Good Reads

[Laurel]

http://www.texasmonthly.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_hero/public/stories/images/Moore_The-strip-center-on-the-edge-of-Grand-Saline-where-Charles-Moore-spent-his-last-day%2C-in-June-2014.-Credit--Leann-Mueller_680_0.jpg?itok=N7n1bLIV

For his entire life, Charles Moore sought to heed God’s call to change a broken world—fighting passionately for civil rights, helping the poor, and feeding the hungry. Until one day, in a desolate parking lot in Grand Saline, he decided he hadn’t done enough.

“Guys, what is he doing?” asked Munn as the four watched the man lay a white foam cushion in the parking space, on the pavement next to the concrete bumper. The man got on his knees. Munn, who had moved to Grand Saline from Seattle, had seen Muslim cabbies stop their cars and get out, lay down a mat, and pray, but she’d never seen anyone do that in Texas. “Is he pulling weeds?” she asked. Was that a gardening cushion?

After standing around all day, the man now seemed full of purpose. He began pouring something on himself—over his left leg, over his shoulder, down his right side, and finally on his head. It was such a hot day that maybe, the friends thought, it was water. But he was using a red can. “Is that gas?” McPherson asked. She and Munn stood up. The four stared as the man set the can aside and picked up something long and thin. “He has a lighter,” gasped Munn.

The man was still kneeling, his back straight. He raised the lighter to his head.​

- read the full article Man on Fire (from Texas Monthly)​

 

[Laurel]

http://static.nautil.us/4766_9abe36658bff8131d5a0923ebc196d0e.png
Can’t fool the camera: A time-lapse sequence of the moon setting* behind San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The camera is not fooled by the moon illusion, and accurately represents a constant moon size.

How the moon stirs tension between your conscious and subconscious minds.

What is this new theory?” the long-retired New York University cognitive psychologist, Lloyd Kaufman, asked me. We were sitting behind the wooden desk of his cozy home office. He had a stack of all his papers on the moon illusion, freshly printed, waiting for me on the adjacent futon. But I couldn’t think of a better way to start our discussion than to have him respond to the latest thesis claiming to explain what has gone, for thousands of years, unexplained: Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?

He scooted closer to his iMac, tilted his head and began to read the MIT Technology Review article I had pulled up.1 I thought I’d have a few moments to appreciate, as he read, the view of New York City outside the 28th floor window of his Floral Park apartment, but within a half-minute he told me, “Well, it’s clearly wrong.”

It wasn’t even my theory, yet I felt astonished. It described two researchers—Joseph Antonides (an undergraduate) and Toshiro Kubota (a computer scientist), of Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania—who had constructed a perceptual model in which the sky was contiguous with the horizon, so that the moon was placed, as it were, in front of the sky, occluding it.2 Since our depth perception also places the moon farther away from us than the horizon, we are faced with a perceptual dilemma. The scientists reasoned that the horizon moon’s enlargement is a product of the brain trying to solve this dilemma.

It’s wrong, he told me, because “you can get the illusion if you have only one eye. Simple!”

*

The moon illusion is a sort of Rip Van Winkle figure in the history of science. Unlike other astronomical puzzles, the moon illusion, wrote Rutgers University philosopher Frances Egan, “has persisted through massive changes both in our overall physical theory, and in our very conception of the scientific enterprise.”​

- read the full article Your Brain Can’t Handle the Moon (from Nautilus)​

 

[Equinoxe]

Here is an article about Late Bronze Age international politics that for some reason I felt inclined to re-read today.

The article is by noted Hittitologist Trevor Bryce and details the somewhat cynical underpinnings of the first recorded peace treaty in human history, known as the 'Eternal Treaty', made between Rameses II and the Hittite King Hattusili III in the year 1259 BC.

It's not terribly long, and if it sounds dry perhaps some might find it so, but it tells a tale of international intrigues and a usurper desperate for recognition of his throne. There's angry letters between ancient kings, condescending replies, and even some sardonic remarks from a Pharaoh.

 

[Radiohead]

Here is an article about Late Bronze Age international politics that for some reason I felt inclined to re-read today.

