Measuring hurricanes

There are some real, and potentially deadly, problems with our reliance on the Safir-Simpson scale for gauging the size of hurricanes. Wind speed is just one component in measuring the destructive power of a storm. Other factors, in combination with and even on their own, make such storms deadly.

• Storm surge. As we're seeing with Ike and as we saw with storms such as the New England Hurricane of 1938, can kill more and faster. The slow-moving tsunami pushed by the storm as it makes its way across the ocean can raise the water level from a few inches to many feet in minutes. In Providence in 1938, "the surge hit the downtown business district. In Exchange Place, water which had been just a few inches deep was waist deep within minutes. It rose to a remarkable 13 feet 8-1/2 inches, exceeding the level marked on the Old Market Building after the Hurricane of 1815."
• The dimensions of the storm. Again, from the National Hurricane Center, "Ike remains a very large hurricane and hurricane force winds extend outward up to 120 miles...195 km...from the center...and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 275 miles...445 km." Most hurricanes, even ones with much stronger winds, are half that size. The range of destruction is spread across a much wider area.
• Rainfall. Fay, a tropical storm when it reached Florida's west coast a few weeks ago, had top winds that barely reached 60 mph. It moved so slowly, however, meandering around central Florida like someone's drunken aunt, and delivered up to two feet of rain.
  

The Safir-Simpson is a convenient way for the news media to tell a part of a story. It brings us an interesting fact that can obscure our awareness of other even more important fact.

RoasterBoy playlist

September 11, 2008

Tom Rush - Galveston Flood

As we watch Ike intensify and take aim at Galveston, this old song about the 1900 Galveston flood keeps spinning around my head.

Wasn't that a mighty storm
Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning
Wasn't that a mighty storm
It blew all the people away.

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1 Day ago

September 9, 2008

iTunes Genius Playlist

I am trying out the new iTunes 8 feature called Genius. In brief, you give the Genius the name of one song in your music library and it builds a playlist of stuff that a good DJ would put together. The first song that I chose was The Green Manalishi.

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Fleetwood Mac - The Green Manalishi
Live At The Boston Tea Party (Part One)

The Band - The River Hymn
To Kingdom Come (Disc 2)

Neil Young - The Loner
Live Rust

Savoy Brown - Louisiana Blues
Blue Matter

Cream - Deserted Cities Of The Heart
Wheels Of Fire - In The Studio

Quicksilver Messenger Service - Who Do You Love (Part 1)
Happy Trails

Yardbirds - Train Kept a Rollin'
Yardbirds Reunion Jam

The Velvet Underground - I'll Be Your Mirror
The Velvet Underground & Nico

John Lennon - Cold Turkey
The John Lennon Collection

Traffic - Shoot Out At The Fantasy Factory
On the Road

Fleetwood Mac - Man Of The World
The Vaudeville Years - 1968 To 1970 (Disc 1)

Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Cream - N.S.U. (BBC Sessions)
Cream: The BBC Sessions

The Yardbirds - "Over, Under, Sideways, Down"
Roger The Engineer

Jeff Beck - Shapes Of Things
The Late 60's With Rod Stewart

Savoy Brown - Train To Nowhere
Blue Matter

Jefferson Airplane - Today
Jefferson Airplane Loves You (Disc 1)

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - I Scare Myself
Striking It Rich

The Electric Flag - Groovin' Is Easy
"The Monterey International Pop Festival,Volume"

Janis Joplin - Combination Of The Two
Janis (Disc 2)

Fleetwood Mac - Black Magic Woman
Fleetwood Mac - The Collection

Blind Faith - Presence Of The Lord
Blind Faith

Cream - Those Were The Days
Wheels Of Fire - In The Studio

Country Joe & The Fish - Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
"The Monterey International Pop Festival, Volume 1"

Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover [Live]
Jefferson Airplane Loves You (Disc 2)

2 Days ago

Fleetwood Mac - The Green Manalishi

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3 Days ago

September 8, 2008

The Clash - The Magnificent Seven [live]

YouTube - The Clash - The Magnificent Seven [live] 4 Days ago

Phil Ochs - Pleasures of the Harbor

The title song from this album, Pleasures of the Harbor, is an edgy tale of sailors home for brief shore leave. With Ochs's wiggling vocals and the gentle, stringed backing, sets you up for one of the most disturbing songs anywhere - The Crucifixion. Ochs opened some pretty strange doors in his brief time with us.

