Ian is no longer a glimmer in the eyes of NWS forecasters. Ian is now a tropical storm. However, Ian is about to head north over unfavorable waters, will likely never develop hurricane strength, and is not expected to hit anything big. (See map above.)
Nothing else is really happening in the Atlantic at this time, wrt storms. There is a disturbance in the Lesser Antilles, which is not likely to do anything more any time soon, if at all.
Update: Monday AM:
Yes, the chances that a tropical storm that has been tracked for a few days now as a disturbance will form today is very high. By the end of the day we may have a named storm, and that storm may be Ian.
Here is incipient Ian:
Original Post:
The Atlantic Ocean is certainly having a special day today, with three, count ’em, three areas of disturbance spread across a huge area:
The one on the right has a very high probability of turning into something real, perhaps eventually to be a named storm, some time over the next few days. It is way too early to say much more than that about it.
But, since the topic of storms has come up, check out the latest video by Peter Sinclair on the topic of weather and anthropogenic global warming:
Diversity and opportunity. And freedom. Lots of freedom, freedom is great. I can tell you, I know freedom and I know we have lots of it, more than any other country. And diversity, we’ve almost got that under control too.
But seriously …
If you are like me, the tirade eventually given by the protagonist in the following clip was already formulating in your head for the first two minutes of this scene, and when it spilled out (in a form better than you or I would have managed), you were like “Yeah. Go baby!” (Or words to that effect.)
It is a tirade that is always running in my head, along side another one. The other one has to do with an issue also dealt with during the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, by the way, in case you’ve not see it). That second and related issue is fairness, and how it is a bad thing in journalism.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you well know what we are talking about. False balance. This is where one position is expressed, and a second opposing position is expressed, and therefore (as in, because these two positions were expressed) the press treats them as equal no matter how idiotic one or both may be. Indeed, it is often the case that there are not two legitimate positions related to a given issue. Hell, there are almost never two positions on a given issue, even though the press always insists that there are exactly two positions. Five. One. Three. Seven. Almost never two.
Anyway, have a look. It is about eight minutes long but worth every second, if you’ve not seen it:
I want to spend a moment looking at this problem of the press doing almost everything they do wrong almost all the time.
Why? Because this problem has become the most important political problem of the modern era.
North Korean nuclear arms and ISIL might be the most immediate problems in the news. Climate change might be the most important existential problem the planet has ever faced. Education, jobs, the economy, and all that might be the key perennial issues that come up in every election and affect people at all levels of government. And so on. But the mixture of jingoism (willful avoidance of thought) and the balance and fairness fetish are the reasons that those issues will only ever be dealt with in a half-assed and ineffective manner. It is the reason that people like me, who believe that taxes pay for civilization and the government can do good work, are fed up and are about to turn into full fledged anarchists. Or at least, that is how if feels sometimes. And by sometimes I mean almost all the time.
And this comes to a head because Donald J. Trump is a legitimate and respected candidate for President of the United States.
Did I just say “respected” and “Donald Trump” in the same sentence? Yes, yes I did. I did it because it is true and not true at the same time. Trump is either only barely respected, or simply not respected at all, by almost everybody, including his own party elite. He is seen as a lose cannon, a threat, a huge problem, an enormous mistake. But every single day the press, which consists of people who can’t believe that they are in a position where they have to cover Donald Trump as though he wasn’t a joke, treats him with the respect he deserves as a presidential nominee. They do this at the very same time that they treat Hillary Clinton — who was a family and children advocate, the designer of our first stab at a 20th century health care system (a century overdue), a very effective and highly respected Senator from New York, and an accomplished Secretary of State, and a few other things — like a child that is always acting badly and requires constant admonishment.
Let us pause for a moment and blame the Patriarchy
Let me digress for a moment, to underscore this point. Hillary Clinton is a woman and Donald Trump is a man. Hillary Clinton is a highly accomplished and qualified candidate for President of the United States who is being treated, as I just said, like a child whom you expect to constantly be in trouble, and that you are constantly ready to correct or punish. And by “you” I mean that awful fourth grade teacher who was always picking on that one kid who never seemed to get a fair break. And by the awful fourth grade teacher, I mean Matt Lauer. And I’m using Matt Lauer to stand in for All Of The Reporters.
This is a picture of peaceful female protestors being pepper sprayed by the patriarchic police state.Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the man running for president, is a clown.
A joke. A rising dangerous fascist. A crook. A liar. A person with a weak grasp on reality.
A litigious bastard. (So I’ll add that these are all things Trump has been accused of, who really knows?)
Trump represents everything that is bad about a bad political philosophy. He is the perfect product of the willful ignorance and the calculated walling off of reality that have become central to Republican philosophy and tactics. He is absolutely the last person in the world that should be allowed anywhere near the White House. But he can lie, cheat, bully, incite violence, and generally do things that individually would instantly end a political career, again and again, several times a week, and continue to be “respected” by the press. As I’ll explain in a moment, Trump’s respect from the press is not because he is a man. It is for a different reason, and that is the focus of this post. But the difference between the way Clinton and Trump are treated is because of their different genders, and this is sexism in the Fourth Estate (by all sexes of reporter, producer, and editor, with only a very few exceptions) demonstrating itself to be shockingly ingrained and intractable. We have a seemingly unfixable patriarchy in this country.
