Link Banana

Amos pegs it:

Sometimes a good graphic can put the issue into perspective.

Do go have a look at what would, in a perfect world, stop all related arguments cold.

The reality of the price at the pump against the price of a barrel:

Analyses of gasoline economics show that when the price of oil rises, it takes up to four weeks for gas station prices to catch up, with most of the increase taking place within the first two weeks. But when oil prices sink, it takes up to eight weeks for the savings to be passed along to consumers. The phenomenon is known as “asymmetric price adjustment” (PDF) or, more informally, “rockets and feathers.”

Fifty things — some thoroughly reasonable, some a tad odd — that are being blamed on the high price of oil. My personal favorites:

22. Bacon and ham could get more expensive. (WSJ)
28. Demand for wine is weakening. (Portland Business Journal)
32. One Virginia library mulls bringing back the bookmobile. (Daily Times, Maryland)

(via kottke)

This rerun is a great reason to love The Onion.

The Economist offers two charts about interesting aspects of modern energy:

• The Price of Oil. Looking at this graph makes it at least seem reasonable that oil could actually get to $200 a gallon.
• Energy Efficiency. Though America’s use of energy per dollar of GDP has dropped in recent years, it remains the least efficient country in the world. This data was also used is a story in the magazine.

Soap, if you don’t know, is a surfactant. That means it attracts both nonpolar compounds (like oils) and polar compounds (like water), thus it attaches to oils on your body and lets water carry them away. Pepfactants are — or will be when we get them — similar, but cooler.

Adding a dash of Pepfactants to laundry detergent seems to confer this switching ability on the whole mixture. It should then be possible to switch off the films that give rise to soap bubbles between the washing and rinsing cycles, so that less water is needed to remove the suds. Pepfactants are biodegradable, so they could also be useful in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

Perhaps mistakenly, I shrugged off Nicholas Kritstof’s first attempt to convince the world that the Sudanese government is ready to restart hostilities in the south of their country. (For those who are wondering, Darfur is in the west, and their had been a long war in the south that ended a few years ago.) After a second column on the same idea, I figured it at least beared mentioning.

Since late November, there have been repeated clashes in the Abyei area between South Sudan’s armed forces and a large tribe of Arab nomads, the Misseriya, which is armed and backed by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Mr. Paguot said that several hundred people had been killed in these clashes, and that some of the gunmen were government soldiers who had taken off their uniforms to masquerade as tribal fighters.

On Feb. 7, gunmen from the Misseriya shot up and looted a bus arriving in Abyei and began blockading the road that leads into the town from the north. That has cut off supplies, so shops in the town market are running out of fuel and food, and prices are rising.

The American make a pretty interesting comparison between the price of oil and Vladimir Putin’s aggression abroad.

We found that as the price of oil rose, the aggressiveness index increased: that is, the more valuable oil became, the more hostile Russian foreign policy became. The reverse was also true: when oil prices dropped in 2001 and 2002, so did Russia’s aggression. The relationship proved strongest at the annual level: a $1.48 increase in oil prices yearly correlated with an additional “point” increase in Russian aggression.