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4 Days ago

September 6, 2008

Woody Guthrie: Jesus Christ

You might recognize the tune and even some of the lyrics from Woody's Jesse James: MilkandCookies - Woody Guthrie: Jesus Christ 6 Days ago

September 3, 2008

MilkandCookies - Pink Floyd: Us and Them, Original

MilkandCookies - Pink Floyd: Us and Them, Original

In a Rolling Stone interview, David Gilmour remarked that Pink Floyd wasn't very good musically and had to find other ways to be successful. Guess that it worked. Dark Side of the Moon was on the Billboard charts for more than 1500 weeks. 1 Week ago

iTunes shuffle playlist

I Hear A Rhapsody - Bill Evans
Bill Evans - "Montreux II"

Banquet Hall - Loreena McKennitt
To Drive The Cold Winter Away

Anu - Adrian Legg
Guitar For Mortals

Take My Hand, Precious Lord - Thomas A. Dorsey
Say Amen, Somebody

And - Grateful Dead
Terrapin Station (Capital Centre, Landover, MD 3/15/90) (Disc 3)

Treacherous Cretins - Frank Zappa
Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar (Disc 1)

Help Me - Elvis Presley
Amazing Grace: Elvis (Disc 2)

Buzzard Keep On Flyin' Over... - Simon Rattle cond.
Porgy And Bess Disk 2/3

Cousin Mary (Alternate Take) - John Coltrane
Giant Steps

Shango (Chant to the God of Thunder) - Babatunde Olatunji
Drums Of Passion 1 Week ago

September 2, 2008

YouTube - U2 BAD Live Aid 1985

There was so much great music at the Live Aid concert. No doubt, a lot of the energy came from the worthiness of the cause. Also, though, many bands were at the top of their games. Even the long vamp at the end of this one, while Bono dives into the crowd, adds to the haunting sharpness of the tune. 1 Week ago

Why people make fun of tech writers

Sad to say, I've written headlines like this, up to and including the split infinitive.

Contextualize Technical Writing Assessment to Better Prepare Students for Workplace Writing: Student-Centered Assessment Instruments: EServer TC Library via kwout

Need cats?

You can use cats i am near to find, well, cats near you.

cats i am near via kwout

Do the math

I was reading this article about falling oil prices in today's Boston Globe. The subhead notes that the price of a barrel of oil is down 30% from its peak in July, but that prices could be rising again.
So, the price has dropped 30%. In order for it to return to that level, however, it will have to rise 50%. You go down 30% and up 50% to get to the same place?
In order to understand this, I guess that we should consult with Sarah Palin, whom John McCain says “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.”

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Crime in suburbia

From The Landmark (subscription required):

Holden

Monday, September 1

6:53 p.m. Skateboarders in roadway on Main St. causing a hazard
...
9:46 p.m. Skateboarders on Main St. 10:07 p.m.

Tuesday, September 2

8:31 a.m. Animal in back yard with foul smell on Salisbury St.
10:39 a.m. Caller on cell phone says she's lost in the woods at Trout Brook; OK, dog got her back to the trail

Friday, September 5

8:40 a.m. Two children waiting for bus throwing acorns at passing cars on Wachusett St. 8:41 a.m.

Saturday, September 6

10:25 a.m. Caller reporting dead mouse in coolata left in car overnight

Sunday, September 7

4:48 a.m. 911 Caller scared because of no hot water

Rutland

Monday, September 1

12:05 p.m. Man got stuck in tree while trying to rescue cat, Wildbrook Dr.

