thanks, bp

readers may have noticed the new bp oil spill meter perched in the right column of this blog. it will remain a fixture here until such time that the leak has been independently confirmed as sealed.

my home-made widget isn't as snazzy as pbs', but it can be resized. the spill rate is based on pbs' worst case scenario of 4,200,000 gallons per day (which amounts to 48.61 gallons per second ¹), which daily comes closer to reality as we peel away layer after layer of bp's lies and lowballing.

my widget also takes account of local time zones. according to wikipedia, the well exploded on april 20 at 9:45pm central daylight time. so anyone in chicago watching the meter will see the "day" counter advance nightly at 9:45pm. anyone watching in los angeles will see their counter advance at 7:45pm, while counters in new york will advance at 10:45pm, and so forth around the globe.

copy the code below and paste it into your own web pages to get a meter for your blog. to resize it, simply substitute your own numbers at each instance of the parameters for "height" and "width":

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="220" height="156" id="bpLeakCounter01" align="middle"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.aarrgghh.com/gladYouAsked/bpLeak/bpLeakCounter01.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="http://www.aarrgghh.com/gladYouAsked/bpLeak/bpLeakCounter01.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="220" height="156" name="bpLeakCounter01" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed></object>

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1. oddly, the math programmers at pbs seem to think 4.2m gal/day amounts to just 37 gal/sec. update: d'oh! my bad — pbs' counter is also attempting to account for the "recaptured" oil, a number even harder to substantiate than the spillage. update 2: now revised to include bp's reported stoppage.