Word: peakes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nobody predicted this. The true believers in what's called peak oil--a motley crew of survivalists, despisers of capitalism, a few billionaire investors and a lot of perfectly respectable geologists--have long cited the middle to end of this decade as a likely turning point...
This isn't quite the same as saying that oil production has peaked and is about to start declining sharply--the view of the true peakists. In "peak lite," as some call it, the big issues are not so much geological as political, technical, financial and even human-resource-related (the world apparently suffers from a dearth of qualified petroleum engineers). These factors all delay the arrival of oil on the market, meaning that production would not so much peak as plateau. But with demand rising sharply, especially from China and India, even a plateau could be precarious...
...most of this oil is hard to extract and even harder to refine, and it isn't likely to account for a significant share of global production anytime soon. Almost everybody agrees that the pumping of conventionally sourced oil outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already peaked or will peak soon, a reality that even discoveries like the recent 8 billion-bbl. find off the coast of Brazil can't alter because production from so many existing fields is declining...
...week of Thanksgiving also marks the year's lowest volume of searches on the term "diet." And it marks the peak of online searches for the term "depression," perhaps related to the failure to stick with our diets or, more likely, because we're stuck with - or without - our families. The good news, however, is that searches for "depression" and popular antidepressant medications have declined overall since Thanksgiving...
Another search that hits a peak around Thanksgiving is "engagement rings" - that term logs the most searches during the week before Thanksgiving and during the week of Valentine's Day. Offline, most jewelers report that the busiest weeks for engagement ring shopping are those between Chrismas and New Year's (probably because most proposals occur on either Christmas Day or New Year's Eve). So, why does the online shopping spike take place a week earlier? My analyst team offers the "ultimatum theory" - to which I don't subscribe - as an answer. They think the online spike is likely caused...