Fisher’s Principle of Sex Ratio and Why the Press Is Stupid
And now back to the main point, the answer to a question I know many of you have been asking yourselves, in one form or another, for a long time. Why are the two main political parties so close in representation in government? Why are most elections so close? Why are opinions on various issues, even when one side is clearly utterly bogus and the other side so clearly correct, almost always close to 50-50, or at least, in the 60% to 40% range? Why is the balance of opinion about policy or candidates so near the middle so much of the time?
Fisher’s Principle.
Fisher’s Principle is an idea that was initially applied to explain the apparent fact that sexual reproduction produces a 1:1 ratio of males to females. Never mind that fact that most species, it turns out, probably don’t do this, and that the ones that do, do so because they are physiologically constrained to do so. It was still a good idea because it works in some cases, and is internally logical. The idea is also related to, and probably intellectually basal to, some very important game theory. And, for our purposes, it explains a lot about why the press is essentially incapable of doing its job, and why civilization is, at this moment, teetering on the edge of collapse because of that.
Here’s the idea. You are an organism concerned, rightfully, with your Darwinian fitness. You are about to have an offspring. You can have a male or a female.
So you do a marketing study. You find out that all the organisms in the next generation, into which you are about to launch your offspring, will be seeking a mate. Marketing theory tells you that if one sex is rare, it will be more valuable. So, you estimate the sex ratio of the next generation. The only way to do this, of course, is to assess the current sex ratio. You find out that a particular sex is more rare, and thus, individuals of that sex are more valuable, and that is the sex of offspring that you produce.
But, of course, all the other organisms of your kind are doing the same thing, so that rare and valuable sex is now flooding the market. So, the other sex becomes more valuable, and individuals start producing them. So the market shifts back the other way.
Owing to overlapping generations, some randomization of timing of information flow and decision making, and all that, the kind of organism you are, as a result of following Fisher’s Principle of producing the sex of higher value, ends up with about a 50-50 sex ratio.
Now, you are a newsroom producer or an editor. There are many stories out there, and for every story, there are multiple points of view. For a political story, things are simple. There are two points of view: left vs. right, or Democratic vs. Republican, or whatever.
Think of it more precisely. There aren’t just two points of view, but there is a population of sound clips or quotes reflecting those points of view that you can use. You note that the general consensus is starting to move towards a particular point of view. It makes sense that we implement a certain policy, and more and more opinons are shifting that way.
So, now, you have two choices. One is to mainly report that one policy is being converged on by almost everyone, and is likely to become the policy guiding future legislation and action. Then you move on to the next story. But anyone in news will tell you that is not a story. Hell, anyone in fiction will tell you it is not a story. There is no conflict, no gap between obvious outcome and what actually happens, in that story.
To make this a story, you need to do something other than the obvious. And that is easy to do. You pull out the sound bites or quotes or position papers that reflect the shrinking minority view, and lead with that. You appear to give equal time to two opposing views, but really, you are not being fair. You are placing the emerging consensus view, the smart view, the correct view, and the shrinking everbody-knows-this-is-nowhere view, next to each other and treating them with the same level of attention and respect. You treat the emerging consensus unfairly by pretending it is not an emerging consensus, and you give the bullshit view an unfair break by pretending it is not bullshit.
But by doing so, you are producing an offspring that is more valuable because it is more rare.
And, at the same time, you are telling a better story. Never mind that it is bordering on fiction, never mind that it involves unfair treatment of the truth, never mind that there could be real world negative consequences of this selfish strategy, never mind that this treatment of the news demonstrably slows down or reverses the progress of civilization. Never mind that people suffer and die. The important thing is, you protected your ratings or your readership, and if you played it well, maybe improved them. And that is your job. Good job. Never mind the consequences.
So that explains why we can have two political parties, one relatively smart and thoughtful and often ready to govern (I don’t want to sanctify the Democratic Party, but they are better at all these things these days) and the other stupid, mean spirited, and wrong on almost every single issue, and not just wrong, but Michele Bachman level wrong. Sarah Palin level wrong. Donald Trump level wrong!!
Elections are a special, and cleaner, case. Elections have numbers, polls, that tell the press two things. First, what are the genders of possible offspring? Normally the two genders are Democratic and Republicans, but occasionally a third option shows up and can be a factor. Then, within the contest among the worthy opponents, the press can keep track of the relative worth of stories benefiting each of these entities. Which side should be pushed forward from behind, which side should be knocked down a bit, to keep both close to the middle, near an optimum value, so that the overall story (who is winning a race, is the new health care plan legal, should we had off to a particular war) remains commercially viable?
There are two major negative consequences that arise from this behavior, other than trampling on and killing the truth and all that. First, a candidate that should never win has a chance of winning. The only reason Donald Trump has any chance of winning this year’s election is because major media benefits from the race being close. Remember that, if he wins. Remember who to blame.
The other consequence is actually more insidious. In order for the press to keep a bogus candidate in the running, they have to report bogus positions and bogus policies with a straight face, and this in turn, shifts the window of credibility for those policies into the realm of reality. Over time, people can say things that they could never say before and remain credible, and positions can be put on the table that our civilization left behind decades or centuries ago. We could not talk about rounding up people with a certain physical appearance or religion because of the lessons we learned from the Nazis. Now we can talk about these things again. We can pretend that criminal misconduct by a candidate is not important, or that another candidate broke the law many times when she never actually did.
