How Bay Weekly's Betsy Kehne got the shot
Betsy Kehne had been waiting for three decades for the bird perched a stone's throw from her window.
At five years old, she'd grieved at learning that the pesticide DDT was pushing bald eagles to extinction.
DDT was banned in 1972. By the end of the century, the number of nesting eagles in Maryland had increased sixfold to 260 pairs. Today, more than 2,000 bald eagles make their homes in the Chesapeake region, so that seeing them soaring overhead is no longer rare.
But Kehne, Bay Weekly production manager and a hobbyist photographer, had never come close enough to get a shot.
Now an eagle had come to her Southern Anne Arundel County home, perching a stone's throw away on a neighbor's Shady Side pier.
She grabbed her Nikon D50 and ran for the shot.
Still wearing in her bright-pink flannel pajamas covered with monkeys, she slid on her coat and husband Mark's sandals.
Tip-toeing closer to the white-headed bird, she snapped a picture at every step. The eagle never flinched. From behind a tree in her neighbor's yard, Kehne got the picture she wanted.
Posted on Bay Weekly's Facebook page, Kehne's eagle sparked a reaction.
Within 40 minutes, her picture earned 32 likes, the highest ever for a Bay Weekly Facebook post. The buzz escalated to 114 likes, 11 shares and 29 comments in three hours.
Today, the picture has 228 likes, 31 comments and 23 shares, each one multiplying Bay Weekly's friendship.
Go to www.facebook.com/bayweekly to see the eagle — and what's new at Bay Weekly.


text:
View catholic Singles in Brooklawn
By clicking continue, I agree to receive transactional and promotional emails from Match.com. I understand that I am free to withdraw consent at any time.
By using our site, you agree to the Match.com Terms of Use.
Search the Garden State for your next date today and find a New Jersey single in your area. Relationships are a two-way street, start searching for your match today! Are you looking for a date or a serious relationship with a Brooklawn, New Jersey single? Sexy and single in Brooklawn, New Jersey? Join the ultimate single's site and view thousands of singles' profiles.
Audubon, Audubon Park, Barrington, Bellmawr, Blackwood, Blackwood Terrace, Blenheim, Camden, Collingswood, Deptford, Glendora, Gloucester City, Haddon Heights, Haddon Township, Haddonfield, Hi Nella, Hilltop, Hi-Nella, Lawnside, Magnolia, Middle City East, Mount Ephraim, National Park, Oak Valley, Oaklyn, Runnemede, Somerdale, Thorofare, Wenonah, West Collingswood, West Collingswood Heights, West Deptford, Westmont, Westville, Westville Grove, William Penn Annex East, William Penn Annex West, Woodbury, Woodbury Heights, Woodlynne view all states »
Asian Men, Black Men, Catholic Men, Christian Men, Divorced Men, Free Online Dating, Gay Singles, Gay Dating, Jewish Men, Lesbian Singles, Single Parents, view all communities »


text:
Innisfree My Real Squeeze Mask (New 2017) is a new upgrade from the Innisfree It's Real Squeeze Mask. With a 100% cellulose fermented eucalyptus mask, this new version achieves better tear resistance and is thinner at the same time as it adheres to the skin when used, enhancing the penetration effect. of nutrients.
Innisfree My Real Squeeze Mask (New 2017) is made by cold pressing, meaning that the nutrients in the ingredients are pressed and extracted in very small amounts in gradual decreasing temperature. In this way, the nutrients obtained are pure and pure, and unnecessary ingredients are removed.
Innisfree My Real Squeeze Mask Cucumber (Cucumber): Moisturizes and hydrates, energizes the skin.
02. Except the eye area and the upper part of the mouth, it will be attached to the face.
03. After 10~20 minutes, remove the sheet. Lightly tap to absorb the contents.


text:
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Healing Spell Giveaway
But today it's all about you. Not only is Kimberley the nicest person ever, and I'm going to see her again at her signing in Salt Lake on Thursday night, but she sent me some swag for The Healing Spell!
And my son totally wanted this gator, and he's pretty mad that I'm going to be giving it to one of you.
First, what The Healing Spell is about. Watch this amazing trailer.
You know you want this book. It's just that good, trust me. A 5-starrer, for sure.
So the giveaway. You'll get a signed copy of The Healing Spell (not pictured), the below-pictured stuffed gator, and a book plate and bookmark.
To enter:
1. Follow my blog.
2. Leave me a comment.
3. Extra points for tweeting, posting on your blog, etc. Just let me know what you did in your comment.
Have a great day!
94 comments:
- Ted Cross said...
Hey, I'm in!
- July 5, 2010 at 5:38 AM
- Em-Musing said...
I'm in too. thanks, Fantastic trailer.
- July 5, 2010 at 5:41 AM
- Natalie Aguirre said...
It sounds great. I'd love to win it. And I can't wait for your review.
- July 5, 2010 at 5:48 AM
- Natalie Aguirre said...
It sounds great. I'd love to win it. And I can't wait for your review.
- July 5, 2010 at 5:48 AM
- Heather Kelly said...
I'm in. If I happen to post and mention this, I'll re-comment! thanks for giving away the good stuff!!
- July 5, 2010 at 6:12 AM
- Liza said...
