## Supply and demand in the Middle East

In the continuing interest of figuring out what in God’s name is going on with the price increases in oil, I did a little research on the US Government’s Energy Information Administration website, which apparently exists. (I suppose it may be an inexorable fact that governments continue expanding until beaurocracies are created to represent all possible three letter combinations, at which point they move on to four letter ones like USSR.)

To put the world oil supply in historical perspective, I took the past data for proven reserves and divided it by the yearly world oil consumption. The result (shown above in red) is a plot of the number of years worth of reserves in the ground expressed in the years of consumption at that time. If you can trust the reserve data, this number is basically a lower bound on the amount of time before the oil hits the fan. For reference, I’ve also shown the total worldwide consumption.

There are two interesting things, I think, about this plot. First, it’s kind of hard to worry too much about “peak oil” when the amount of time our reserves will last keeps going up, not down. Second, there doesn’t appear to have been any change in the consumption or suppy (at least in terms of reserves) that would justify the sustained rise in prices that occured around 2001.

## LaTeX equations in WordPress

There is a very nice plugin for WordPress done by Automattic that allows one to include LaTeX mathematics in a post. However, their version handled everything as inline math, so that operators like integrals and sums were too small, as if they were trying to be fit within the space of a line, and not as they should be in a displayed equation.Â Fortunately, they made it open source, soÂ I justÂ made a few very minor changes to fix that, and plan to extend the plugin in the future to allow for both inline and display equations to be created.

You can download the current version of what I have so far here. It requires the fauxml plugin, so remember to download and install that, first.

If anybody is interested in this, let me know via a comment and I’ll try to get to this sooner rather than later. I think the ability to write math in a post and comments would allow for some very interesting science and math blogs. For example, it would be great to see people throwing equations around in the comment stream of a post about some contentious interpretation of quantum mechanics.

At any rate, here is an example of the kind of beautiful output that can be created with the LaTeX plugin:

$latex E[(X|Y)^2]-\mathrm{var}[X|Y] = \left( \frac{1}{f_Y(y)} \int_\infty^\infty dx \, x f_{X,Y}(x,y) \right) ^2$.

Pretty cool huh?

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1. So far so good. However, it would be nice if they would keep all user-added files in a single folder. As it is now, any added plugins and themes must be remerged in. There’s no reason that the included distribution themes and pluginsÂ have to be in the same directory as user-added themes and user uploads. It makes no sense, and renders the upgrade process a much more laborious enterprise than it really has to be. Good design would dictate segregating everything the user might want to add or change into a single directory that wouldn’t have to be touched during an upgrade.