That is Andrea Mitchel’s fault. And Chuck Todd. And the rest of the reporters.
This is a feedback system. More extreme candidates engender more extreme policy excursions, which in turn allows more extreme candidates to throw their sombreros over the wall.
There are cracks forming. Mainstream news reporters who actually would lean towards a Republican candidate (or enjoy participating in bashing Clinton) are suddenly dropping their jaws and rolling their eyes, or just pointing out that they are fed up:
But it may be too late for the press to redeem itself now. They have placed Donald Trump very close to the White House, for their own self interest, and in so doing, are dangerously close to burning the house down. People talk these days about the collapse of the Republican Party. Fine. But what we really need is a tear down and replacement of how the Fourth Estate conducts itself. Mostly, the press is good at patting itself on the back, giving itself awards, and throwing huge collective tantrums when their integrity and freedom are questions. But now, those very people who would normally defend the press are increasingly less likely to come to their defense, and are starting to demand reform.
Not really. But it is World Suicide Prevention Day. And, one way YOU can help prevent suicides is by keeping your gun locked up, separate from the ammo, and keeping the ammo locked up as well.
Why?
Here’s why:
Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among teens and young adults and the 10th leading cause of death among all Americans.
On average, 4 teenagers and 118 total Americans complete suicide every day.
90% people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.
Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.
50% of suicide deaths in the United States are by firearm.
Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.
Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent.
Reducing access to lethal means, like firearms, saves lives.
A gun in the home is 22x more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide, or unintentional shooting than for self defense.
If there is a gun in your home, keep it unloaded and locked up or with a trigger lock. Store the bullets in a different place that is also locked.
If there is a gun in your home, do not let children and teens have a key to the places where guns and bullets are stored.
If a household member becomes depressed or has severe mood swings, store the gun outside the home for the time being while you seek help!
The history of what we call “OpenOffice” is complex and confusing. It started as a project of Sun corporation, to develop an office suit that was not Microsoft Office, to use internally. Later, a version became more generally available known as Star Office, but also, a version called “OpenOffice” soon became available as well. The current histories say that Star Office was commercial, but my memory is that it never cost money to regular users. I think the idea was that large corporations would pay, individuals not. This was all back around 2000, plus or minus a year or two.
In any event, the Open Office project built two things of great importance. First, it made a set of software applications roughly comparable to the key elements in Microsoft’s Office Suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation app, and, depending, something that draws and something that relates to databases.
The second thing it did was to create and develop an important open source document format.
But, believe it or not, in the world of software development and programming, even in the happy fuzzy world of OpenSource, there can be fights. And, not just the fun and tongue in cheek fights over which religion you are (vi vs. Linux). These fights often involve differences in points of view between megacorporations that get involved in OpenSource projects, and the unwashed masses of programmers contributing to such things. The majority of code is written and maintained by corporations, much of that in the hands of a very small number, but the contributions from individuals not linked to corporations is extremely important.
In the case of OpenOffice, the tensions were between the broader Office-interested development community and big corporations shifted in 2010 when Sun corporation which had always been involved in OO development, was purchased by Oracle Corporation. Oracle has not been friendly to OpenSource in the past, so the wider community freaked. There is a side plot here involving Java, which we will ignore. Oracle didn’t end up doing anything clearly bad against the OpenOffice project. But, they also ended up not doing anything good, either, which is essentially a death sentence for a project like this. Later in the same year, an organization called The Document Foundation was created and took on the job of forking OpenOffice.
Forking is where a given lineage of software is split to create an alternative. Sometimes this is to bring some software in a different direction, perhaps for a more specialized use. Sometimes it is a way of resolving conflict, much as hunter gatherers undergo fission and fusion in their settlement patterns, by separating antagonists or putting a distinct wall between antagonistic goals. In this case, while the latter is probably part of it, the main reason for the fork and its main effect was to get the project under the control of an active development community so work could be continued before the project stagnated.
That fork became known as LibreOffice. For some time now, it has been recommended that if you are going to install an OpenSource office suite on your Windows, Linux, or Apple Computer, it should be LibreOffice.
One could argue that the OpenOffice suit or its analog (earlier, Star office, later the LibreOffice fork) is the most important single project in OpenSource, because an office suite is a key part of almost all desktop computer configurations. Of course, most servers don’t need or require an office suite, and there, web servers and database servers, and a few other things, are more important. But to the average end user (in business or private life) being able to open up a “Word Document” (a term misapplied to the category of “wordprocessor document”), or to run a spreadsheet, or to make a presentation, etc. is essential, and that is what an office suit provides. OpenOffice was comparable to Microsoft Office, and now, LibreOffice is comparable to Microsoft Office. By some accounts, better, though many Microsoft Office users have, well, a different religion.
Now, it is being reported that the mostly ignored, maligned by some, historically important yet now out of date OpenOffice project is about to byte the dust. As it were.
Dennis Hamilton, VP of the group that runs OpenOffice, “… proposed a shutdown of OpenOffice as one option if the project could not meet the goals it had set. ‘My concern is that the project could end with a bang or a whimper. My interest is in seeing any retirement happen gracefully. That means we need to consider it as a contingency. For contingency plans, no time is a good time, but earlier is always better than later.'” [Source]
Approximately 160 million copies of LibreOffice have been downloaded to date. The closing of the OpenOffice project, should that happen, will probably have little effect on LibreOffice, since most people had already walked away from the venerable old but flawed grandaddy of OO Suites.
