Jeff Rubin has written a half-decent 80,000 words. He’s in love with himself and he dresses funny and has weird hair, but that’s normal. I’m sure he has a huge tattoo on his back of himself fucking a squirrel in the ass. Whatever. I don’t care.
Jeff Rubin is a complete fake who couldn’t predict the price of milk next week. Here’s a clue. He draws massive attention to his 2 correct predictions (in retrospect) about oil in the first 30 pages, never mentions the wrong one, and never makes a specific prediction afterwards. Rubin needs to be brought up on war crimes charges, or castrated, or something. Complete douche.
Complete Dick. Douche and a dick, I’m telling you, he is bad news. I can say anything I like. I paid $26.95 to read things I already knew.
To get here, we have flown 180 miles over some of the most remote mountains in the world from Whitehorse, the 23,000-person capital city of the territory, located in the middle of nowhere. Whitehorse is the center of civilization in a region larger than the entire state of California.
…
With soundtrack courtesy of Holmes:
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home.
All your reindeer armies, are all going home.
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor.
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
It’s all over and into the void.
C’mon, Everybody! Into the Void!
22 comments
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May 28, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Uncle Yarra
Chapter #1, A Brief History of Oil, Page 6, pp4:-
“Gasoline continued to be the only fuel choice for powered aircraft until the 1940s.”
I knew this to be wrong straight-off-the-bat so I looked it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_204
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_205
As it happens, RAE and similar organisations were VERY interested in Diesel powered flight, for obvious safety reasons.
This is why I wouldn’t call this a reference book.
May 28, 2009 at 6:08 pm
JR
Wait, A Brief History of Oil, What are we talking about?
Yarra, I totally agree, but we need to be on the same page.
Your Junkers references are spot on. (When I say spot on, I don’t mean they are what they are, I mean they are fitting and timely. Yarra has a knack for this like many ZK contributors)
I need to update my coverage of your garden, I know, I know. It’s coming. Trust me.
May 28, 2009 at 6:16 pm
JR
They never seemed concerned with the weight of the engines. I believe modern F1 engines are about 100 kilos or 220 lbs. Those Jumas look like 500-600 pounds.
May 28, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Doom Docktor
Hey Tenth Jagar, are you going to post anymoron on CFN?
And how did you come up with that moniker?
Did I ever tell you my Jagarmeister story? All true, I swear.
May 28, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Uncle Yarra
Sorry, pre-review comments on OIL 101. I thought we’d marry the two books into our “I could have done without spending the cash on that” pile.
Yes, two crankshafts does not a light engine make, but F1 engines come from the other side of the performance vs. reliability school of thought.
Also, you need to remember that at that time, supercharger efficiency was not great, gasoline quality was highly dependent on the crude oil source and materials technology made TBO (time between overhaul) on the low side of appalling.
So a supercharger that heated the air more than necessary isn’t a problem in a diesel (especially at altitude); the cetane rating of diesel was far more consistent than the as yet uninvented octane rating of gasoline and also the self-lubricating nature of diesel made injector design less arduous. More importantly for the opposed piston designs, there were no exhaust valves to burn, simple ports that could optimise their timing by an offset between the two cranks.
Thus a diesel configuration was worth pursuing.
BTW, the Napier series of diesel engines obtained an efficiency that even a modern turbofan can’t beat.
May 28, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Doom Docktor
IF life was fair (it isn’t and never will be), anyone trying to make a killing and get all famous with a new book on oil depletion would first have to spend an hour alone in a locked, windowless, soundproof room with dave, explaining to him the significance of his or her findings and justifying all conclusion reached.
I’d pay money to read about that, baby.
May 28, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Uncle Yarra
I’ll have to check some of Downey’s industrial gas production ‘facts’.
I seem to remember ethyne (acetylene) being produced using calcium carbide as an adjunct to steel production – I could be wrong though…
May 28, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Doom Docktor
Calcium carbide + water => Acetylene + calcium oxy-hydroxide
+ spark => torch or explosion, depending upon confinement conditions.
