04 Jun 2006 #0623.html

New York Rainstorm

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Dear Family and Friends,

Welcome to this week's "Thoughtlet."

These words are my personal diary and a weekly review of ideas, beliefs, thoughts, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you: my children, my family, and my friends.

"Monday was Memorial Day. We stayed home. I worked on projects on the computer all day. As I recall it was nice weather, and I didn't even go outside all day. Oh well!

Tuesday I was back at GDC. Terry Quinn in the London office is putting together a big proposal for Sonotach in Algeria. Luis and I helped him put together several components. I was very pleased to receive this e-mail from Midland Valley's President, Alan Gibbs, one of the groups Terry brought into the proposal from Glasgow, Scotland:

Dear Terry, Thanks for getting back to me with more detail. I'd like to involve my colleague Roddy Muir in the conversation and he's not in today. So we'll call you mid-morning tomorrow if that's OK. I found the bit on your interpretation services on your web site. Haven't seen Roice in years. The first time was back in 82/3? when he visited BNOC trying to sell us one of the first Landmark systems and then later he visited after I set up Midland Valley, since then we've bumped into each other a few times in Houston but I hadn't made the connection that he was now with GDC. Talk to you tomorrow. Alan'

It's nice to know it is not just me with a long memory. And it also felt good, as the tone was so positive, and along the line of how I always saw myself, prior to the divorce. I guess I could stop writing about the divorce. However, I have not reconciled to myself it would be right, especially since several of you have not accepted the fact your mother divorced me, or your father divorced Andrea. So it is not just me still struggling with the selfish actions of another person. Tuesday evening Andrea and I went to the temple. It is so nice to have someone who wants to go to the temple with me, and someone who would never confront, verbally attack, and then walk out of a discussion with the temple president. But maybe I bring up this wound as self-justification for my mistakes. Certainly it is not in the positive tone of Alan Gibbs.

I think Rachel came in on Wednesday, and I do not have any notes to tell me. It would be on a credit card receipt, or a plane ticket, which is probably still around someplace.

Thursday I sent a note to Albert Boulanger and told him we were going to have about a six hour layover at Newark Airport, and that Andrea wanted to bring Rachel into New York City. Albert suggested I would really enjoy the American History Museum at 79th and Central Park West 5th, or maybe the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or maybe the Smithsonian American Indian Museum down by the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Albert knows me. He is a good friend. What he didn't tell me was about New York rainstorms this time of the year. Oh well. I have a note that at 11:00 PM we had a call from Joshua. I do not remember the specifics, and it seems like it was related to building bridges someplace.

Friday morning early we headed to the airport for our trip to Europe. We got on the Continental flight to Newark, picked up the June 2006 magazine, and on page 65 there was a photo of Mike Bahorich inside a box with the caption: "Breaking Out: Apache Corp.'s Mike Bahorich can't be contained." The article isn't that long, and since Mike was at Amoco in the group that reviewed HyperEdge, told me they were going to buy it, and then did an internal development, which hastened the financial failure of HyperMedia Corporation, from which I have never recovered financially, I think it is appropriate to quote the article:

"OUT-OF-THE-BOX THINKER Mike Bahorich takes a different approach at Apache Corp. There's nothing unusual about a young guitar player dreaming of rock stardom. Plenty of college kids aspire to the fame of Jimi Hendrix or the Edge. Mike Bahorich spent his early days at the University of Missouri-Columbia pursuing that dream. "I played in my first rock 'n' roll band when I was 12," he says. "I wanted to be the next Eric Clapton." But at 19, after a couple of years playing small-town clubs across Missouri, reality set in. "I thought I'd better have a backup plan," he says. Although he's not a household icon like Clapton, Bahorich's backup career did make him a rock star. He earned his bachelor's in geology from Missouri and then a master's from Virginia Polytech in geophysics – the science of earth imaging – and today he's executive vice president of exploration and production technology at Apache Corporation, an independent oil and gas exploration and production company with $7.6 billion in annual revenues. Bahorich is behind eight patents for developments that have helped geophysicists more accurately determine where they'll strike oil and gas – critical knowledge for a company whose business is siting drilling locations. "The more accurate we are, the better it is for the company, the environment, and the consumer," he says. "Energy is a trillion-dollar industry. If we can become 1 percent more efficient, that's $10 billion." The 49-year-old Bahorich doesn't think of himself as a star. A modest sort, he likes to tinker around the edges. Innovation, he contends, is about small, incremental breakthroughs that tweak someone else's big ideas. (Interesting. Note the parenthetical comments were not in the Continental article.) Take interval attribute mapping. In the early 1980's, Amoco, Bahorich's employer at the time, asked him to figure out why an $80 million Alaskan well turned out to be a dry hole. "In trying to solve that problem of finding the reservoir rock – rock that could produce oil – I noticed patterns in the seismic data," he says. "I developed a technique for measuring the image characteristics in a quantifiable way that would reveal the reservoir rock, and then take this volume of information and transform it into map characteristics." Bahorich's technique is now widely used throughout the industry. (Thanks to Gary Jones and John Kerr independently developing StratAmp and Landmark Graphics and providing it as a free add-on to the Landmark interpretation software.) It's typical of his modus operandi. Bahorich didn't invent seismic imaging; he just tweaked it. He did the same with the problem of finding fault lines. his Coherence Cube is the first method developed for direclty viewing faults within a seismic image. Faults are critical in oil exploration because hydrocarbons are often trapped up against them; being able to see them clearly using the Coherence Cube has saved the energy industry countless millions in exploration costs. Bahorich took something geophysicists look at every day – three-dimensional seismic images – and looked at them in a new way, stripping away reflectoins of different rock layers until all that remained were "discontinuities," in this case, fault lines. "I was tinkering," he says. "I literally screamed at the screen when I saw the first clear image of a fault." Bahorich's tinkering earned him not only a patent for the Coherence Cube, but also a prestigious gold medal from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. "The cool thing about science is, you know somebody is going to come up with a better way to do something, whatever it is. So why not be the one to do it?" he asks. Bahorich earned his eighth patent last year for a tweak of the concept of spectral decomposition. "When you hear a guitar chord, you're hearing distinct information from each of six strings," he explains. "Spectral decomposition is about getting specific information from a specific band of sound, or pitch. Someone else invented that idea, I just developed a further mathematical enhancement." Clearly, Bahorich hasn't lost his enthusiasm for music. He hasn't packed away the guitar that inspired the musical analogy. Far from it. When Apache put together a band for its 50th anniversary party in 2004, Bahorich was there, singing lead and, of course, rocking out. - Molly Rose Teuke"

