Month: January 2011

Spam Reducing

The Symantec story is about the large drop in spam traffic over Christmas, but in fact the chart shows enormous fall in recent months generally, under 20% now of what it was back in August 2010.

Suggestion is that this is not because spamming has become bad business for spammers sadly, but simply a change of focus in upcoming spam campaigns. We live in hope.

Not clear what kinds of spam this is tracking, email only, or blog comments too ? I mention that because subjectively I’ve much less spam in the blog comments queue during the last year – 60 per 30 days rather than 200/300 ? FaceBook and LinkedIn suffer a different kind of spam – friendly spam from any group or page you “like” sending every update to ever member – just lazy use of very crude common-denominator apps.

The BP Commission Report

Still digesting this …

They were operating on well-known and understood tight margins on pressure balance ever since the incident during partial drilling by the earlier rig, and right through completion of the drilling to the final “primary” cement job. That balance was always between too little (mud, pressure, cement, etc) failing to control the hazardous hydrocarbons, vs too much (mud, pressure, cement, etc) destroying (the value of) the well. It may seem scary to lay people, but this is always what engineering is about – difficult judgements by responsible, moral people – we’ll “probably” be OK. It looks like “cost-cutting” to do less, but we all cost-cut (look for the best price, the most cost/value effective) every day.

[At this point, I’ve only read as far as the end of the cement design and analysis – ch4, p102 – and I’ve not seen any mentions (yet) of the problems and risks associated with the BOP systems, or the top-sides relief systems, serious but secondary – but I’ll hazard a guess (based on earlier reading of BP’s own report) that the real failure is the decision to ignore the failed negative pressure test (!), and the failure of any warning / criticality signs in BP’s higher supervisory management systems that this whole operation was on tight margins, which could have enforced double checks on the safety-critical decision points, like this one, and other additional quality surveillance. As I said earlier the irony is that BP were one of the first to introduce “criticality” ratings to the industry, 25 years ago.]

So, continuing, reading on … a quote from the commission report (their italic emphasis, not mine) and even with hindsight their use of the tense “would” – is telling.

“At the Macondo well, the negative-pressure test was the only test performed that would have checked the integrity of the bottom-hole cement job.”

And later …

“It was therefore critical to test and confirm the ability of the well (including the primary cement job) to withstand the under-balance.”

The visiting execs and the new trainee in the team both add to the dynamics of dealing with the apparent problem at a critical moment in what was already known to be a critically-balanced situation – interesting. And then the fateful error :

” … the 1,400 psi reading on the drill pipe could only have been caused by a leak into the well. Nevertheless, at 8 pm, BP Well Site Leaders, in consultation with the crew, made a key error and mistakenly concluded the second negative test procedure had confirmed the well’s integrity.”

After that, yes the BOP’s should have been a last line of defence, but weren’t … it’s history … Having been in the pressure testing position myself on several projects, I feel for Anderson …. was he amongst the dead, I wonder ? [He was.]

The recommendations need reading in detail, but this looks like systemic management / surveillance / regulation system needs, so that what look like normal processes in abnormal situations don’t (accidentally) skip critical checks. To their credit, BP still seems to be taking the full hit of responsibility, but I doubt BP is special in this respect.  These are industry needs.

Ten Years of Blogging

This open source s/w approach really works surprisingly well.

I have a collapsing archives plug-in the side-bar that failed as the date went from 2010 to 2011, despite having ten years of successfully linked archives. At first – yesterday – I thought maybe there was a “decade” level of hierarchy, but whatever the design intent the years and months got screwed up in the display. I was about to troll for a fix this morning, and in fact as a logged into WordPress the Robert Felty “Collapsing Archives” plug-in had an update waiting to go … it auto-updated … and it seems to behave correctly. Result.

Oh, and of course that means I noticed this is my 10th year of  blogging ! Wow.

Science vs Religion Wars

I have three or four draft responses to Pharyngula (PZ Myers) blog posts, but they always turn into long essays and I rarely get round to publishing. One problem is he has many signed-up readers who respond to every post, and individual comments get lost in the baying mob (just like Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog I find). And since my comments (as an atheist) are mainly about the baying-mob mentality, it’s hard to know how to get the point into the stream. So here a very short post with one point, track-backed to PZ’z blog.

In this Facebook extract example, the innocent / ignorant status poster and commenters are indeed misguided on attributing the +/-10ft design to God, but the one scientific response totally misses the point and proceeds (very smugly I might add) to split hairs with one quantifiable “design” detail, and get soundly booed off stage by the believers with no argument either way. But PZ and his admirers simply jump on the same band-wagon – Oh look, theists only argue using the LaLaLaLaLa fingers-in-ears methods. Dumb and dumber I say. Theist or scientist, you can both be dumb. There is a very important point of interest in this facebook post that is completely swamped by those who believe themselves intellectually superior yet prefer wars to progress.

OK, so the “10ft” quote was way off the mark, but the “Goldilocks” enigma of how much of the universe seems to be fine-tuned “just right” for our-world-as-we-know-it to exist is a very interesting question. Easily attributed to god by the ignorant, but conveniently glossed-over by science in baying-mob mode.

My point ? It’s a myth that pointing out flaws in your adversaries’ arguments is a source of progress – falsification is good in the science-lab of repeatable-cases, refereed-peer-reviews & law-courts, but not in the real world. In fact it simply deepens the divide, reinforces adversaries as adversaries and excludes middles. Middles that have nothing to do with with compromise or accomodationism or apologism – I’m as atheist as any of the four horsemen – but concerned with the exclusion of sound rational knowledge.

Pull your finger out PZ – you are supposed to a responsible scientist / atheist.