You may have heard the name, you may have an idea of who she was. This recent item on the Rachel Maddow show (long, but worth every second) puts her in context. Watch it:
Schlafly was one of the key architects of the modern right wing movement. She is one of the worst people in the world, at least in the context of American society and politics. She pretty much single handedly a) defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and b) managed the propaganda campaign that makes a lot of otherwise not-too-stupid people think, even today that the ERA is a bad idea.
She was a white supremacist who urged the Republican Party to abandon the Latino vote and focus on the white vote. She opposed same sex marriage and even civl unions. Earlier this year, she endorsed Trump for president. Again, watch the above report from Maddow to see how 50 years of right wing history and politics came together with the Trump campaign.
She died at the age of 92, and only after doing a lot of damage to our civilization.
Laborers generally do their jobs, because if they don’t they get fired. But there are entire professions where people are not doing their jobs and the rest of us suffer.
Jacob Wetterling was abducted and murdered two and a half decades ago. The guy who did it was known to the cops then, and he had done things like this before, and those thinks were known about. There are all kinds of reasons they should have busted him even before Jacob was murdered, but they weren’t doing their job. Turns out that when you look across the country and across decades, you can find FAR more examples of cops not doing their jobs, either being outsmarted or just being lazy or who knows what, than you can find example of them doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.
The press. We all love the press, and respect the press, and wouldn’t know what to do with out the press, bla bla bla. But we now understand that the wars in Iraq would have likely been avoided had the press been doing its job then. The press is now grading Donald Trump on a curve, treating his presidency in such a way that it legitimizes racism and white supremacy. That is the press not doing the sacred job they seek reference for. I suspect that if you look across history you will find lots of great examples of the press doing a great job. But there will be more examples of the press falling down on the job. If the press was really doing its job with respect to Donald Trump, Trump would have been in prison decades ago. This Labor Day is not for them.
Weather reporters. So many of them have been for so long in denial of climate science, passing on doubt to the average American, using their position of trust to spread lies. We have had a harder time pushing people and institutions in the general direction of reality with respect to climate change because of weather reporters not doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.
There are exceptions to all these cases. You know who you are, and you don’t need lip service from me. You are in the game already, criticizing your colleagues. Or should be. This labor day is for you, a little. But mostly it is for the people who have jobs that if they fail at, even a little, they get fired, demoted, or abused.
So here it is. An extra day off. Use it well. Do something fun. Then get back to work or you’re fired!
What I mean by that is that the real guts of the defunct TV show Mythbusters, Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara, are all over this new thing they are doing for Netflix!
Apparently this is a thing: Network TV shows almost all die a certain kind of death. They get more and more expensive to run every year because the expectation is that contracts become more and more valuable if the show is successful. So, eventually, the producers have to start killing off the staff. For a fictional TV show, this is done by ordering the writers to do in various characters. For a live action non fiction show, you just fire them.
Then, the show falls apart and shuts down.
(One might wonder how the Simpsons stay so good for so many years and not have this happen. I can only assume Bart and his family got one hell of a contract!)
Putting aside the exact details of what happened with Mythbusters, Grant, Tory and Kari did get cut loose, and a short time later the show was cancelled. AND THERE ARE SO MANY AS YET UNBUSTED MYTHS. Jeesh.
Adam and Jamie are great and all, but in my opinion, Tory, Kari and Grant are and were equally as great, and often, just plain better because they were not fettered with lofty production goals that seemed to stifle Adam and Jamie on occasion.
This will be a Netflix Original called “The White Rabbit Project,” referring to that time honored tradition of going down one or another rabbit hole.
There are no details available at this time, but this is great news.
The first several projects in the book involve making electricity, or using it to make light bulbs shine or to run an electromagnet. [/caption]The most complicated projects are the ones where you make interactive games using LED lights and buzzers.
This is a book about how to play with electricity, not how to get a Masters Degree in electricity. In other words, any kid, the ones who seem destine for a career in electronic engineering and the ones who don’t, can get along in this book because it does not assume itself to be a building brick to a greater career. Yet the projects are interesting and informative and educational, and any kid who does a dozen of these projects is going to learn.
This kind of activity, which should involve parents for most kids, is the cure for the sense of depression you feel when you go to the toy store and look at the “science” section and everything you see is crap. Just get this book, order 50 bucks worth of parts, and get to work-fun. Then order some more parts, probably.
No kids’ book on electronics would be complete without a batter made from something you get in the produce section.[/caption]This book for kids is very kid oriented, as it should be. One of the first practical projects you build is an alarm system to keep your parents the heck out of your room. You can make a noisy musical instrument. You can make a device that makes sounds some humans can hear (the kids, likely) and some can’t (parents).
Although soldering is done, it is minimal and, frankly, can probably be avoided by using alternative techniques. But really, it is not that hard and one should not be too afraid of it.
A lot of the projects use and develop logic circuits. Kids actually love logic circuits, I think because they end up rethinking a bit about how tho think about simple relationships. And, it is good to know this stuff.
Unlike many electronic kits you can buy (which can be quite fun and educational in their own right) this approach does not rely on ICs (integrated circuits) that produce magical results with poorly described inputs and hookups. There are some basic ICs, including gates, an inverter, flip flops, and a timer. These are very straight forward circuits that are mostly (except the timer) really just very fancy switches.