Sterling

Monday, September 1

8:36 a.m. Officer wanted, Rugg Rd./ Maple St. Woman forced off road into poison ivy by bicyclists riding abreast in the road

Tuesday, September 2

12:01 p.m. Loose pig in area of Justice Hill/Rowley Hill Rds

Friday, September 5

5:06 p.m. Loose chickens in road in front of funeral home, Worcester Rd.

Ike is a scary storm

According to Dr. Jeff Masters, Ike is more powerful than Katrina.The way that it is strengthening, by increasing its windows further out from the center rather than wrapping tightly around the eye, is producing a massive storm surge on the dangerous northeast quadrant.

Ike will probably inundate a 180-mile stretch of Texas coast from Port O'Connor to just north of Galveston with a 10-15 foot storm surge. This will occur even if Ike is a Category 1 storm at landfall. The latest experimental storm surge forecast From NOAA's SLOSH model (Figure 1) shows a 10% chance that Ike's storm surge will exceed 15-21 feet at Galveston. The Galveston sea wall is 17 feet high, so it may get overtopped.

Reminds me of Tom Rush - Galveston Flood

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New feature on this blog's home page

I've added a new widget on this blog's home page. It shows updates from some of the blogs that I'm following. It uses a new feature in Blogger. Many of you, I know, read this blog via RSS or email and so may not need to see the home page. If you happen to check it, please let me know what you think.

What I learned from the sidewalk trash

It's a cool and clear morning. There's plenty of water around from the overnight dew and yesterday's rains. Marley and I didn't walk yesterday because of the weather. The day off and the cooler temperatures gave Marley some extra energy today. We walked to the Worcester line and back at a steady clip, as steady as a curious dog's nose will let us proceed.
I've been taking an extra plastic bag so that, along with cleaning up after Marley, I can also pick up a bit of roadside trash. It gets me out of the cycle of my own thoughts as I try to imagine who tossed the trash and why.
According the Centers for Disease Control, Marlboro is, by far, the most popular cigarette brand in the country. (The 2007 report is here.) My unscientific curbside analysis shows something different. About half of all of the cigarette packs that I pick up are Newports, with Marlboro, Parliament, and Camel filtered making up the balance. I rarely see the cheap, generic brands. Holden must be doing pretty well.

When content aggregators get the blues

Apparently, this site, allaboutdepression.info, generates articles by locating topics related to keyword, collecting the topics, and publishing them. In this case, the keyword was depression. The aggregator didn't bother to notice that there are many different meanings and uses for the word depression and its derivatives.

Tropical Depression 3 could become a tropical storm (Carteret County News-Times) | allaboutdepression.info via kwout

Old becomes new, rinse, repeat

Friend Kevin and I were talking recently about some popular new technologies that are showing up in the workplace. One is a netbook, a light-weight laptop or portable computer that relies primarily on web services to provide you with what you need - applications, communications, and storage. Related to the netbook, is PC-as-a-Service. The same basic principle applies - all or an important part of your computing capabilities is handled by services that reside on servers inside or outside your company's data center. The overall idea is that it's difficult and expensive to maintain an operating system and the requisite applications on hundreds or thousands of employee computers. It's far more efficient to consolidate those capabilities back in the computer room or out there in the cloud.
Kevin and I found this both interesting and amusing. See, more than 20 years ago, when we worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, we managed X Windows systems that put a big monitor on the user's desk while all of the serious computing was handled by a server someplace else. (Purists may want to quibble about the use of the words client and server in the X Windows context. Quibble away.) When it was time to update the operating system or other programs or to add more storage or computing power, you took care of it in the computer room, rather than going to dozens of cubicles and performing the same task on each user's system.
Of course, then and now, a highly-reliable, high-speed network is essential. (What's the definition of a networked solution? A system that you didn't know about in a place that you never heard about is keeping you from doing what you want to do.)
For lots of people, that kind of connectivity is available at home, at work, and at their favorite coffee shop. Using the Firefox browser, I have many days when I don't need to use any desktop application. My email, calendar, task list, music, newspapers, and time-wasters are delivered by the web. Twenty years ago, we had comparable solutions, although the systems were at least 10 times more expensive and the networks were 1% of the current speeds. It makes the brain hurt to think about what the next score of years will bring.