The article is by noted Hittitologist Trevor Bryce and details the somewhat cynical underpinnings of the first recorded peace treaty in human history, known as the 'Eternal Treaty', made between Rameses II and the Hittite King Hattusili III in the year 1259 BC.

It's not terribly long, and if it sounds dry perhaps some might find it so, but it tells a tale of international intrigues and a usurper desperate for recognition of his throne. There's angry letters between ancient kings, condescending replies, and even some sardonic remarks from a Pharaoh.

I'd just like to note I'm reading it for you believe it to be true.

 

[PayDay]

Fifty from the Trail: The Best Cowboy Cooking from a Timeless Land
http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Trail-C...d_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1P7MSYWGY9W3ZJM4QX5W

The Cheshire Moon
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cheshire-Moon-Robert-Ferrigno/dp/0380713977

 

[SkAoUt]

For his entire life, Charles Moore sought to heed God’s call to change a broken world—fighting passionately for civil rights, helping the poor, and feeding the hungry. Until one day, in a desolate parking lot in Grand Saline, he decided he hadn’t done enough.

<snip>

​

- read the full article Man on Fire (from Texas Monthly)​

Holy shit that was difficult to read. I certainly didn't make it through without water leaking out of my eyes.
A terrible end to a life, by all accounts, lived in the service of others.

 

[PayDay]

So I've been on the Cypress Hill mailing list since a concert I went to at a small venue.

They revamped their website, and on it there is this thing called 'Tales From the Road' which contained this badass and well written account of a tour.

You can read it here:
http://cypresshill.com/
http://eric-bobo.com/bits/?tag=tales-from-the-road

Now, here is the part of the story that gets interesting and a bit funny. During our show, we have our weed medley part, as many of our fans already know. During this part, the head guy of the police dept. went up to one of the stage hands and said this, “who’s responsible for this band here??” The stage hand replied, “I believe he’s on stage.” The officer than said “well, someone has to tell these motherfuckers that this ain’t Colorado!!” The officer then heads toward Dougie who is my drum tech & stage manager. Dougie goes to the officer and then the officer says, “I’m gonna say this as nice as I can. If he sparks that joint up one more time, you & all your buddies are going to jail!!” Dougie responded with a firm “No problem”. Dougie let B know and it was all good but they did keep a watch on us for the rest of the show. Be it a stage prop or not, they weren’t having any of it. First of all, none of us are trying to go to jail and we will always respect the laws and wishes of the venue in regards to smoking but there are just some places that it ain’t going down like that. I believe Mississippi may be one of the last if not the last state to ever legalize medical marijuana and the cops weren’t trying to let everybody get high in that way. In any case, there were no more problems with the police and the show was great. As a matter of fact, a couple of the lawmen came by our trailer to takes some pics. We were hoping it wasn’t a set up of any kind. Well, we didn’t stay around for too much longer after our set so we just packed it up and went back to the hotel. Since we had an early lobby call, I definitely wasn’t trying to hang out too late and I don’t think anyone else was either. With the next day being Mother’s Day, none of us wanted to miss that flight back home.

How cool is that.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/08/math_versus_maths_how_americans_and_brits_deploy_the_collective_noun/97583266-detail-from-albert-einsteins-general-theory-of.jpg.CROP.promo-mediumlarge.jpg

The Imitation Game, a glossy new biopic about the British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, features a lot of maths. Characters take advanced maths classes that require them to scribble complicated maths on notebook paper, and then they set their sights on the devilish maths of the Nazi Enigma machine. To American audiences, all those maths might seem doubly mysterious in their propensity to add and multiply. We Yanks prefer to pledge allegiance to the Math, indivisible, under God.

For a field centered on numbers, math seems pretty confused about its pluralization. Americans and Canadians tend to say math while Brits and Australians opt for maths. In defense of our star-spangled convention, “math” is more consistent with the way English speakers abbreviate disciplines like economics (econ) and linguistics (ling). Still, both versions are correct, if complicated by the fact that while mathematics sounds plural, it may actually be singular.