Many of the parts, including a breadboard, LEDs, hook up wires of various kinds, and pretty much all the resistors, capacitors, etc. etc. can also be used with the more sophisticated Arduino projects, should you end up going in that direction.
This is a really fun book. If you have a kid of the right age (maybe from six to 12, with 100% adult involvement under 10 years) get it now, secretly, get some parts, and work your way through several of the projects. Then, make it (and the parts) a holiday present. Then look really smart.
This chapter-end section give you an idea of the level of the projects. There is a lot of stuff in here. All doable, but it will take a while to get through it all. [/caption]Here is the overview table of contents (the book is much more detailed than suggested by this top level TOC):
PART 1: Playing with Electricity
Chapter 1: What Is Electricity?
Chapter 2: Making Things Move with Electricity and Magnets
Chapter 3: How to Generate Electricity
PART 2: Building Circuits
Chapter 4: Creating Light with LEDs
Chapter 5: Blinking a Light for the First Time
Chapter 6: Let’s Solder!
Chapter 7: Controlling Things with Circuits
Chapter 8: Building a Musical Instrument
PART 3: Digital Electronics
Chapter 9: How Circuits Understand Ones and Zeros
Chapter 10: Circuits That Make Choices
Chapter 11: Circuits That Remember Information
Chapter 12: Let’s Make a Game!
So, for me, this is a bit of schadenfreude vis-a-vis Samsung, but I feel badly for the people who ended up with the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.
Hurricanes are well defined systems with characteristics that quite literally set them apart from other storms. Large storms such as Nor’Easters are sometimes less well defined and interact more with major troughs, the jet streams, etc. We have come to understand Hurricanes as the worst case scenario, while other storms are less dangerous.
But sometimes, and I suspect more recently lately, these non-tropical storms become quite dangerous. The Great Storm of ’78 killed hundreds in New England and made us suddenly realize that coastal property was a temporary thing. But we sense the danger of recent storms less acutely because for all storms we have better warning systems, and most storms don’t kill that many people these days, like they used to. So worse storms seem less bad.
And sometimes, it turns out that these large powerful and dangerous extratropical systems and the tropical hurricanes or their remnants merge and interact, creating what sometimes emerges as a “superstorm” or at least, a “really inconvenient storm.”
Sandy is an example of the former. Perhaps Hermine is an example of the latter. Hopefully not the former as well!
The focus on hurricanes as the dangerous big brother of temperate storms (including Nor’Easters) has unintentionally shaped our storm warning system to downplay by default non-hurricane storms, including the hurricanes themselves when they become extratropical. But the “remnants” of hurricanes over land are usually very dangerous because of the flooding they cause, and late in life former hurricanes are capable of ganging up with temperate systems to become very dangerous.
In the case of Superstorm Sandy, owing to global warming driven warm waters, the storm remained as a hurricane at the time it started to interact with temperate storm systems, and the result was one of the worst storms to hit the US East Coast. Yet, it was technically not a hurricane at landfall. Rather, it was a hurricane that ate another storm on its way to Ohio, and got too big, too powerful, too messy, and too dangerous to maintain use of the term (hurricane) normally reserved for better organized, more predictable, and better behaved dangerous storms.
Maybe we are seeing a shift in where the danger lies in Atlantic storms. There will never be a storm as dangerous as a Major Hurricane moving just the right way at just the right time against just the right piece of coastline. Ivan, Andrew, Katrina, like that. But the typical Category I hurricanes and the seemingly new phenomenon of more frequent post-tropical hybrids, and more frequent certain supercharged Nor’Easters seem all in about the same category of overall badness.
We are certainly seeing some self reflection on the part of meteorologists, who are always faced with the very difficult task of properly informing and educating the public, properly modulating alarm over a given storm system, always trying to not cause problems for the next storm by overstating or understating expectations. Some of this self reflection, as well as the gory details of how these different kinds of storms (Nor’Easter or Hurricane-Extratropical hybrid) develop is demonstrated in the following passages taken from various Hurricane Center discussions or Wikipedia, pertaining to the storms as indicated. I put them here for your enjoyment and/or horror.
1991 Perfect Storm
The 1991 Perfect Storm, also known as the The No-Name Storm (especially in the years immediately after it took place) and the Halloween Gale, was a nor’easter that absorbed Hurricane Grace and ultimately evolved back into a small unnamed hurricane late in its life cycle. The initial area of low pressure developed off Atlantic Canada on October 29. Forced southward by a ridge to its north, it reached its peak intensity as a large and powerful cyclone. The storm lashed the east coast of the United States with high waves and coastal flooding before turning to the southwest and weakening. Moving over warmer waters, the system transitioned into a subtropical cyclone before becoming a tropical storm. It executed a loop off the Mid-Atlantic states and turned toward the northeast. On November 1 the system evolved into a full-fledged hurricane with peak winds of 75 miles per hour (120 km/h), although the National Hurricane Center left it unnamed to avoid confusion amid media interest in the predecessor extratropical storm. It later received the name “the Perfect Storm” (playing off the common expression) after a conversation between Boston National Weather Service forecaster Robert Case and author Sebastian Junger. The system was the fourth hurricane and final tropical cyclone in the 1991 Atlantic hurricane season.