I'm in, but if I win, you can give the alligator to your son. :)
- July 5, 2010 at 6:17 AM
- Theresa Milstein said...
I'm in too. And like Liza, if I win, I'd be happy to give the gator to your son.
I'm a follower, commenter, and I'm linking the contest to my blog.
Hope you had a great 4th!
- July 5, 2010 at 6:32 AM
- Candyland said...
Sounds like a good one1 *I miss you*
- July 5, 2010 at 6:50 AM
- Mary Brebner said...
Even though I never win, I love to try--plus, the gator's cute!
Tweeted this contest, too.
- July 5, 2010 at 6:52 AM
- Palindrome said...
I never win either. Sigh. But I shall enter and post in my sidebar! The more the merrier!! Huzzah!!! I love books!
- July 5, 2010 at 7:04 AM
- Jaydee Morgan said...
Looking forward to your full review! It looks good :)
- July 5, 2010 at 7:25 AM
- erica_henry said...
I'd love to be entered.
I follow
I'm leaving you a comment now
And I retweeted @ericakhenry
- July 5, 2010 at 7:28 AM
- Andrea Mack said...
I'm already a follower. This sounds like a great book!
- July 5, 2010 at 7:33 AM
- Kerri C at CK Farm said...
Cool! Good summer reads are for me :)
- July 5, 2010 at 7:49 AM
- salarsenッ said...
That was great! I tweeted you and posted the giveaway to my sidebar. Thanks!!
- July 5, 2010 at 7:51 AM
- Larissa said...
Sounds great!
lchardesty at yahoo dot com
- July 5, 2010 at 8:09 AM
- Rachele Alpine said...
Great contest...the book sounds awesome! I'm a follower!
- July 5, 2010 at 8:12 AM
- Amber Lynae said...
Still following your wonderful blog.
I would love to win.
- July 5, 2010 at 8:31 AM
- Claire Dawn said...
This is another one of the books that keeps crossing my radar.
- July 5, 2010 at 8:31 AM
- PaulaKayMac said...
This is me, entering. The book sounds great!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:01 AM
- B.J. Anderson said...
That was a really awesome book trailer! And I would love to be entered. I'm tweeting this post too. Thanks for the giveaway!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:01 AM
- Danyelle said...
I've been meaning to get my hands on this one. O:) I've tweeted and facebooked--I already stalk you. :p
- July 5, 2010 at 9:06 AM
- Kathryn Packer Roberts said...
I'm in. I follow your blog (and you follow mine... kathrynpackerroberts.blogspot.com, it's in my side pannel under contests).
You make this book sound so good, can't wait to read it!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:16 AM
- Abby Stevens said...
Looks great! I would love to read/win this. :)
- July 5, 2010 at 9:18 AM
- angie said...
I would love to be entered!
I am a follower
I tweeted http://twitter.com/bangersis/status/17797197335
- July 5, 2010 at 9:19 AM
- Kristen said...
Sounds fantastic! I would love to win and read this.
I've been a follower for while. :)
dragonzgoil at gmail dot com
- July 5, 2010 at 9:27 AM
- Jonathon Arntson said...
Wow. THE HEALING SPELL looks nothing like anything I have ever read, but I would love to give it a try.
Have a good 4th, E?
- July 5, 2010 at 9:39 AM
- Mary Campbell said...
I met Kim at Storymakers and her book sound great love to get a copy. I tweeted this post.
- July 5, 2010 at 9:45 AM
- NaTahsha Ford said...
Sounds like a great story. I'm in!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:54 AM
- SonshineMusic i.e. Rebecca T. said...
Comment. Check.
Tweet. Check.
Blog sidebar. Check.
Whee! Thanks for posting!
Check out my BEA BONANZA BOOK GIVEAWAY!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:54 AM
- Zoe C. Courtman said...
That book trailer is gorgeous. Definitely intrigued - and definitely please enter me! Thanks!!
- July 5, 2010 at 10:22 AM
- Connie said...
The trailer is lovely! Count me in for the contest.
- July 5, 2010 at 10:27 AM
- lotusgirl said...
Sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to check into it when it comes out.
- July 5, 2010 at 10:30 AM
- Alex (Tales of a Teenage Book Lover) said...
Whoa! That trailer is awesome!
See, I tweeted!
alexreadsbooks at gmail dot com
- July 5, 2010 at 10:36 AM
- Christine Fonseca said...
WOOT! Love contests
- July 5, 2010 at 10:47 AM
- Shannon O'Donnell said...
This one is already on my wish list! I'm dying to read it. :-)
- July 5, 2010 at 10:48 AM
- Readerly Person said...
Totally in! (Just for the gator, of course... don't tell anyone!)
- Rebecca
- July 5, 2010 at 11:02 AM
- Amy Jo Lavin said...
Looks interesting! Thanks for sharing.
- July 5, 2010 at 11:03 AM
- Lisa_Gibson said...
Sounds wonderful! Count me in.
- July 5, 2010 at 11:22 AM
- Betherann said...
I'm a new subscriber! count me in!
- July 5, 2010 at 11:37 AM
- Lydia Kang said...
Sounds like a good one! Count me in!
- July 5, 2010 at 11:39 AM
- Amber Tidd Murphy said...
I HEART your giveaways! YAY!