May 28, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Uncle Yarra
Oh yeah, I know it works, old codger down the road from my parents used to have a headlight on his motorbike based on the same principle. You adjusted the brightness by controlling the drip rate. I don’t know if it was produced in industrial quantities by the same process, though.
May 28, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Doom Docktor
There are two controls: the water drip rate and the gas flow valve. The latter is tricky, if too lean, gas may overpressure your reactor vessel. We used to use them as miner’s lamps. I still have one that I show my drunken dinner guests. Needs a new flint ignitor.
When I was a kid, we could still buy carbide at the hardware store. Naturally, we did all the dangerous stuff with it, like making carbide rockets. Used to blast coffee cans over the folks’ house, back to front. Hint: a little standing water makes a great gas-tight seal.
Wonder my head is still attached, two eyes still functional, all digits work.
May 28, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Donovan
“spend an hour alone in a locked, windowless, soundproof room with dave”
Get the audio and we’ll loop it for the little bastards at halloween. Or pirate radio out of mexico and walk all over El Rushbo(nehead).
Heard it on the [insert blood curdling scream here]
Next week on dave’s Dark Room…
May 28, 2009 at 10:34 pm
JR
I’m pretty sure Tenth Jager refers to Guderian’s World War I Battalion and not how many drinks one has consumed. But I could be wrong.
May 28, 2009 at 10:48 pm
JR
Guderian was born in Kulm (Chełmno-now Poland), West Prussia. From 1901 to 1907 Guderian attended various military schools. He entered the Army in 1907 as an ensign-cadet in the (Hanoverian) Jäger Bataillon No. 10, commanded at that point by his father, Friedrich Guderian. After attending the war academy in Metz he was made a Leutnant (full Lieutenant) in 1908. In 1911 Guderian joined the 3rd Telegraphen-Battalion (Wireless-Battalion), Prussian Army Signal Corps. In October 1913 he married Margarete Goerne with whom he had two sons, Heinz Günter (1914-2004) and Kurt (born 1918) who would both become highly decorated Wehrmacht officers during World War II (and in the case of his older son, a Panzer general in the German Bundeswehr after the war).
During the First World War he served as a Signals and General Staff officer. This allowed him to get an overall view of battlefield conditions. He often disagreed with his superiors and ended up being transferred to the army intelligence department where he remained until the end of the war. This second assignment, while removed from the battlefield, sharpened his strategic skills.
After the war, Guderian stayed in the reduced 100,000-man German Army (Reichswehr), where he was made company commander of the 10th Jäger-Bataillon after which he joined the ‘General Staff’-in-waiting, the Truppenamt (a German General Staff being explicitly forbidden by the Versailles Treaty). In 1927 Guderian was promoted to major and transferred to the Truppenamt group for Army transport and Overseer of motorised tactics based in Berlin. This key role put him at the centre of the development of the resources that would later come to dominate what became known as blitzkrieg. Fluent in both English and French, he gathered ideas by the British maneuver warfare theorists J.F.C. Fuller and, debatably,[1]
-wiki
June 2, 2009 at 12:45 am
Uncle Yarra
Gee, someone has posted a review of OIL 101 on Amazon…
This book is aptly named, for it is a general ‘101’ type introduction to the subject of oil, but a reference book it is not.
There are some factual mistakes, somewhat excessive repetition, the odd grammatical error and some feeble diagrams. The sixty-nine page index with one reference per line is an atrocious format and is a devious trick to increase the page count of the book when advertised.
Statements like “Gasoline continued to be the only fuel choice for powered aircraft until the 1940s.” (page 6) are outright wrong and could have been sanitised by a simple adjective like ‘preferred’ (As it happens, RAE and similar organisations were VERY interested in Diesel powered flight, for obvious safety reasons, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_204
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_205 ).
If one had a dollar for every time the book iterated that heavier products can be cracked into “higher yielding products like gasoline” the book would pay for itself.
It would have been far better to pay more for printing a quality table that showed densities and other physico-chemical data of hydrocarbons rather that table after table listing methane down to resid or vice-versa, depending on the chapter’s focus.
