Back home after the Standord Geothermal Workshop (SGW). Some highlights were catching up with Russell Roundtree (CSM geophysics grad) and signing on to help with the AGU-SEG geothermal workshop in summer 2025. Stay tuned for details. Pulled out 45 SGW papers of particular interest to me and thought why not code up some python to scrape the text out of the pdf files then make a wordcloud? Might give a kind of ranked summary of the important topics in the papers I selected. About 350K words contributed to the word cloud below. Interesting relative occurrence of model versus data. Right now mode ..read more

 This week I am attending the #stanford #geothermal workshop. SGW is a premier forum on all aspects of geothermal, from district heating to electric power generation.  After serving six years as #uark #geosciences department chair and two more as #fulbright college associate dean, I've chosen to rejoin regular faculty this summer. My plan is to focus on modern, utility-scale geothermal power generation for #arkansas, where 90% of electrical power is from fossil fuels and a mature nuclear power plant. In the coming decades, some other form ..read more

It has been a while since we did a covid update for AR, US and World. But here it is 2 years and 10 months into the covid era.    ..read more

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 Cases continue extremely high and setting 7-day average records in all zones plotted. I expect the usual 2 week lag to see the signal in the death data ..read more

Below is today's AR-US-World plot of C19 deaths (left) and cases (right). Note US and world case data for today are crazy high. In fact, US is over 1M daily cases, representing 40% of cases reported worldwide. The AR 7-day average cases is the highest ever and steeply increasing. Meanwhile deaths for all regions are trending steady or down. Are we seeing the omicron effect -- more infectious and less deadly? As the song says, 'Something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear ..read more

 Back in 1911 there was a scientific conference in Europe, invitation only, that brought together some of the giants of early modern physics: Curie, deBroglie, Einstein and 15 more. The topic was 'Radiation and Quanta', Einstein only 6 years earlier in his miracle year introduced light quanta to explain the photoelectric effect. In 1911 quantum mechanics was still a decade away, the fundamental contributions of Schrodinger and Heisenberg were yet to come.  I bring this up for two reasons. First, I recently watched the movie Copenhagen about the 1941 meeting of Heisenberg and Boh ..read more