Book Review - Stolen Prey

It was not a good day for Lucas Davenport. Strange as it may seem, a couple of tweakers got the drop on him at an ATM and he ended up with a broken wrist. Then he was called to a gruesome murder of a family in a well to do neighborhood. The crime scene had all the earmarks of a torture murder by a Mexican drug gang but they could find no connection of this family to drug activity. It takes all of Lucas' sleuthing skills to uncover a well hidden money laundering scheme behind the murders. Meanwhile, Virgil Flowers is tracking the tweakers who seem to be in the business of manure transport.

I won't call this one of the best in the Prey series, but Sandford always manages to write a readable story. And this one has an interesting twist at the end.

Engineering Geekery

While I have never observed the phenomenon personally (probably because I usually get Guinness in a can), it is important to understand why it happens.

Engineers understand Stoke's Law which describes the drag on spherical objects with small Reynold's Numbers in a viscous fluid. It's the mechanism that describes how oil and water separate and you can use it calculate how long it will take a micron sized oil particle to travel a certain distance and hence know the residence time needed for separation. But folks who get their Guinness in a pint glass have notice that the bubbles in the brew seem to flow down rather than up. Leave it to the Irish to find out why.

Next I predict a Computational Fluid Dynamics Doctoral Thesis in the subject. You have to admit that the research would be fun.

MSM Bias

I was watching national news on the National Barrack Channel yesterday when BrianWilliams starts a story about Donald Trump being a birther and then tying him to Mitt Romney. The implication being that Mitt is a goofy birther too. He went no further in describing why The Donald had re-started the birther issue. If he had, he would have had to admit that Obama's birthplace was listed as Kenya in Obama's literary agent's brochure and he would have had to explain how that happened. And then he might have to talk about why Obama let such a mistake carry on for so long. And then he might have to admit that Obama let it happen because it was a useful lie at the time.

And then he could have talked about the other useful lie perpetrated by Elizabeth Warren who claimed Native American status. But we can't let a few lies defer us from the The Narrative.

To paraphrase a popular commercial:

"When you want attention, you list your birthplace as Kenya.
When you list your birthplace as Kenya, people think you are not an American.
When people think you are not an American, they don't want you as President.
Don't affect you chance to be President, tell the truth."

Energy Cost Sticker Shock

PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization that manages the high voltage electric grid and wholesale electricity market for 13 mid Atlantic states and the District of Columbia. They recently held a capacity auction to fix the prices for electricity for 2015. The results are ominous! The market price was $136 per megawatt. In 2012, the price was $16 per megawatt. If you do the math, that's an 850% increase!

This is not speculation. These are real prices. Here's the press release.

Why, PE, you may ask, is the price increasing so much? In a word, Regulations. In Obama's war on coal, the EPA instituted regulatory changes to require coal plants to install MACT, or Maximum Achievable Control Technology, on their emissions by 2015. This regulation will effectively remove 14,000 megawatts of coal powered capacity from the system.

You won't see this news in the MSM. The Fox story is here along with information on what our legislators are doing about. Remember that this issue goes far beyond "tax the rich". Everyone will have to pay more for electricity. How would you pay for an electricity bill that increased by a factor of 8? What do you think manufactured goods will cost because of this increase? What will your food cost? Get busy and write your Congress Critters!

Going Walkabout

The Brother in Law hit Damascus, Va this weekend in his quest to thru hike the Appalachian Trail. He's covered a distance of 467 miles. He hit town during the Trail Days Festival. They had a medical tent there for the hikers so he got a checkup and was declared good to go.

In local news, Rico and his father were in town for a few days so we had a few drams of scotch and ate some Bar B Que shrimp.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Up and out the door at O Dark 30 to catch the first flight to Houston for a day of meetings. The morning meeting, a project status update, went pretty well. It stayed on topic and folks didn't try to engineer a solution in the meeting. The afternoon meeting was a different story. It started with one of the brain trust talking about a highly specialized technical subject (lateral bucking in sub sea pipelines) and treating us to a detailed review of his research in an accent that almost nobody could understand. At about the mid point of the meeting, the leader asked about taking a short break. The next speaker assured us that she would be short and wanted to talk before the break. 30 minutes later she was still talking about a ramp up procedure for a well that wouldn't be put into production until 2015!

Sometimes I wonder why the price of gasoline is so low and how major oil companies manage to make a profit.

Robert Parker Lives!

It was a sad day when Robert Parker died. He gave me hours of enjoyment reading his novels and I was sad to see it end. But wait, there is a new possibility out there. Ace Atkins has been selected by Robert Parker's estate to ghost write Robert Parker novels and his first one, Lullaby, has hit the shelves.

Atkins has the uncanny ability to write in the same style as Robert Parker. If you know Parker's books, you know his style - short sentences, gritty descriptions and no nonsense action. It was all there. I look forward to more.