As “Lynneguist” Lynne Murphy explains on her blog, the “s” at the end of mathematics is only homonymous with the type of “s” that transforms one cook into too many cooks. It looks like a pluralizing “s,” but it acts like the deadbeat second “s” in “chess.” Mathematics qualifies instead as a mass noun (there goes another deadbeat s): The word may gesture toward quantity, but it is uncountable. Some mass nouns—anger, music, countryside—are too abstract to be divisible. Others—sushi, furniture, cinnamon—might break into discrete units, but these units add up to something slightly different than conventional plurals, such as dogs, pens, or cream cheese brownies.​

- read the full article Why Do Brits Say "Maths" and Americans Say "Math"? (from Slate)​

 

[Laurel]

So I've been on the Cypress Hill mailing list since a concert I went to at a small venue.

They revamped their website, and on it there is this thing called 'Tales From the Road' which contained this badass and well written account of a tour.

You can read it here:
http://cypresshill.com/
http://eric-bobo.com/bits/?tag=tales-from-the-road


How cool is that.

Very!

 

[PayDay]

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/08/math_versus_maths_how_americans_and_brits_deploy_the_collective_noun/97583266-detail-from-albert-einsteins-general-theory-of.jpg.CROP.promo-mediumlarge.jpg

The Imitation Game, a glossy new biopic about the British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, features a lot of maths. Characters take advanced maths classes that require them to scribble complicated maths on notebook paper, and then they set their sights on the devilish maths of the Nazi Enigma machine. To American audiences, all those maths might seem doubly mysterious in their propensity to add and multiply. We Yanks prefer to pledge allegiance to the Math, indivisible, under God.

​

shhhhh... Don't tell anyone, but I broke the Nazidouchebag code

Also:
http://www.motortrend.com/features/travel/112_0811_2008_dodge_challenger_srt8_in_europe/

The Ultimate Dodge Challenger Road TripAn American in London... and Paris, Stuttgart, Innsbruck, Turin, Le Mans...

Nope, your eyes aren't playing tricks. And no, we haven't been fooling around with Photoshop. That really is a*Dodge Challenger*SRT-8 parked on Waterloo Bridge in London, England, all testosterone and torque and Hemi orange attitude. We're a long way from Motown, Toto...

They crack 170+ mph on the Autobahn
/me is jealous.​

 

[PayDay]

A fascinating article by Erin Cressida Wilson, writer of Secretary. The opening:

'Growing up in 1970s San Francisco I was often dragged by my parents to explicit foreign films at small cinemas like the Clay or the Vogue, the Balboa or the Castro.

'There I’d sit, underage and somehow smuggled in, on a scratchy red chair that smelled of popcorn and sticky floors, surrounded by bohemians and intellectuals watching the same thing that I was watching: sex.

'Back then, the entire city felt drenched in sensuality, and so did my home. It was here on sweaty afternoons that I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, curled up with my mother, drawing constellations and stars and universes from freckle to freckle across her skin.'

..different times...

 

[Laurel]

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5479/14664409904_f28bc4f789.jpg
image courtesy rbatina (Flickr)

It’s disappointing how many people have children and miss this golden opportunity, usually waiting until they’re in their teens to start playing mindgames with them.

Before my son was born in 2004, I was prepared. I’d brainstormed a long list of sociological and psychological experiments with friends and coworkers, ready to unleash my inner Milgram on my unborn offspring.

My original plan was to raise him thinking he was living in a computer simulation, but sadly, my wife vetoed it. And any other potentially harmful, but funny, life-altering scenarios.

But I managed to sneak one in anyway.
[...]
I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too. So, here was my experiment:

Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.

Would that child better appreciate modern independent games that don’t have the budgets of AAA monstrosities like Destiny and Call of Duty? Would they appreciate the retro aesthetic, or just think it looks crappy?

Or would they just grow up thinking that video game technology moved at a breakneck speed when they were kids, and slammed to a halt as soon as they hit adolescence?​

- read the full article Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting (from Medium)​

 

[DallasDonna]

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5479/14664409904_f28bc4f789.jpg
image courtesy rbatina (Flickr)

Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics.​

- read the full article Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting (from Medium)​

Then, for his first cell phone,

http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/cellphone_design/dkmb86g_487pr55s2hc_b.jpg

 

[Laurel]

Then, for his first cell phone,

http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/cellphone_design/dkmb86g_487pr55s2hc_b.jpg

 

[DesEsseintes]

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5479/14664409904_f28bc4f789.jpg
image courtesy rbatina (Flickr)

It’s disappointing how many people have children and miss this golden opportunity, usually waiting until they’re in their teens to start playing mindgames with them.