- July 5, 2010 at 12:19 PM
- Solvang Sherrie said...
Sounds like a great book. Enter me please!
- July 5, 2010 at 12:23 PM
- Annette Lyon said...
That's one awesome trailer.
I wanna win!
(I follow you, and I tweeted!)
- July 5, 2010 at 12:23 PM
- Talli Roland said...
Looks like an amazing book!
- July 5, 2010 at 1:06 PM
- Jaz.parks said...
i don´t know if the giveaway is international, but i would love to win :D the book trailer is great, awesome. my e-mail is dani(dot)prmr(at)hotmail(dot)com, and i made a blogpost: http://concursos-de-la-blogosfera.blogspot.com/2010/07/healing-spell-giveaway.html. And of course, i follow you.
:D Jaz.parks
- July 5, 2010 at 1:13 PM
- Jemi Fraser said...
Love the gator - no wonder your son doesn't want to give it up. I've read a bit about this book and it sounds wonderful!
- July 5, 2010 at 1:29 PM
- Krispy said...
That was a good trailer! Please enter me! I missed out on this book when LiLa had their contest, so yay for second chances! :)
Hope you had a happy 4th!
- July 5, 2010 at 1:33 PM
- Kaitlyn said...
Thanks for the awesome giveaway :)
Tweeted: http://twitter.com/KaitorTot/status/17812571111
- July 5, 2010 at 1:39 PM
- Kirthi said...
Hi Elana! Thanks so much for the great giveaway! I'm sorry your son is jealous, hehe :D The trailer sounds sooo promising, and I really want to read it!
I follow you (of course)
And I tweeted!
- July 5, 2010 at 1:44 PM
- ali said...
Huzzah! I'm a follower (duh), here I am commenting (sheesh) and I tweeted and FB'd. WIN!
- July 5, 2010 at 2:04 PM
- The Itzel Library said...
The Trailer is amaazing! Love it!
Wow! Great Contes!
International? Because, I´m Mexico.
Either way, my extra points are:
I´m follower (The Itzel Library)
Post Contest: http://the-itzel-library.blogspot.com/p/concursos-blogosfericos.html
Take care
- July 5, 2010 at 2:05 PM
- Holly Ruggiero, Southpaw said...
Wow, book trailers are getting better. The book sounds intriguing.
- July 5, 2010 at 2:06 PM
- Melissa said...
I'm in! Amazing book trailer and that gator is so fricking cute!!
- July 5, 2010 at 2:40 PM
- C. K. Bryant said...
Great Contest! I'm definitely a follower, I tweeted, FBked, and I blogged about it. (will post on Wednesday on www.christinebryant.blogspot.com)
You ROCK!! (do I get an extra point for that?) ;-)
- July 5, 2010 at 2:47 PM
- RaShelle said...
Yay, for Kimberley. Can't wait to see her on Thursday!!! Twittered and will be blogging about it 7-6-10. Great contest Elana.
- July 5, 2010 at 3:10 PM
- Onge said...
Count me in!! I love reading new books. The trailer looked awesome. Thanks!
- July 5, 2010 at 4:23 PM
- Taffy said...
Great! Another interesting book to find and read!
- July 5, 2010 at 4:42 PM
- Jenn Wilks said...
I wanna win! I'm commenting, I'm following . . . :o)
- July 5, 2010 at 5:26 PM
- Janet Johnson said...
I'd love to win! My boys would like the gator, too. ;)
- July 5, 2010 at 5:31 PM
- mariska said...
I would like to win this..HERE :)
1. A follower via GFC
2. Left comment.
3. I tweeted : http://twitter.com/becunique/status/17826714783
- July 5, 2010 at 6:04 PM
- Stephanie McGee said...
That gator's so cute!
- July 5, 2010 at 6:10 PM
- Sharli said...
Awesome! Please enter me! I'm a follower :)
And I tweeted here: http://twitter.com/Entre_Libros/statuses/17834138037
- July 5, 2010 at 8:13 PM
- Marsha Sigman said...
The cover is awesome!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:09 PM
- Martha Lawson said...
Please, please, please - I want this!!! Amazing contest.
I follow on gfc
mlawson17 at hotmail dot com
- July 5, 2010 at 9:14 PM
- Gail said...
Wow, what a trailer! Can't wait to get the book....or win one!!!
- July 5, 2010 at 9:52 PM
- Llehn said...
I'd love to play please!
1. A follower via GFC
2. Left comment.
- July 5, 2010 at 10:46 PM
- Haku said...
Enter me please
Google Friend Connect Follower: simply_haku
Twitted: http://twitter.com/simplyhaku/status/17847360823
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/maripopsita?v=wall&story_fbid=100164446705216#!/group.php?gid=130467126976819
Blog Sidebar:
- July 5, 2010 at 11:59 PM
- Nichole Giles said...
Very fun! I'm a follower and I want to win! But I'm too tired to blog about it tonight, so I'll just comment and hope I'm very lucky.
Have fun on Thursday!
- July 6, 2010 at 12:24 AM
- Matthew Rush said...
1+1 for me I guess as a follower and commenter.
- July 6, 2010 at 4:44 AM
- Bohemienne said...
