Monthly Archives for July 2010

July was dominated by three running stories: the attempt to close the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, Kyrgyzstan's constitutional transition in the aftermath of June's violence in the south, and the widening use of financial and legal instruments as tools of statecraft — from a state-secrets prosecution in Beijing to a currency decision in Tehran.

Published this month

• 24 July — Iran to Shun Euro, Dollar in Oil Deals. Tehran says it will exclude the dollar and the euro from crude transactions. What that changes is the plumbing, not the price — and in 2010 the plumbing is the point.
• 24 July — India Unveils $35 Computer. A touch-screen device for students at a claimed thirty-five dollar bill of materials, and the reasons the previous decade of low-cost educational computing should temper the enthusiasm.
• 22 July — Climate: Argentina Experiences Killing Freeze. Antarctic air runs up the length of the continent, snow reaches the subtropics, and the losses fall on livestock and citrus.
• 21 July — Eurasian Chessboard: Kyrgyzstan. Central Asia's first female president takes an office the electorate has just voted to shrink.
• 21 July — Polish Plane Crash: Unanswered Questions. A parliamentary committee calls the Smolensk crash a crime. Separating the contested questions from the settled ones.
• 21 July — U.S. Navy Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drone in Test. Four drones down over water, and why tracking — not power — is the hard part.
• 14 July — 21 Lutetia. A comet-bound probe passes within about two thousand miles of a main-belt asteroid whose composition has resisted classification for decades.
• 12 July — Russian Spy Suspects Had Ordinary Lives. Eleven people, years of constructed identity, and a tasking aimed at access rather than secrets.
• 10 July — New Capping Effort Planned for Gulf Spill. Swapping a leaking cap for a sealing stack a mile down, and the pressure reading that will decide everything.
• 9 July — Kyrgyzstan Puts Cost of June's Ethnic Riots at $71 Million. The first damage estimate for Osh and Jalalabad — and what a damage estimate cannot count.
• 7 July — India: Protestors Blocked Railway Services. A nationwide strike over deregulated fuel prices and double-digit food inflation.
• 5 July — Chinese Court Sentences US Geologist to 8 Years. Eight years for a commercial oil database, and the problem with retroactive classification.

The month in one line

A recurring theme runs through July: the distance between a headline number and what it actually measures. Seventy-one million dollars of damage in southern Kyrgyzstan counts buildings, not the trade that will not happen next year. Thirty-five dollars for a student computer is a bill of materials, not a delivered price. A capped well is not a killed well. Reading the number correctly is most of the work.

Continue to the August 2010 archive, or browse by subject: World, Sanctions, Space.

Threads that ran through the month

Three of July's stories are versions of one problem: institutions being asked to do something they were not designed for. A court applying state-secrets law to a commercial database is stretching a security instrument across an economic transaction. A fuel-pricing reform is asking a household budget to absorb a fiscal correction. A containment cap improvised onto a sheared riser is being asked to hold a pressure it was never specified for. In each case the strain shows up somewhere other than where the decision was made.

A fourth thread is the reliability of a first number. Preliminary damage estimates, prototype price points and early accident findings all share a property: they are produced under time pressure by parties with a position, and they are quoted for years afterwards as though they were audited. Where an initial figure appears in this month's coverage, the article says who produced it and under what conditions.