The diagrams are rudimentary and occasionally insulting. As an example, see page 135 for an eight-character wide diagram of a ball and seat valve, surprisingly, showing a poorly shaded ball and seat. Or figure 11-1 (page 243), showing an oil tanker, with the hitherto unheard of terms like ‘deck’, ‘hull’ and ‘stern’.
However, when it comes to a useful diagram such as an ADU, EIA comes to the rescue with figure 7-1 (any other infrastructure in a refinery is left up to the readers imagination, it would seem). The vast majority of semi-useful diagrams come from the EIA, making originality at somewhat of a premium in this book.
In Downey’s favour, he has struck the balance between using acronyms and the full word in many cases. For example, referring to the full title of an atmospheric distillation unit instead of an ADU when the term had not appeared for a chapter or two in the text was an appropriate repetition.
June 2, 2009 at 2:10 am
JR
“The sixty-nine page index with one reference per line is an atrocious format and is a devious trick to increase the page count of the book when advertised.”
Who wrote this, you or the reviewer? It doesn’t matter. I have suspicions that you wrote the review (I haven’t even read it yet). I’m not gonna get sucked into the “who wrote it” trap.
I’m just glad people read.
Anyway, I have no problem with a 69 page index. This means the writer is referencing everything and it is easier to check for plagiarism. Rubin, on the other hand, has a very short index with too much of his own writing in the index. Poor. Poor. Poor. He wrote one whole chapter with no references.
He is all over the place. But he references both Kunstler and Vaclav Smil with no opinion offered. I’m not even sure he read the books.
June 2, 2009 at 3:28 am
Dr. Doom
“I’m pretty sure Tenth Jager refers to Guderian’s World War I Battalion and not how many drinks one has consumed. But I could be wrong.”
Proof positive that TJ is YOU, JR!
And, I’ll drink to that.
June 2, 2009 at 3:39 am
Dr. Doom
Yarra, you’re getting very technical on us. Did you review this book (OIL 101) or not? And, how does this knowledge relate to backyard aquaponics, the physics of rock acoustics, and the technical performance aspects of F-1 ICEs?
June 2, 2009 at 3:53 am
Holmes
I’m randomly sampling portions of “Garcia: An American Life”.
It’s an impressive assemblage of research and quotes. The author is not overly opinionated, which is (I guess) one way to take on the telling of such an extraordinary tale.
(p. 80-81) With regard to the Merry Pranksters, Ken Babbs had this to say: “We were astronauts of Inner Space, which is as big as outer space. As above, so below. We popped acid, flopped on the floor, hooked up tape recorders and rapped out whole novels. We got up on our feet and played musical instruments, acting out parts we made up on the spot. This wasn’t a summer lark, but a legitimate literary endeavor of artistic merit, holding out the promise of commercial success.”
Is it just me, or do all of these acid gobbling dudes talk like Humphrey Bogart? Go back and reread that quote imagining you are HB.
See!!!!!!! I’m not just making this shit up.
June 3, 2009 at 4:01 am
Uncle Yarra
The index size is not the problem, it’s that it’s mostly empty space. Most indexes are 2, 3, or 4 columns wide; the term is right next to the page number.
This guy has:-
Term……………………………………………………………………………………………123
Another term, plus adjective…………………………………………………………….38
The bibliography is adequate AFAICT.
June 3, 2009 at 4:04 am
Uncle Yarra
“how does this knowledge relate to backyard aquaponics, the physics of rock acoustics, and the technical performance aspects of F-1 ICEs?”
I can’t build my own sleeve-valve engine, so I crack a rock on Stuart Staniford’s head, it makes a nice noise (echoey) and I dump his remains in the Fish tank (after the chooks have left only the bones).
June 3, 2009 at 9:23 am
bunnbunn
Poor Stu, we hardly knew you… forensically speaking.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/03/new-zealand-rated-most-peaceful-us-83rd/
October 14, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Anton OCE
wahaha…i like it!