The gator is totally adorable, I agree! And I've heard amazing things about THE HEALING SPELL. Would love to experience it for myself!
- July 6, 2010 at 7:23 AM
- brandileigh2003 said...
tweeted: http://twitter.com/brandileigh2003/status/17867323475
contest page: http://blkosiner.blogspot.com/p/conests.html
- July 6, 2010 at 7:32 AM
- Jennie Englund said...
Adorable gator. I think we're old college pals, he and I. Went to San Francisco State together.
Still not sure why we were gators there. Only one I ever saw was in the zoo...
- July 6, 2010 at 8:33 AM
- John Sankovich said...
Sign me up for that Gator, my son would love it.
- July 6, 2010 at 10:14 AM
- Margo Berendsen said...
A good book recommendation can never be ignored! Thanks for the contest.
- July 6, 2010 at 11:00 AM
- Kay said...
Sounds like another good book to add to my TBR pile. I'm looking forward to your review. I also gave you a mention in my best blogs of the week at www.kaymcgriff.edublogs.org. Come on over and check it out.
- July 6, 2010 at 6:22 PM
- Mandarina said...
Hello, thank you for this giveaway.
I am follower (Mandarina)
Twitted : https://twitter.com/noemisapi
mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
- July 6, 2010 at 10:15 PM
- EVA SB said...
Great trailer!
Please count me in
I'm a follower
I tweeted
I posted to my sidebar
- July 7, 2010 at 12:21 AM
- Diana said...
Hey! Please count me in
I'm a follower
Nick: Diana
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
I tweeted about it here:
Thanks for the giveaway!
- July 7, 2010 at 4:02 PM
- Tom M Franklin said...
entered! following! exclamation mark!
- July 8, 2010 at 7:11 AM
- J. L. Jackson said...
Great contest!! I am a follower, here is my comment and I tweeted!
- July 8, 2010 at 7:24 AM
- Sarah N Fisk said...
Yay! And I blogged: http://bookgiveaways.tumblr.com/post/785284594/the-healing-spell-by-kimberly-griffiths-little
- July 8, 2010 at 8:00 AM
- VR Barkowski said...
Can't believe I missed this. The stuffed alligator is too cute for words, but I live and breathe Southern Louisiana. I can't wait to read this book. Posted contest in my sidebar.
- July 8, 2010 at 8:21 AM
- Tere Kirkland said...
Just read your review, so I thought I'd enter.
Love books set in the sultry South!
Good luck to everyone who enters!
- July 8, 2010 at 10:29 AM
- Leah (aka Mary_not_Martha) said...
Your review makes me want to read this! I'm so excited about your new Bookanistas and looking forward to future reviews. Following you.
- July 8, 2010 at 10:43 AM
- KM said...
Definitely count me in!!
- July 8, 2010 at 12:20 PM
- Sharon K. Mayhew said...
I just read your review...Please throw my name in the hat! Great review!
- July 8, 2010 at 8:08 PM
- k_sunshine1977 said...
sounds fantastic! please count me in.....
k_sunshine1977 at yahoo dot com
- July 9, 2010 at 10:10 AM
- Sandy! said...
I don't know when is the deadline for this contest, but if I'm on time, please enter me!
tweet: http://twitter.com/sandymanga/status/18229667305
- July 10, 2010 at 5:25 PM
- Alessandra @Out of the Blue said...
Wow, this sounds like a great book! Please count me in.
Tweeted about it here: http://twitter.com/alessandra83/status/18467227079
- July 13, 2010 at 3:25 PM
- Aik said...
I'm a follower.
+1 Tweeted:
aikychien at yahoo dot com
- July 14, 2010 at 7:08 AM
- Natasha said...
Great Contest! I want this, so count me in! hehe
I follow your blog!
I Tweeted: http://twitter.com/AGreatBook/status/18553844856
- July 14, 2010 at 4:40 PM
- Lola Sharp said...
I'm So in!! What a wonderful contest, and lovely trailer.
And my 14 y.o. daughter collects stuffed gators! I gotta try and win this one, yes?
I'll 'pimp' your contest in today's post and put it on my sidebar.
I hope I'm not too late? I couldn't see WHEN the contest ends?
- July 19, 2010 at 10:02 AM
- Lola Sharp said...
Oh, and Happy Monday. :)
- July 19, 2010 at 10:03 AM


text:
Denton Events, Coupons, Reviews!
Subscribe to KidsScoop! The monthly family event and savings newsletter.
