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Comment Re: Paint Drying (Score 1) 137

Andy Warhol already went down the road in the 60s with films such as the 8 hour long Empire, which consisted of a single shot of the Empire State Building. Neat, eh?

I see Warhol also threw together a flick with the alarming title Tub Girls. Although some of his films depicted graphic sexual acts this one apparently doesn't go further than showing one of his Superstars in the nude chatting with friends.

Comment Re:Time for a new date (Score 1) 201

Actually the all time high of crude + condensate production was 77.25 million barrels per day, reached in February. The US is the nation showing most of the gains in production over the last 6 years, though: World Oil Production According to the EIA. If other nations could replicate the US experience with drilling for tight oil then perhaps we'd see enough substantial supply gains to bring down prices. The lack of sufficient added supply in the face of rising demand is why oil prices remain high.

Comment Re:In highschool (Score 1) 201

Brazil had that big string of sub-salt oil finds in the last decade, too - tens of billions of barrels ready for market, but the projects are still in the pipeline, and Brazillian production has actually declined in the interim. When they have everything up and running likely it will add to world supplies in a significant manner, but these megaprojects take a long time to fully complete - and their coastline is a much more hospitable environment to work in than the Arctic coast, and Brazil doesn't antagonize foreign companies in anything like the manner Russian firms do, either.

Comment No more Discussion search too (Score 1) 81

Google also recently axed its very useful Discussion search function: Where has the discussion search filter gone? - Google Product Forums No reason given - ostensibly to combat piracy in bootlegging forums? And to kill grandmothers who are trying to figure out why they have these shooting pains racing up their left arm. Oh yeah, etc. Nice one, Google. Just another instance of them being useless pains in the ass for whatever reason.

Comment Re:11% fuel efficiency improvement (Score 1) 138

The 11% figure is from Mythbusters too, there's an actual company, Fastskinz, which builds much more subtle looking coverings which failed to make the grade in one test: Fastskinz Test Drive: Can a Golf Ball Covering Improve MPGs? - Popular Mechanics

Along the way, we periodically checked the fuel-economy readout on the dash display of both vehicles. At 139.9 miles, the Fastskinz Flex was returning 27.2 mpg while the unwrapped Flex showed 28.4 mpg. At 271.1 miles, the Fastskinz Flex was delivering 23.7 mpg and the unwrapped Flex showed 24.1 mpg. We drove until the gaslight glowed in both cars, which turned out to be 430 miles. Back at the gas pump, we filled each Flex in the same manner we did that morning. The Fastskinz Flex returned 24.52 mpg and the unwrapped Flex returned 24.55 mpg. The dash display read 24.8 mpg in the Fastskinz Flex and 25.6 mpg in the unwrapped Flex.

Essentially, in our test, we found no real fuel-economy improvement from the Fastskinz MPG-Plus wrap. And if you trust Ford's MPG displays, the Fastskinz Flex actually delivered slightly worse fuel economy on our loop. So two identical vehicles, on an identical route at identical speeds, with the same drivers, on the same day, returned nearly the same fuel economy. Where did MPG-Plus go wrong?

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