Hurricane and Superstorm Sandy
FIRST A NOTE ON THE NWS WARNING STRATEGY FOR SANDY. IN ORDER TO
AVOID THE RISK OF A HIGHLY DISRUPTIVE CHANGE FROM TROPICAL TO
NON-TROPICAL WARNINGS WHEN SANDY BECOMES POST-TROPICAL…THE WIND
HAZARD NORTH OF THE TROPICAL STORM WARNING AREA WILL CONTINUE TO BE
CONVEYED THROUGH HIGH WIND WATCHES AND WARNINGS WARNINGS ISSUED BY
LOCAL NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE OFFICES.
SANDY CONTINUES TO MAINTAIN AN AREA OF DEEP CONVECTION NEAR THE
CENTER…WITH AN EYE OCCASIONALLY VISIBLE ON SATELLITE IMAGERY.
ALTHOUGH THE SATELLITE PRESENTATION OF THE SYSTEM IS NOT VERY
IMPRESSIVE…SFMR MEASUREMENTS…FLIGHT-LEVEL WINDS…AND DROPSONDE
DATA FROM THE AIR FORCE HURRICANE HUNTERS INDICATE THAT THE WINDS
HAVE INCREASED TO NEAR 75 KT. SINCE THE HURRICANE WILL TRAVERSE
THE GULF STREAM THIS MORNING…AND THE SHEAR IS NOT TOO STRONG AT
THIS TIME…SOME MORE STRENGTHENING AS A TROPICAL CYCLONE IS
POSSIBLE IN THE NEXT FEW HOURS. HOWEVER…THE MAIN MECHANISM
FOR INTENSIFICATION LATER TODAY SHOULD BE BAROCLINIC FORCING. THE
OFFICIAL WIND SPEED FORECAST IS CLOSE TO THE LATEST GFS PREDICTION
AS THAT MODEL SHOULD BE ABLE TO HANDLE THE EVOLUTION OF THIS TYPE
OF SYSTEM FAIRLY WELL.
THE CONVECTIVE STRUCTURE OF SANDY HAS DETERIORATED TODAY…EVEN AS
THE CENTRAL PRESSURE HAS CONTINUED TO SLOWLY FALL…SUGGESTING THAT
THE CONVECTION IS NO LONGER DRIVING THE BUS. THE INTENSIFICATION
OBSERVED THIS MORNING WAS ASSOCIATED WITH STRONG WINDS OCCURRING TO
THE SOUTHWEST OF THE CENTER…OUTSIDE OF THE CENTRAL CORE…AND WAS
ALMOST CERTAINLY DUE TO BAROCLINIC FORCING.
SATELLITE…RADAR…SURFACE…AND RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT DATA
INDICATE THAT SANDY MADE LANDFALL NEAR ATLANTIC CITY NEW JERSEY
AROUND 0000 UTC. THE INTENSITY OF THE POST-TROPICAL CYCLONE WAS
ESTIMATED TO BE NEAR 80 KT AT LANDFALL WITH A MINIMUM PRESSURE OF
946 MB. AT LANDFALL…THE STRONGEST WINDS WERE OCCURRING OVER
WATER TO THE EAST AND SOUTHEAST OF THE CENTER. HURRICANE-FORCE
WINDS GUSTS HAVE BEEN REPORTED ACROSS LONG ISLAND AND THE NEW YORK
METROPOLITAN AREA THIS EVENING. IN ADDITION…A SIGNIFICANT STORM
SURGE HAS OCCURRED ALONG A LONG STRETCH OF THE MID-ATLANTIC AND
SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND COAST.
2016 Hermine
Satellite imagery indicates that Hermine has become a post-tropical
cyclone, with the coldest convective tops now located more than 200
n mi northeast of the exposed center. Despite this change in
structure, surface data from the Outer Banks indicate that some
strong winds persist near the center, and the initial intensity is
set to 55 kt for this advisory. During the next 48 to 72 hours,
Hermine will interact with a strong mid-latitude shortwave trough
and all of the global models show the system re-intensifying during
that time and a redevelopment of a stronger inner core, albeit one
situated underneath an upper-level low. Regardless of its final
structure, Hermine is expected to remain a dangerous cyclone through
the 5 day period.
Hermine is still a big storm and will affect eastern regions to some degree, but the storm never reformed as a hurricane, and is not not expected to do so. Also, the storm has jinked out to the east more than expected and will likely move farther east. So, there will be some coastal effects, but not much out of the ordinary.
POST-TROPICAL CYCLONE HERMINE FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 30
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL092016
2100 UTC SUN SEP 04 2016
CHANGES IN WATCHES AND WARNINGS WITH THIS ADVISORY…
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FROM WATCH HILL…RHODE
ISLAND EASTWARD TO SAGAMORE BEACH…MASSACHUSETTS INCLUDING BLOCK
ISLAND…MARTHA’S VINEYARD…AND NANTUCKET.
THE TROPICAL STORM WARNING HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED FROM FENWICK
ISLAND…DELAWARE SOUTHWARD…AND ALSO DISCONTINUED FOR DELAWARE
BAY NORTH OF SLAUGHTER BEACH.
SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT…
A TROPICAL STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR…
* NORTH OF FENWICK ISLAND TO SAGAMORE BEACH
* DELAWARE BAY SOUTH OF SLAUGHTER BEACH
* BLOCK ISLAND
* MARTHA’S VINEYARD
* NANTUCKET
Original Post:
Hermine was bad enough for florida, though of course, nothing like a Major Hurricane. But, the downgraded storm may not be done with us yet. There is a very good chance that Hermine will reform into a hurricane, or at least something that we’ll call a hurricane because it will look like a hurricane, blow like a hurricane, and hurt like a hurricane, over the next several hours. This will happen after the land-damaged storm passes over global warming heated ocean waters. Sometime between mid day and early evening on Saturday, Hermine could gain hurricane strength and directly affect New Jersey and nearby places.
Barrier islands from the Carolinas to New Jersey, but especially around Delmarva, New Jersey, and New York, are at risk for storm surges, with a major risk in southern Delmarva and Virginia Beach, and the lower Tidewater. Outer New Jersey may experience something like a 6 foot storm surge Sunday night or early Monday AM.
This is Labor Day Weekend. A very large number of people go to these areas over this Final Weekend before the perceived end of summer. Causeway roads that connect these barrier islands to the mainland may be washed out, and the barrier islands themselves are not great places to be.
The big question at hand is this: Will the state authorities in these areas have the will and the wiles to warn their citizens and visitors off these dangerous areas, or will they avoid damaging business by sitting on their hands. Then, either way — whether a particular area is damaged by the storm or damaged by safety in light of the storm — will there be some help for those businesses? Oh, and lets not forget to include these considerations in the costs of this storm.
So be careful, watch the weather, and pay attention, if you live anywhere on the US East Coast.
I remember watching, decades ago, a short film with Picasso. There was a glass wall that you could not see, and Picasso was standing behind it, dressed like a French Artist and holding painting equipment. He then proceeded to draw lines on the glass. Each line had a particular orientation and shape. He put just a couple of lines on the glass, and in so doing, created a great work of art. If I recall correctly, he made a few of them. Years later, visiting Picasso’s home in Paris, I saw a bicycle handlebar thad had been broken and welded roughly back together again. Two pieces of metal, each with a particular size and shape, made into a great work of art.
Just a few pieces make three different cars, with a fair amount of detail.
Anybody can do that, right? Draw a couple of lines and call it art? Stick a couple of pieces of metal together and call it art? Or like those modern artists, spill some paint on the floor, frame it, and call it art?
Well, yes. You can call it art. But it won’t be art. It will be drek.
Track not included in design. A minimal brick interurban commuter system.
And, sadly, that is also what happens when the average person takes four or five pieces of LEGO and sticks them together. You get drek. Nothing. Nada.
But, if you are an artist, you may have a sense of form, color, shape, etc. and when you stick a few pieces of LEGO together, you might get a form that is arguably artistic. Many artists are quite capable of working in a media unfamiliar, in this case LEGO bricks, to produce something, maybe something quite nice. Try it. If you know any artists, give them a handful of LEGO bricks and see what they can do.
Instructions are as detailed as needed to get the job done, as per usual.
There are cars, planes, ships, trains, etc. There is a Space Shuttle, and France’s TGV train. There is even a cement mixer.
The models and designs are very generalizable, so if you have a reasonable collection of LEGO bricks, you can use that collection and this book to construct quite a few miniature models of your own, even if you don’t have the exact pieces.
The author is Mattia Zamboni, who has written other books on LEGO, and has been a “LEGO Ambassador” since 2015. His day job is to build robots at the University of Applied Science and Arts of Souther Switzerland.
I was half expecting Trump to soften on immigration. The logic of that? His main supporters, who hate all immigrants and are a bunch of racist slobs will vote for Trump no matter what he says because the are morons. But, the fence sitters, the amoral “Good Republicans” who would vote for him because they have learned to fear Democratic economic policies (this group are also all morons) might vote for him if he was less crazy sounding.
But no, that didn’t happen. Instead, he embarrassed our nation buy telling the President of Mexico, to his face, that he’s going to have to pay for this wall. Then he gave the most clearly hateful immigration speech yet.
But, there will be taco truck on every corner. Trump is going to lose and there will be taco trucks on every corner. THEY PROMISED!!!!!!
The gentleman speaking on behalf of Trump makes a very interesting, racist point. Mexican culture is dominant. The Spanish never conquered Mexico, we are told. If you don’t control Mexicans, they will take over. If you don’t realize that, it is just because you haven’t been to Mexico lately. Seriously, he said that!
And, he tells us that for this reason, if Trump doesn’t win this election, there will be a taco truck on every corner. Because, I guess, that is what a dominant culture does.
I’m going to be really pissed if there are not taco trucks on every corner at the end of this. Dammit.
The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don’t bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that’s on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has lost all credibility.
Here’s an example.
It has been noted that,
The Wall Street Journal has published 21 opinion pieces since October opposing state or federal investigations into whether ExxonMobil violated the law by deceiving its shareholders and the public about climate change, a new Media Matters analysis finds, far more than The New York Times, The Washington Post, or USA Today published on either side of the issue. The Journal has yet to publish a single editorial, column, or op-ed in support of investigating Exxon’s behavior, and many of its pro-Exxon opinion pieces contain blatant falsehoods about the nature and scope of the ongoing investigations being conducted by state attorneys general.
The graphic at the top of the post reflects this.
This is part of a larger pattern, of which the WSJ is the worst offender.