*Basic Info:*Sharkarosa Wildlife Ranch11670 Massey RoadPilot Point, TX 76258Hours:Saturdays & Sundays 10:00am-5:00pmAdmission:Adult (13+) $12Children (3-12) $10Children 2 & under FREESeniors (65+) $10Military & 911 personnel free with IDSeason passes available*Review*My husband and I visited Sharkarosa Wildlife Ranch on a Sunday morning with our boys, ages 2 and 5. There were quite a few people who had the same idea to get there early to avoid being outside in the heat before it became too unbearable. We purchased two bags of feed for the animals and reserved a time for the Safari Tram ride.We enjoyed feeding the camels, donkeys & various farm animals at the petting zoo area. There was an employee giving a presentation on kangaroos - which interested my five year old - but was a little too much to keep the two year old's attention. When we approached the petting zoo area, one of the employees escorted us into the corral. The animals were VERY excited to see us and it definitely made quite a few of the kids in the area a bit nervous. The goats especially love visitors with feed bags, so my husband finished off our bags of feed so we wouldn't be too bothered. Once we were able to view and observe the different animals available (just a handful outside of the petting zoo animals), we headed for the tram. We wished someone would have let us know to purchase additional feed bags or save some feed for the tram!The Safari Tram ride is worth the price of admission. Under the covered tram, which is pulled by a tractor, the side gates enclose the passengers and allow them to safely observe the animals at the ranch. There are three different areas the tram takes you through to observe and get very close to different animals. The first stop was to see the zebras, horses and donkeys. The tram is parked and they come right up to the tram! The employee leading the tour encouraged everyone to drop some food into the buckets attached to the tram to please the animals. The second stop was to see various farm animals (emu, llama, wild pigs, cows, deer) and the final stop was to see the camels. My boys absolutely loved the tram experience! Without the tram experience, my boys would not have been very interested in Sharkarosa. This is probably most suitable for elementary aged kids. There are animal presentations throughout the day, but at 2 and 5 they are a little too young to sit and appreciate that right now. The actual area where patrons walk around is dirt/gravel and likely not stroller friendly. There are no bathrooms available, just porta-potties, which is sometimes difficult to do with toddlers and young kids. There are covered picnic tables to bring a lunch or you can also visit the Bear Den Cafe for lunch from 11:00am-4:00pm.


text:
MSO2302A Oscilloscope
Rigol - MSO/DS2000A Series
MSO/DS2000A Series is the new mainstream digital scope to meet the customer's applications with its innovative technology. MSO2000A Series has 2+16channels, target for the embedded design and test market with its industry leading specifications, powerful trigger functions and broad analysis capabilities.
- Bandwidth: 300 MHz
- Analog Channels: 2
- Digital Channels: 16
- Max Sample Rate: 2 GS/s
- Max Memory Depth: 14 Mpts
- Operating System: Embedded
- Form Factor: Benchtop


text:
Of course this article would never have been written about a man and that pissed me off.
But I DO sometimes feel guilty about training a lot - and the guilt stems from SR not being there with me. Having kids has out of necessity led us to a schedule where SR and I almost never can run, bike or swim together because one of us has to watch the kids. And when I'm out there longer than him, I feel bad (well a little).
But on the island of Mallorca, everything was suddenly different. We had a full time live-in babysitter along for the week (AND she's interested in being an Au Pair for us in the future!). So SR and I had a large part of the day together to train with our triathlon club and then the second half of the day was spent with the kids. What a dream!
And guess what - the kids loved it, too!
Just to give a little background, Mallorca/Majorca/Mega Llorca (the third being The Lorax's name for it) is a large island off of the east coast of Spain, where Catalan is the official language, but Majorquis is the local dialect. It is an island of extremely diverse geography and is filled with tourists from all over Europe, though the Brits were the ones who made their presence most obvious.
Anyhow, you know it wasn't Americans who wanted "mushy peas". Must be the Atlantic that divides us because SR thought they sounded good and Natali and I were both like - "um, gross!"
So our training schedule looked like this (some of this was on my own or just with SR and/or Anette):
Day 1: 80km cycle in Formentor mountains
Day 2: 3 hour barefoot run on the beach
Day 3: 72 km cycle flat
Day 4: Half marathon on sand and in Albufuera trails
Day 5: 101 km mountain cycle (and there's proof just below that I did it - the longest ride I've ever been on and SR's second longest)
Day 6: 4 hour barefoot run on sand (yep, I was alone - SR left with Natali one day early)
(what a difference from my last pregnancy where I coulnd't run a step bewteen weeks 26 and 36 due to SI joint problems)
Here are SR and Anette on our 101 km ride.
Here is SR on that same ride.
The heights on our mountain rides scared the shit out of me, to put it mildly. I thus used my brakes way too much on the downhills, but it got better with time.
Here I am in the Formentor Mountains. I had adjusted my handles so I sat more upright and biking was no longer uncomfortable.
And training wasn't all we did.
Okay, I just have to say one thing about the above picture - I must be one of the only women in the world who looks better in a bikini 28 weeks pregnant than I do non-pregnant. I guess I better enjoy it for the very short time it lasts.
Just in case you couldn't tell, The Lorax really is eating an apple naked in the ocean with sandals on.
I can't recommend Mallorca enough, despite it being very touristy. Please feel free to contact me if you want advice on a trip to this gorgeous island.
I got so sick of my running songs while I was there. But on my run today, I really got into a new song by Architecture in Helsinki called "Contact High".


text:
The New England Patriots agreed to terms with first-round draft pick Dont'a Hightower on a four-year contract Wednesday, NFL Network confirmed.
Financial terms are undisclosed, but as the No. 25 overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft, Hightower can expect a four-year rookie contract worth around $7.7 million, with around $6.2 million in guarantees.
A 6-foot-2, 265-pound linebacker, Hightower recorded 234 tackles, including 21 for a loss, with five sacks during his 44-game career at Alabama. Hightower blew out his knee in 2009 and did not fully recover until the second half of the 2011 season.