Before my son was born in 2004, I was prepared. I’d brainstormed a long list of sociological and psychological experiments with friends and coworkers, ready to unleash my inner Milgram on my unborn offspring.

My original plan was to raise him thinking he was living in a computer simulation, but sadly, my wife vetoed it. And any other potentially harmful, but funny, life-altering scenarios.

But I managed to sneak one in anyway.
[...]
I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too. So, here was my experiment:

Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.

Would that child better appreciate modern independent games that don’t have the budgets of AAA monstrosities like Destiny and Call of Duty? Would they appreciate the retro aesthetic, or just think it looks crappy?

Or would they just grow up thinking that video game technology moved at a breakneck speed when they were kids, and slammed to a halt as soon as they hit adolescence?​

- read the full article Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting (from Medium)​

Remarkable - that's EXACTLY what I am planning to do with my son. Only I planned to begin with scissors paper stone, then Go, chess, etc, before Pong and the ZX Spectrum (in emulators), via various consoles, before he is eventually allowed upstairs to Daddy's ludicrously over-specced HD gaming rig. A ludic(rous?) history in miniature, like some precious Mughal locket.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I suggest you go back 4500 years to the Egyptians and the dawn of math, math didn't exist then yet they built the Pyramids with astonishing precision using unconscious insights harvested from Nature. Consciousness as we know it was about 20 centuries down the road in 4500 BC.

Julian Jaynes wrote a wonderful book about pre-conscious humans, THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND.

 

[DesEsseintes]

I suggest you go back 4500 years to the Egyptians and the dawn of math, math didn't exist then yet they built the Pyramids with astonishing precision using unconscious insights harvested from Nature. Consciousness as we know it was about 20 centuries down the road in 4500 BC.

Julian Jaynes wrote a wonderful book about pre-conscious humans, THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND.

I've read that book. Absolutely the best example I know of the thin dividing line between genius and madness. Still don't know which side I'd put it on, but the scientific consensus veers sharply towards the latter. I'm not sure I care - it's wonderfully insightful.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I've read that book. Absolutely the best example I know of the thin dividing line between genius and madness. Still don't know which side I'd put it on, but the scientific consensus veers sharply towards the latter. I'm not sure I care - it's wonderfully insightful.

https://www.youtube.com/user/julianjaynessociety

I bought Jaynes' book back in the 60s and agree that a schizophrenic world yet exists in each of us. The trick is to harness its utility, and I've invested like 45 years doing so. It truly is a primal force if you know how to use it, its method and madness.

 

[Que]

Then, for his first cell phone,

http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/cellphone_design/dkmb86g_487pr55s2hc_b.jpg

The first time I used a cell phone that was it. The embarrassing thing was it belonged to my client. He sold sandwiches out of a roach-coach, I sold real estate.

This was in the pager and pay-phone days. Not even two-way pager days. Ten numeral digits only. Cellphones had just come out and were impractical and cost prohibitive.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Cell phones are, in fact, repeater appliances, and repeaters have existed forever. What do you suppose microwave towers were for? They were everywhere to relay calls from point a to point b. Modern cell phones simply allow for high volume mobile calls using smaller transceivers and less power.

 

[Laurel]

At least 10 years back - maybe even pre-Lit - I found a really awesome travel journal posted in 1999, back before social media. Really awesomely funny. I've tried searching for it on Google without any luck. Then today when going through old files I found the link:

August 29

My Kingdom for a toilet
After two and a half months in China there is one conversation that keeps coming up among travelers such as myself. Imagine six or eight travelers sitting around the table in a cafe somewhere in Beijing. The conversation might go something like this:

You won't believe what happened to me this morning. I just arrived at the airport and I really had to take a dump. I sit down on the toilet, I do my thing, and then I notice. NO TOILET PAPER! Thank god the guy in the stall next to mine had some tissues. I don't know what I would have done.

Right, well you learned your first lesson about China the easy way. Never leave home without toilet paper. The same thing happened to me but there was no guy in the stall next to me. I took of my sock and used that.