I remember meeting a member of the church from Washington D.C. once who was a personal publicist. He would make sure someone had articles about themselves in the Continental Airlines Magazine, and that the right people heard about things of relevance. His comment to me, after spending about an hour with me, was that I am the kind of person the church needed to put in as a Stake President. It absolutely turned me off to think of lobbying for a church position, especially one requiring so much work. Then he told me he had been divorced, and I completely wrote him off. Hadn't thought of that discussion for over 20 years, and as I write this I find myself wondering if I was right. I still think so. After all, I'm not comfortable being as famous as I am in my profession. Why would I want to be more uncomfortable? And I did not get a PhD or even an Masters in Geophysics, nor have I applied for and received 8 patents, nor have I played the guitar at a Public Company birthday party, so it is irrelevant to think about it anyway. It's better to be ready for the unexpected New York rainstorm. than to spend any time worrying about being famous.

So we arrived in Newark, having checked our bags through to Zurich, Switzerland. We went downstairs to baggage claim and found some transportation people who told us we could catch a bus into Times Square and back out and make our next flight . . . barely. Andrea really wanted to see Times Square, and Rachel was also interested. It was their party, so I went along. It took almost an hour to get to where we got off the bus, and we realized we did not have much time to tour. So we walked up towards Times Square, and we found a New York rainstorm. It was not misting. It was not sprinkling. It was not raining. It was dumping buckets of water between extremely tall skyscrapers. We stepped out of the way, and hoped the New York rainstorm would go away. It didn't. There was a guy selling umbrellas. I bought two. It was still coming down, we were all hungry, and so we went into a Chinese noodles place. I had a very good shrimp bowl. As we ate we kept looking outside. The New York rainstorm did not let up. Finally we decided to chance it, and worked our way up to the awning under a hotel entrance, then Andrea and I shared an umbrella and followed Rachel to Times Square. Andrea and Rachel seemed so excited to be there. I thought it was just a whole bunch of people with nothing better to do than stand around in or run through a New York rainstorm. There was a guy that hit on Rachel several times. Kind of scared me, as it seemed to me there was a chemistry, and he was not a viable son-in-law in my book. And it wasn't just the tattoos. It was the cocky spirit emanating from him. Oh well! It isn't my choice. It isn't my choice. It isn't my choice. And I do trust Rachel to choose wisely. Even with the umbrellas we were soaked by the time we got back on the bus to ride back to Newark airport. And to top it off, I still don't understand why we didn't sit in the airport and work on the computer or read for six hours instead of go through the hassle of going to Times Square where the only thing really experienced was a New York Rainstorm. Oh well!

Turns out this was about the day we received an e-mail from Sara, which I wasn't able to read until we got back to Houston. It read:

'Dell wants to make me an offer! They're working through the numbers and will get back to me today or early Monday AM! Sara'

We flew all night Friday and arrived in Zurich Saturday morning. When awake, I was reading "The Worlds of Joseph Smith, a Bicentennial Conference at The Library of Congress," Edited by John W. Welch, BYU Studies, V44, No. 4, 2005. I highly recommend this as good reading for each of you. And please remember, our extensive library is not just for us, it is for you kids. I know I need to get the index on-line, and I will. In the meantime, if there is a book I write about or you remember and didn't read, let me know and we will send it to you, with the only requirement being you send it back when you are finished, or after a couple of months, whichever comes first. I wrote the following possible stanza for Prime Words from this reading, where the a reference is from page 111 of this book, and the b reference was written at my missionary companion Bruno Steinle's house in Interlaken, Switzerland on Sunday, 04 June 2006:

'Remembering is to the past As faith is to the future Remembering is sacramental (a) Both can be our Teacher (b)'

I will talk about what happened on Saturday and Sunday in Switzerland in the next Thoughtlet (0624.html. My main point of this Thoughtlet is that it is important to always be prepared for an unexpected New York rainstorm."

Since the 38th week of 1996 I have written a weekly "Thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me). Until the 43rd week of 2004 I sent these out as an e-mail. They were intended to be big thoughts which mean a lot to me. Over time the process evolved into a personal diary. These notes were shared with my family because I know how important the written word can be. Concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life, I thought this was a good way to reach those I love. It no longer feels right to send out an e-mail and "force" my kids and my family to be aware of my life and struggles.

Everyone has their own life to lead, and their own struggles to work through. I will continue this effort, and will continue to make my notes publicly accessible (unless I learn of misuse by someone who finds out about them, and then will aggressively pursue a legal remedy to copyright infringement and I will put the Thoughtlets behind a password).

The index to download any of these Thoughtlets is at http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets, or you can e-mail me with questions or requests at rnelson@walden3d.com (note if you are not on my e-mail "whitelist" you must send 2 e-mails within 24 hours of each other in order for your e-mail to not be trashed).

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 2006 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.