Hightower can play multiple positions, and his versatility was part of the reason the Patriots moved up in the first round to select him. Hightower is expected to compete with Rob Ninkovich for the starting role at strong linebacker and also might be used as a pass rusher off the edge.
By signing Hightower, the Patriots have all of their picks from the 2012 NFL Draft under contract on the day before rookies are scheduled to report for training camp. The Patriots are the 15th team to finish signing their entire 2012 class.


text:
MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-August 31, 2011-- SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced that Sanjay Mehrotra, President and Chief Executive Officer, will address the investment community attending the 2011 Citi Technology Conference on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 9:35 am, Eastern Time. The session will be webcast and can be accessed live from SanDisk Corporation's Investor Relations website at www.sandisk.com/IR. A replay of the webcast will also be made available.
About SanDisk
SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) is a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, from research and development, product design and manufacturing to branding and distribution for OEM and retail channels. Since 1988, SanDisk's innovations in flash memory and storage system technologies have provided customers with new and transformational digital experiences. SanDisk's diverse product portfolio includes flash memory cards and embedded solutions used in smart phones, tablets, digital cameras, camcorders, digital media players and other consumer electronic devices, as well as USB flash drives and solid-state drives (SSD) for the computing market. SanDisk's products are used by consumers and enterprise customers around the world.
SanDisk is a Silicon Valley-based S&P 500 and Fortune 500 company, with more than half its sales outside the United States. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.
CONTACT: SanDisk Corporation
Jay Iyer,


text:
overall feeling AnCo gives you
edited May 2012 in Animal Tracks
i hope to god a thread similar to this has been made, but alas, the search function is long gone. what feeling/emotion do you most often feel while listening to the great animal collective? i either feel nostalgic or adventurous most of the time. occasionally i can be scared or frightened (r u als0 frytind?)
I'm guessing there has been threads like this...
I feel... different, when listening to AC. I think foreign is a better word for it. They definitely give me a differently feeling than any other artist/band I listen to.
free i guess. They inspire me to take my own path and not subscribe to anything but me. They be them and are still cool so why cant I be me and be cool?
Yeah i once had this discussion with a friend, see I'm also a big Radiohead fan and the two bands are completley non comparable to me but my friend and I were just talking about music we loved and i lay it out like this: Radiohead put nearly everything I understand and feel about myself in this incredibly emotional and visceral space You know what they know. However Animal Collective create everything I Don't yet understand, everything that cannot be put into words really, everything that is beyond our reach and for that reason I think they are the most important creative force of our lifetimes. At least of my lifetime
i like radiohead
Listening to Animal Collective makes me feel like I'm on a Quest through a Dream-like world trying to find Enlightenment. The journey is fascinating; sometimes beautiful, other times uncomfortable, but always magical.
TreeRoots your words are perfect. Im getting a radiohead tattoo this weekend !
Sweet! Please post a picture at your convenience What are getting?
I shall do so. Im getting the Kid A bear on my shoulder
Very cool. I'm going to get an AnCo tattoo sometime in the future.
I contemplated getting an AC one but I have to plan it out. I think getting Feels in the writing thats on the album would be sick.
Agreed, I'm searching for the right thing to be applied to my body. I'm not going to get a tattoo until either I meet someone that wants to get a tattoo with me in Australia or I visit America. I was thinking something Down There related, like a modified cover art alligator or something. That album kind of represents a part of my life that I want to always remember, and tattoos are good for that.
I don't think I have the dinero for a tatoo right now. If I ever got a tatoo it would be the visualization of a Peacefish getting forund eating a Popeyes chicken wing.
Terrortoast has a peacebone tattoo. Tats are forever and you'll always like or love AC. Just never EVER tattoo a name other than MOM on you, trust me, coverups can be expensive. Animal Collective makes me feel: sympatico intoxicated lost
Yeah I've seen a picture of Toast's tattoo, I like it a lot.
i love the feels idea. it has universal apeal as well as personal apeal. if i were to ever get a tatoo that would be it. Well probably not since sombody else came up with the idea. GAHHH!!!!!! Well it's a great idea anyway.
I thought so too. The idea is up for grabs Sagey- Radiohead was the first love of my life, but AC comes next. Pretty nervous for my first one today though, needles petrify me
Don't think of it as a needle... think of it as a pain stick!
Muuuuch better
I heard that after a minute or two you go numb and can't feel much pain, and I don't think it is that painful anyway, not like I would know personally right.
Yeah I'm hoping so. I mean it's a pretty basic design and just in black ink, just worried about the boney parts. I'm sure it'll be worth it
boy how i regret getting this papa roach tattoo back in 2001!
though i still have love for the roach!
viva la cookie raja!
he doesn't really have any tattoos. I should know. I [u]should[/u] know, I'm a medical doctor. I own a mansion and a yacht.
bangtidy! |) ac makes me feel BANG TIDY!
but also DANG hidey! hola!
You guys mentioned Radiohead - I think currently it's my favourite band along with AnCo (why am I not on a Radiohead forum??) I sort of feel like Radiohead makes cool, serious music that just happens to be awesome and heartfelt in a detached sort of way (Weird Fishes anyone?) AnCo I think is different in that it is awkward, definitely-not-cool music that is very much from the heart and makes me nostalgic for a life I haven't really lived (ain't no small towns in Malta, we're basically a concrete lump).
i wanna drink a malt in malta after taking a bath in bath!
just don't knock anoka! or ila knock yr bloke orf!