The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Post all published climate science denial and other scientifically inaccurate statements about climate change on their opinion pages over the last year and a half, while The New York Times avoided doing so, according to a new Media Matters analysis of those four newspapers. The Journal published by far the most opinion pieces misrepresenting climate science, while all three instances of climate science denial in the Post came from columns written by George Will. The Journal and USA Today also published numerous climate-related op-eds without disclosing the authors’ fossil fuel ties, while USA Today, the Post, and particularly the Journal frequently published some of the least credible voices on climate and energy issues.
There’s more. You can read the full analyses HERE and HERE
Hermine has grown in strength, and may even make landfall as a Category 2 storm. At least a strong Category 1.
The right front quadrant of the storm is where the main “punch” (of winds) is located. If the storm winds come into an embayment, they can really build up the storm surge. Look at this image:
You can see the right front quadrant of the storm heading right into Apalachee Bay. Barrier islands to the west of the bay’s head, and the communities right in the bay, are very much at risk for severe flooding.
Here is a blowup of part of the NWS’s experimental storm surge product for the area:
You can see the increase in storm surge intensity/risk in the bay.
Also, there is a small possibility that the storm, which will turn “extratropical” as it passes over Florida and joins an existing storm system, will later move out to sea in an area conducive to re-formation. Not too likely but the idea is being bandied about.
Update (Noon Thursday):
It is very likely that Hermine will become an actual hurricane by the end of business day today, or during the early evening. It is really starting to look like one now, as of this writing.
The storm is likely to make landfall (as a hurricane?) before mid day tomorrow (Friday). There is a very serious storm surge threat from some point east of Apalachicola, all the way over to about Spring Hill, or even a bit farther south (heading towards Tampa). Especially at risk are areas around Big Bend Wildlife Management area and Suwanee River, where embayments may focus the storm surge.
Some of these places may have storm surges over over 9 feet above the ground.
After that, the National Weather Service is trying to be vague, because Hermine will interact with a large existing low pressure system. How much rain, where, how much wind, where, all that, is not clear. By the time the storm gets to near Norfolk, it might not even be near Norfolk. This could become a land threatening Nor’Easter affecting New York or Boston, or it could to out to sea and rain mainly on boats. Stay tunes.
This is not a major hurricane, but it is likely to be a significant flooding and rain event for a lot of people over a large area. This is also going to mess up Labor Day weekend, which will have a significant economic impact on many areas where people usually visit and recreate.
Original Post:
For a while there it looked like the Atlantic might develop up to four simultaneous named storms, but that has not worked out. One of the storms will never get a name, one of the disturbances now looks like it may never be a storm. Gaston continues to chug away towards the Azores.
But one of these four weather events is now a named storm that will matter.
Tropical Storm Hermine is a global warming enhanced storm that will produce record rainfall events, catastrophic inland flooding, and likely, coastal storm flooding, in many locations in the US east.
Paul Douglas of Aeris Weather notes that this storm reminds him, somewhat of Sandy, because of its bigness and wetness and potential to reach far inland. It will not be as bad as Sandy, but, he notes, “there is a growing potential for disruptive weather all up and down the East Coast from Friday into Sunday; coastal Georgia and the Carolinas right up I-95 into Washington D.C. and New York City may be impacted by 40-60 mph winds, flash flooding and coastal flooding and beach erosion as Hermine churns north.”
Also like Sandy, a blocking pattern in the Atlantic will cause Hermine to stay longer off the coast than otherwise.
Places that normally flood are likely to flood. The storm will come over land at the base of the Florida Peninsula and the Florida Panhandle. It is possible that the storm will be a weak Category One hurricane just before landfall, but not likely. It will then cross florida and run up the coast, either just on land or just off shore. One model h as the storm curving back from the Atlantic into southern Newe England, another model has it staying on land until New York City, then curving back out over Long Island. That gives you the range of uncertainty for the storm’s activity in several days from now.
But the track for the first several days is pretty well understood. Across the base of florida, then across Georgia, South Carolina, and into or near the Tidewater area, staying near the coast the whole time, more or less straddling the strandline.
It will be windy and wet with a lot of rainfall. The loss of Labor Day business will be bad for tourism regardless of any damage to such facilities that may occur as well.
Is Hermine enhanced by global warming?
Hermine is a weather event. Global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gasses (and other human effects) is a climate phenomenon. So how can we possibly connect them?
Well, we have moved well past the days when one could pose such a lame brained question. Climate is weather, long term, and weather is climate, here and now. So, if climate is fundamentally changed, then the wether is fundamentally changed. The question is not whether weather that drenches or withers and climate wither are bound! The question is, what ways are a particular untoward weather event and the recent changes in the climate bound?
Here’s how.
Warmer seas and warmer air, causing generally more moisture in the air; and changes in air currents due to Arctic warming and other effects, causing a more uneven distribution of moisture in the air causing big dry areas and big wetter areas, and large wet blobs to form up and then move more slowly than usual across the landscape, make something like this storm (which at the base of it could have happened anyway) be bigger, wetter, slower-moving and thus rainier.
(which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, by the way, in case you’ve not see it). That second and related issue is fairness, and how it is a bad thing in journalism.
by Øyvind Nydal Dahl is the one where you lean a small light bulb against the two terminals of a nine volt battery in order to make the light bulb turn on.
Other tools include a soldering iron and related bits, a wire cutter, some scissors, tape, etc.
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