You guys had it easy, I was wearing sandals. I had to use my hand.

What are you guys talking about? You actually had toilets? My hotel just has a porcelain hole in the floor. I have to SQUAT over that.

Porcelain? You're complaining about porcelain? Just wait until you get into the small towns. There you'll just have a small shack in the back yard. And the floor will have one board missing. You squat over that while the fumes from every shit since time began float up and burn your nose out.

Oh, and the bus stations are even worse. There are 8 or 10 holes all in a row with no doors or stalls. You squat with all the other passengers while they stare at you because you are a foreigner.

Once I was squatting and a woman brought her children in to watch me shit. She pointed at me while the kids surrounded me and laughed at my technique.
[...]

February 7, 2000
New Distance Record

Excerpt from Eric's India believe-it-or-not file.

I, Eric Bolz, hold the new world record for driving the longest distance in India without blowing the horn. At least I would if I had been born in India. You see I drove 55 km without blowing my horn. The official current record is 0.6 km for native Indians, though that is still quite controversial. You see the man who holds the record had just bought a new motorcycle and he had gotten part way home (0.1 km) when the urge to blow his horn overwhelmed him. He realized only too late that he couldn't blow his horn, having lost his left thumb in a cricket match some years before, and having forgotten to refit the bike for right thumb horn blowing. He managed to ride an additional 0.5 km (an incomprehensible distance) before the seizure struck him and he died when his motorcycle struck a bus with 147 passengers. Purists hold that he should be disqualified because technically
the record is defined as the distance between two successive horn blasts. Since he died before he was able to blow the horn at all some people believe that allowing the record to stand will simply encourage others to copy his method. Indeed, at least six others have had their left thumbs amputated in hopeless attempts to break his record. But none of them managed to ride more than 0.25 km before seizures struck them down.​

- read the rest Eric Bolz' Awesome Adventures (from EricBolz.com)​

 

[IrezumiKiss]

http://40.media.tumblr.com/6a9069391509a2fe8422d1a24282e51f/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o1_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/20ce9b28d8f5088799da5619126e679e/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o2_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/191e304db91a603c9ce0adc422eac774/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o3_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/cd03921aaf45e5f6a24176a0a571b2eb/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o4_500.png

http://41.media.tumblr.com/cb8fffad849e84351cc1e3fd5abaf5f2/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o5_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/eda1efeea791a5de50d4ea53678c6248/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o6_500.png

http://41.media.tumblr.com/22de2bdf6655e4daabf49f0a28f8171a/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o7_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/48fcba562c1aeaf1e8500bb00fae0128/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o8_500.png

http://41.media.tumblr.com/5d48c048629f9281a86d39b9277d3e4f/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o9_500.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/149fb026c9ca22c8c46ebc00c67cf5b7/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o10_500.png

robothugscomic:

New comic!

TUMBLRITES: This comic is huge and likely doesn’t render well on tumblr. Check out a more complete version on my site here.

Please note: This comic contains discussion of sexual assault, rape, and rape culture

This guy, this fucking guy, still sticks in my brain. It’s been years since I’ve been online dating. It was an interaction of messages that culminated in this exchange over about 2 weeks.

He’s so forgettable in every other way, but I am just still so aggravated by this weird smug privileged obliviousness around constant social demands on women and femmefolk to be both constantly available to men and at the same time perfectly take all necessary steps to prevent their own rapes.

It is STUPID and AWFUL that we are expected to constantly be smart, aware, strong, reactive, proactive, and sober enough to prevent our own assaults. It is STUPID and AWFUL that if we do anything, ANYTHING, like have a glass of wine, or walk home, or smile at someone, or not smile at someone, that we are somehow in that way shouldering responsibility for someone deliberately, maliciously harming us.

And it is ridiculous to ask someone to shrug all of that social pressure and blaming and responsibility off because it’s vaguely insulting to you that someone has to think about the possibility that you’re not a great person.

Dude, thanks. You saved me a lot of wasted time with that message. I mean it.

http://www.robot-hugs.com/risky-date/

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://40.media.tumblr.com/6a9069391509a2fe8422d1a24282e51f/tumblr_ng1ew8x5iP1t1brz9o1_500.png

Of course, if the guy had not been missing the "sensitivity gene" he would have realized that was the conversation she was probably having and could have likely mirrored it with her word for word.

