Michael Mechanic

Senior Editor

Michael landed at MoJo after six years as an award-winning feature editor at the alt-weekly East Bay Express. He's written for numerous publications, including The Industry Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired. Father of two mostly charming kids and a striped cat named Phelps (okay, not the father), he lives in Oakland, California, where he raises four chickens, plays his guitar, and is lately attempting to teach himself fiddle and mandolin.

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Michael landed at MoJo after six years as an award-winning feature editor at the alt-weekly East Bay Express. He's written for numerous publications, including The Industry Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired. He set out to be a scientist, and as an undergrad spent a year in an organic chemistry lab at UC Berkeley trying to synthesize natural poisons found in the skin of certain tropical frogs. He later earned a masters degree in cellular and developmental biology, and another in journalism. In 2009, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for public service, as one of five writers in MoJo's "Torture Hits Home" package. The father of two usually charming kids and a striped cat named Phelps, Michael lives in Oakland, California, where, after years of classical piano and raucous punk-rock drumming (and putting out more than a dozen CDs on his former DIY label, Bad Monkey Records), he has retired to old-time and traditional American music, blues-guitar fingerpicking, and lately, teaching himself to play fiddle and mandolin. His family's chickens are named Lucia, Podge, Cat, and Weed-Whacker. The goldfish have no names, because the family plans to eat them someday.

How Much of the Gulf is Leased?

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Jun. 10, 2010 2:34 PM PDT

A BoingBoing commenter on my "Who Really Owns the Gulf of Mexico" post points out that there are plenty of non-leased cells in the map highlighted in that piece, and suggests that people check out the following map, too. This is just a detail; you can download the larger version here. But I think it just further underscores the notion of a corporate feeding frenzy around our Gulf resources. The leased areas are denoted in green. There are 6,652 of them, covering 35,637,392 acres--more than 22 percent of the leaseable Gulf.

Most active parts of the Gulf: Leased areas are green.

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Quiz: What Do BP and Kurt Cobain Have in Common?

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Jun. 8, 2010 12:34 PM PDT

Fossil-fuel extraction is pretty much a boy's club. As such, it can be tough to distinguish the names of oil or gas fields from those of, say, downhill ski runs, weapons, and rock bands. BP, for instance, has Gulf fields named Nirvana, Stones, and Supertramp.

Browsing Offshore magazine's 2009 survey of Gulf deepwater discoveries, you'll also find Greek mythology (Atlas, Cyclops, Dionysius, Mars, Medusa, Triton), mountains (Matterhorn, Fuji, K2), Bond references (Q, Goldfinger), royal titles (King, Prince, Princess), Biblical stuff (Genesis, Lost Ark), now-doomed animals (Manatee, Marlin, Swordfish, Tortuga), and cartoon characters (Spiderman, Bullwinkle). The long list of whimsical names feel somewhat jarring in the spill context—a reminder, perhaps, that the energy industry is like a bunch of overgrown boys playing with matches. And, at least most of the time, they don't burn the house down.

So, just for the hell of it—and I do mean the hell of it—take this little quiz. Some items have more than one answer. Answers below the jump.

For each of the following, indicate whether it's a…
A.   downhill ski run
B.   hard rock/heavy metal band
C.   weapon
D.   oil/gas field in the Gulf of Mexico
E.   all of the above

(Extra credit: Identify the two BP fields.)

1. Bermuda Triangle
2. Black Widow
3. The Blow Hole
4. Brutus
5. Claymore
6. Devil's Island
7. Fastball
8. Firebird
9. Gunflint
10. Genghis Kahn
11. Great White
12. Hornet
13. King Kong
14. Longhorn
15. Mad Dog
16. Morgus
17. Morpeth
18. Mother In Law
19. Orion
20. Raptor
21. Red Hawk
22. Shale Slope
23. Tomahawk
24. Thor
25. Vortex

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Who Really Owns the Gulf of Mexico?

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Jun. 8, 2010 12:34 PM PDT

Who owns the Gulf of Mexico? That's a question you have to ask while perusing Offshore magazine's 2010 poster of the Gulf—downloadable here as a large PDF, but well worth checking out. Where most people look at the Gulf, they see a vast marine ecosystem, wetlands, and, until recently, gorgeous beaches.