My dear sir, are you high?
No he isn't, ze druggles don't like him!
No, he's G.O.[!]
this is my first de-railed thread :')
Join the club bro! I think I have 3-6 derailed threads at least.
hahaha welcome to the show! i live in Ila so i get the Ila reference.
you live in the land BETWEEN worlds!
the spaces between the friction! you know?


text:
Tokyo is well-connected and accessible by plenty of flights, whether it is by low-cost or full-service carriers, options are plenty.
So how do you choose? Go with the best deal of course.
Here are some tips on flight selection and how to make the most of that airfare promo.
Although low-cost carriers excludes amenities like seat selection and extra baggage weight, the savings could probably buy you an extra night's stay in Tokyo. Choosing budget airlines, such as Jetstar and Scoot, for a flight to Narita Airport can cost about $500 (return), whereas full-fledged air tickets can go up to $1,000 or more. But it is worth keeping your eyes peeled for promotional fares, which can dip as low as, or if not lower than, what is offered by budget airlines.
According to Skyscanner's analysis, the best time to book for Singapore travellers to enjoy the cheapest fares on average is between 21-25 weeks in advance, with average savings of 21 to 22 per cent..
Certain days of the week are prime for air ticket deals from various airlines, so do not miss out! For example, limited number of discounted tickets are available on Jetstar's website on Fridays from 8am-11pm. Similarly, Scoot's deals are every Tuesday, while Tigerair's are Thursdays. AirAsia occasionally offers free seat bookings during certain periods of time.
Haneda Airport International Terminal vs Narita International Airport
Haneda Airport International Terminal (HND) is much closer to the city center (half the travel time or less) compared to Narita International Airport (NRT), and it is much less busy, which enables you to clear immigration and customs more quickly. However, do note that flight fares are probably more expensive if you fly straight to HND


text:
The White House is now supporting a bill in the House that would make it easier for companies to fight back against patent trolls, according to reports.
The bill, also known as the Innovation Act, was authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and will be put up to a vote in the House either Wednesday or Thursday, according to The Verge. Because the bill already sailed through the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support, it's expected to have strong support in the House.
MORE: "Patent Trolls" Threaten to Drain Silicon Valley Startups
A patent troll is a term frequently used to describe people or firms that instead of creating products or designs simply collect patents to sue other companies.
The Innovation Act could make fighting lawsuits against patent trolls less expensive for defendants and may help them recover court costs. It would also clarify patents and demands in the initial legal action.
The White House has previously expressed its support of patent reform, but publicly supported the bill on Tuesday. "The bill would improve incentives for future innovation while protecting the overall integrity of the patent system," the White House commented in a statement.
However, part of the problem is that patent law allowed people to file for vague and general technological patents in the first place, and that technical knowledge seemed to be minimal -- especially in the early days of the tech boom. It seems odd that someone could have received a patent for a device that receives electronic messages without being able to prove it could actually create one.


text:
PC Coins And Collectables uses cookies to provide you with the best service. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to their useCookie UsageI agree.
Corgi Cameo White Ford Model T in Smiths Crisps Livery c/w Box
box a bit tatty
Model Mint Condition
Copyright © 2019 PC Coins And CollectablesPowered by osCommerce


text:
Christine meets with her now close friend, the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted her case.
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: A Visit with Friends
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: Beauty Shines Through
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: Healing from Scars
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: Living in Fear
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: Fractures
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: I'm Wounded But Not Down
UP NEXTFacing Trauma: Time to Move On
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: 19-Foot Fingernails
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: In Search of Wet, Slimy Hair
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: Teddy Bear Babies
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: Woman Addicted to Hairless Rats
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: Wife Eats Deceased Husband
UP NEXTMy Strange Addiction: Eating House and Home
My Strange Addiction: Million-Mile Ride
Tom spends eight hours a day, seven days a week, riding his bike.
My Strange Addiction: Pillow Talk
Since she was four years old, Tamara has carried around her pillow. Now, as an adult, she can't live without the comfort.
My Strange Addiction: Bathing in Bleach
Gloria is so obsessed with bleach that she takes a "bleach" bath every morning.
My Strange Addiction: Huffing Gasoline
For the lasts 30 years, Theresa has been addicted to smelling gasoline. She satisfies her craving by smelling the toxic substance every 10 minutes.
My Strange Addiction: Plastic Snacks
Kailyn is only 18 years old, but she consumes a huge amount of plastic objects every day.
My Strange Addiction: Wife Eats Deceased Husband
Casie copes with her husband's sudden death by carrying around his urn and eating his ashes.
My Strange Addiction: 19-Foot Fingernails
Jazz considers her 19 feet of fingernails to be her prized possession.
My Strange Addiction: An Adult Baby
Riley, a 25-year-old woman, loves the feeling of dressing like a baby, so much so, that she does it on a daily basis.
My Strange Addiction: Teddy Bear Babies
Krista treats her 12 teddy bears as if they were real children.
Facing Trauma: I'm Wounded But Not Down
Although Mary was the victim of a domestic dispute that left her badly disfigured, she refuses to let anything keep her down for long.