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Even more on pharmacies

OK, so, I look through the advertisements in the Sunday papers and see that Rite-Aid, our neighborhood chain pharmacy, is offering a deal on vitamins. Vitamins are good for us.

Rite Aid : Weekly Circular : Single Page View via kwout

I make my way to the store and then to the vitamin aisle. The sticker on the Nature Made vitamin shelf says BOGO .00. I look around. There are BOGO signs in lots of places. I go back to the front of the store, pick up the flier, find the ad (above), and then, shocking as it may seem, I ask for help from a clerk. "Are these items on sale, buy one, get one free?" I ask.

"Yes," she replies.

"Ah. BOGO. Buy One. Get One."

"Yes. We're trying to educate the customers on what BOGO means."

Uh, huh. Bogo.

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Online tunes

I've been kicking the tires on several Internet song services - last.fm, Pandora, Tun3r, Songza, among others. They're all trying to something both the same and yet be different. They offer access to lots of songs online and have various ways of trying to figure out what you like. (Amazon pioneered this service with its recommendation service.) The good news is that they let you decide what you want and offer new stuff that you may not have heard. The bad news is that none of these sites is terribly intuitive. It's easy to find yourself in odd places, being asked odd questions, and not being able to get back to the place where the music comes from.
Also, as they try to comply with copyright constraints, you often find that an obvious feature has been turned off. For example, Pandora lets you search for and select a song you want, but won't let you listen to it. (They play something that they think is like it.)

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So, this person will be ready to assume the presidency?

McCain campaign manager, Rick Davis, has said that the campaign won't make Sarah Palin available for news interviews until the time is right and the reporters are well-behaved.

From Fox News:
Palin to Do First Television Interview on ABC - America’s Election HQ: "So until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment."

It's up to Governor Palin to be ready, not the media. What's going to happen if she needs to have a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chaves or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Angela Merkel? She's not going to meet with them until they promise to play nicely?

Paths in the woods last a long time

Tropical Storm Hanna brought us heavy rains, but modest winds. We'd closed all of the windows last night, save one, so the house was still stuffy when I got up this morning. With the back door open, I could smell the wet pine scraps that we've left on the wood rack on the back deck.
Across the street, the little stream sounds like a torrent. The little stream feeds a small pond which feeds another stream that runs through the Alden Labs. This afternoon, we took a walk through the woods around the labs. Back in the spring, there had been a lot of trees cut down in those woods and branches left across the fire roads where we walked. It was treacherous at times, stepping through the branches and brush. It's still not clear what they were trying to accomplish. There are still a lot of hardwood logs, good for firewood, lying on the ground. It isn't an easy walk, but the exercise is good.
Paths through the woods last a long time. It's difficult for new growth to establish itself on the hardened ground. Eventually, of course, left to themselves, the woods will reclaim everything, but that can be years, even decades.
Along the way, Marley stopped by the rushing stream to have a drink of the hurrying water.

The river bed is orange, a sign that there's dissolved iron in the water. That's common around here, but it's a bit surprising, then, that we don't have iron ore in the ground.
We walked out of the woods and past the lab buildings, learning along the way, how fish are able to graduate from one grade to another in their schools:

McCain has difficulty finding a tune.

During last night's Republican convention, the sound system erupted with what is, IMO, the best rock and roll song ever - Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode. Berry hasn't formally objected to the use of his song, but he's made it clear that he prefers Obama.
In the meantime, the Republicans are also try to adopt a Van Halen tune, Right Now. The band objects. The songwriter, formely VH frontman, Sammy Hagar, doesn't mind so much, but the current band, re-formed with David Lee Roth, doesn't like the idea of any party using the song for political purposes.
Update: Washed-Up 80's Rockers Clamor for McCain-Palin Infringement