What energy executives see is a massive grid, tangled with scores of oil and gas pipelines and rival fields with macho names that sound like heavy metal bands, black-diamond ski runs, and weapons systems. (See "Quiz: What Do BP and Kurt Cobain Have in Common?") Here's a small detail, slightly blurry, but you get the point. (Red lines are gas pipelines and pink are gas fields, green lines are oil pipelines and green blurbs are oil fields.)

How Oil Execs See the Gulf—Map Detail: Black dots are Fourchon (left), and Grand Isle, Louisiana How energy execs view the Gulf: Black dots are Fourchon (left), and Grand Isle, Louisiana

Next, here's another map detail from farther offshore. I circled the site of the ongoing BP Deepwater Horizon spill in yellow.

Map detail: Mississippi Canyon; BP spill site circled.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

23andMe DNA Snafu: "I Started Screaming"

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Jun. 8, 2010 10:52 AM PDT

ScienceBlogs' Genetic Future reports on a mixup of DNA samples by the Google-affiliated personal genomics company 23andMe, one of a host of companies that scrutinize customers' genetic material and analyze their likelihood of bearing various traits and disease risks. This, as we've reported previously, is far from perfect science; despite the touchy-feely marketing, such tests provide little beyond genetic navelgazing.

The timing wasn't so great for 23andMe, which recently came under the scrutiny of Rep. Henry Waxman's oversight subcommittee. And, while mistakes happen, you can run into real customer-service problems when you screw up. 23andMe, which uses a contract lab, explained the mishap in an announcement visible only to customers who logged in (see full announcement at bottom):

Up to 96 customers may have received and viewed data that was not their own. Upon learning of the mix-ups, we immediately identified all customers potentially affected, notified them of the problem and removed the data from their accounts. The lab is now concurrently conducting an investigation and re-processing the samples of the affected customers and their accurate results will be posted early next week. We expect the investigation will be complete over the next several days and we will provide further details when we have them.

Dan MacArthur notes in his Genetic Future post that customers were griping on the announcement's comments thread about how long it took 23andMe to provide feedback on their baffling data, not to mention the poor quality control—23andMe could easily cross-check a few known traits, like gender. One mother became rather anxious, to say the least, after her family's test results suggested that her son wasn't a blood relation:

He was not a match for any of us. I checked his haplogroups and they were different from ours. I started screaming. A month before my son was born two local hospitals had baby switches. I panicked and I checked over and over. My kids were sitting at the computer because we all wanted to see the results. My son laughed but he looked upset. I called my sister in tears.

So it's buyer beware, says MacArthur, reminding customers not to take their results for granted:

The process between spitting into a cup and viewing your genetic results online involves multiple steps where things can go wrong, ranging from errors in sample tracking (the most pernicious and difficult to correct), through genotyping problems (usually much easier to spot), to errors in data analysis and display.

The best advice, however, might be to take your results with a grain of salt, errors or no errors. Until the loose genetic correlations these tests are based upon are supported by controlled clinical trials involving large numbers of people (identifying candidates for such trials is a quiet part of 23andMe's business model), personal genomics will amount to little more than personal entertainment.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

The One Thing BP Got Right (and Other Oil Blurbs)

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Jun. 2, 2010 5:48 PM PDT

While, uh, drilling for angles on the BP spill, I stumbled across the following ad in PetroMin, an oil industry trade magazine.

An ad from PetroMin magazine
This seemed somehow fitting. Just yesterday the Obama administration—desperate to cap the pipe spewing oil into the Gulf at a rate of up to 798,000 gallons per day—met with Avatar director James Cameron, whose Titanic experience made him an expert on doing stuff underwater. Shadarian, an Iranian company that makes pipeline-repair products, apparently preferred a more Avatar-esque theme. The weirdest thing, though, is the slogan: "Challenging The Perfection."

Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?

BP, for its part, has challenged the perfection that was offshore drilling's near-term prospects. Said prospects are exactly what PetroMin associate editor Vishnu Pillai gushes about in the trade rag's April-June issue, which clearly hit the presses before "blowout preventer" became a household phrase. He writes:

The search for oil and gas has, over many decades, moved from great plains of land to coastal areas and now even into deepwater areas. Yet the industry still believes that there will be no crisis in the foreseeable future. The industry faces the challenges of environmentalists who claim that the planet is being pillaged to assuage the greed of oil companies on a constant basis, faces the challenge of finding new sources of hydrocarbons and faces the challenge of being economically and operationally viable at the same time. Despite such pressing challenges there is that undeflatable air of optimism that is proudly hung across the industry like badge of defiance.

Pillai then explains why the optimism is warranted:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]