Aka "gender radar." Don't enter a relationship without it.

 

[DesEsseintes]

I love anything that shatters the stupid received wisdom that ours is a uniquely sexual generation, from Sappho and Catullus to the temples of Elephantis, via Chaucer, Rochester and the Marquis de Sade. Now some remarkable, erotic, desperate, moving letters have been found and bought, describing the increasingly desperate efforts by a woman in the 1920s to retain her younger, married lover. Powerful stuff that would not be out of place on several Lit fora today.

 

[trysail]

Cheap Oil Jamming Rails Means Higher U.S. Power Bills

By Mario Parker
December 18, 2014


U.S. electricity costs are poised to reach the highest level since 1999 because railroads are too clogged to deliver enough coal to power plants.

While the U.S. has the world’s biggest coal reserves, utilities are forecast by the government to end the year with the lowest stockpiles since 2005. With carriers including BNSF Railway jammed with record shipments of oil and grains, ...power producers say they can’t get the coal they need.

The rail delays mean utilities haven’t rebuilt inventories that fell to a seven-year low last winter. Power producers filed 10 notices this year warning regulators that stocks were low enough to threaten generation, compared with two filings in 2013. Utilities have been obliged to rely more on natural gas, increasing costs for consumers.

“There’s plenty of coal,”Jim Thompson, a director of coal for IHS, an Englewood, Colorado-based energy and industrial analytics company, said by phone Dec. 2. “The problem is the coal transportation system.”

Utilities got as much as 25 million short tons (22.7 million metric tons) less coal than they needed from mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin this year, Peabody Energy Corp., the biggest U.S. producer of the fuel, said in October. Utilities will burn 868.5 million tons in 2014, generating 39 percent of U.S. electricity.

Low Inventories

Power companies are on pace to end the year with 129.2 million tons of inventories, 32 percent less than the record 189.5 million tons reached in 2009, U.S. Energy Information Administration data show.

Utilities have used natural gas to preserve coal stocks, even though it’s 22 percent more profitable for a power plant in the Midwest to burn coal...

Average U.S. power costs will rise 1.8 percent to $12.69 per megawatt hour in 2015, the most expensive in records going back to 1999, the EIA said in a report Dec. 9.

Unplugging Bottlenecks

Average rail speeds plunged 6.4 percent in the past year while dwell times, a measure of how long cars sit in a rail yard, increased 8.7 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

BNSF, owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc..., had the biggest increase in commodity carload traffic this year, with a gain of more than 22 percent... The company has boosted personnel, added tracks and locomotives and sought to unplug bottlenecks...

U.S. coal imports increased 37 percent to 12.2 million tons this year, led by purchases from Colombia, EIA data show.

“The transportation constraints gave utilities a need to diversify supply,” Ted O’Brien, chief executive officer of Doyle Trading Consultants, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based coal analysis company, said by phone Dec. 11. That’s made foreign coal more competitive than U.S.-mined fuel, he said.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has cut generation this year to preserve coal stocks...

Winter Stockpiles

“Our main concern has been -- can we get the coal we’ve bought into our system,” he said. “We started trucking coal to the plants.”

Xcel Energy’s stockpiles are “significantly low,” Craig Romer, the Minneapolis-based company’s director of fuel supply operations, said by phone Oct. 28.

“Normally in the fall we try to build up those inventories in anticipation of weather events,” he said. “Right now, we’re just not getting the service to build those winter stockpiles.’

Utilities may be forced to navigate low inventories through next year and this ‘‘could create challenges in the summer of 2015,” Alan Haymes, an economist at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at the agency’s monthly meeting in Washington today.

Powder River

Powder River Basin coal prices increased 5 percent to $12.65 a ton in the past year. They would be even higher if utilities had confidence it could be delivered, according to IHS’s Thompson.

“Some railroads are now saying it will probably be 2016 before we get a full resolution to the problem...There is pent-up demand. A price spike in PRB could happen depending on the performance of the railroads.”




​

- read the full article Cheap Oil Jamming Rails Means Higher U.S. Power Bills.html
(from Bloomberg)​