My Strange Addiction: Woman Addicted to Hairless Rats
Meet a woman who has unconditional love for her 52 hairless rats.
My Strange Addiction: Noshing on Rocks
Teresa eats about two pounds of rocks each day and has no plans to give up this lifelong addiction.
My Strange Addiction: Woman Eats 3,000 Dryer Sheets
The tempting clean scent of dryer sheets creates an appetizing aroma Charmissa can't resist.
My Strange Addiction: In Search of Wet, Slimy Hair
Evan can't resist cleaning his friends' shower drains in search for long, brown, slimy hair.
My Strange Addiction: Eating House and Home
Single mom, Nicole, is literally eating her home and has been addicted to eating drywall for over seven years.


text:
My question is not about (pseudo) philosophical debate; it concerns mathematical operations and experimental facts.
What is an observer? What are the conditions required to be qualified of observer, both mathematically and experimentally?
Stack Exchange network consists of 175 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.Visit Stack Exchange
Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. It only takes a minute to sign up.Sign up to join this community
My question is not about (pseudo) philosophical debate; it concerns mathematical operations and experimental facts.
What is an observer? What are the conditions required to be qualified of observer, both mathematically and experimentally?
Observer is a special person (or a system that contains such person) which does not obey the usual laws of quantum mechanics. While it is much easier to define observer from a philosophical point of view, the mathematical answer is that the observer is a system which manifests subjective decoherence when observed. For the definition of subjective decoherence and precise mathematical formulations, refer to this work.
Are we talking quantum mechanics? Then I'd say that a "measurement" is any operation that entangles orthogonal states of the system under consideration with orthogonal states of the environment. "Measurement" is the important thing in most formulations of QM. Colloquially speaking, an observer is something that performs measurements.
The only other place in physics I can think of where "observer" shows up is in the oft-used phrase "This is obvious to the casual observer". This is just shorthand for "I can't be bothered to write out the mathematical proof".
Either the observer is classical or the observer is quantum. If the observer is classical, we are back to the Heisenberg cut of the world into a quantum part and a classical part, and the explanatory gap needs to be bridged in this manifestly dualistic interpretation. If the observer is quantum, then another observer needs to observe the first quantum observer by the tenets of quantum mechanics. Down the road of infinite regress we go.
As long as the concept of an observer can't be made mathematically precise and unambiguous, the measurement problem will never be solved.
I prefer a variant of Anonymous Coward's answer given above, by leaving out the environment. I would say that an observer is a system that interacts with the systems it observes by entangling orthogonal states of the systems under consideration with orthogonal states of itself and possibly other systems.
So, I don't bring in the baggage of an environment here, but the possibility of that is included by mentioning "other systems". The fundamental point is that an observer is capable of extracting information from a system. A simple example is the CNOT gate which in the |0>,|1> basis acts on two qubits by applying the NOT operation on the second qubit if the first qubit is |1> and acts as the identity otherwise. This means that when the second qubit in initialized in the |0> state, it can "measure" the first qubit. The observer is thus the CNOT gate, the second qubit is its record of the observation it has made.
There are Copenhagen idealists out there who insist the wavefunction or density state lies entirely in the subjective mind of the observer. There is no objective reality out there except in the mind of the observer.
Let me tell them whatever the contents of the conscious mind, the contents are classical information about an alleged world out there. At best, the contents of consciousness can only pick out POVM elements from some predetermined POVM. Where in Nature is the information contained in the wavefunction or density state or path integral or some other beable stored? Certainly not in the contents of consciousness themselves. If such information are stored nowhere, how does Nature manage to keep track of what it is supposed to do and get the sampling probabilities for the POVM right? But if such information are stored elsewhere, then there is an element of reality outside the conscious mind of the observer.
While my previous answer is entirely valid, the same can be explained using more traditional terminology.
To be simple, observer is a physical system that is capable of triggering collapse of the wave function once it comes into a contact with a quantum system.
Which system can trigger wave function collapse is only determined experimentally. But what is known for sure is that any system that is in thermodynamic contact with the observer (or is not thoroughly isolated from it) also can trigger the wave function collapse.
It is experimentally determined that the Earth's environment and atmosphere are capable of triggering the wave function collapse, which means that they are also in thermodynamic contact with the observer.
On the other hand in well isolated and cooled interior of D-Wave Systems' Orion quantum computer the collapse of wave function does not happen unless a contact with the exterior is made intentionally which allows to perform quantum computations which could not be made otherwise.
This hints that there is no observer inside this well-isolated box. By gradually expanding such box and putting more and more matter inside it it is possible in principle to find the actual point that acts as an observer and triggers the collapse.
This is not practically possible unfortunately, because any living organism cannot exist at such low temperatures which are needed for through isolation and its high level of entropy will make any action on it virtually irreversible thus not allowing to test whether the collapse actually happened.
I'd say, "observer" is an arbitrary entity which converts quantum information into classical. Classical information is, roughly, anything that can be duplicated without distortion and transmitted. The need for classicality is anthropic: we are conditioned by evolution to share information for survival and to value "rational thought" whose main defining characteristic is that it can be repeated.
Thank you for your interest in this question.
Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).
Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?