gregladen | October 31, 2010Tomas is nicely demonstrating the degree to which meteorological models depend on the context of experience. This season I've read most of the discussions and advisories for most of the Atlantic storms, and generally speaking, the forecasts change only a little from time to time once a storm is named, and the final realized path and strength changes match very closely with with was predicted. Occasionally a storm is more poorly behaved than that. But Tomas, which formed in a place no other storms formed this year and that has existed under rather unusual conditions is giving the Hurricane…
gregladen | October 31, 2010This is a pretty good campaign ad, though I prefer the negative kind a lot more when they are about Michele Bachmann. It is, after all Halloween.
gregladen | October 31, 2010According to the current models, Tomas the Hurricane will stay around the Category One/Category Two boundary over the next four days as it moves to the west then north. The predictions are very uncertain at this point, but Wednesday night or Thursday morning, Tomas may be near western Haiti and prepared to bear down on the Port au Prince area as a Category Two (or strong?) hurricane. It may also slip between Haiti and Jamaica, affecting both with strong tropical storm force winds and proceed on to eastern Cuba. Tomas continues to confuse the forecasters a bit more than the average…
gregladen | October 30, 2010I'm writing something about the concept of "The Missing Link" which may also end up as an episode of "Everything you Know is Sort of Wrong" on Skeptically Speaking. The fact that I'm working on this is of no interest to you, I'm sure, until I actually finish it and post it. But, in the mean time, I'm thinking about missing links, and decided to repost this writeup of one example of a fossil find purported to be one.
Let me know what you think: Is Indohyus a missing link?
Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the…
gregladen | October 30, 2010And do NOT vote for Willie Dove. Willie, a Republican candidate for District 1 seat on the State Board of Education says, in relation to evolution and creationism in science classrooms, "One without the other, that's when we have the problem."
Kansas, you don't need this. Check out the details here.
gregladen | October 30, 2010"We're going retro"
"However improbable we regard [an] event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once."
George Wald, parahprased and quote mined. I am under the impression that GG Simpson or someone used a similar phrase in relation to trans-Atlantic dispersal of primates or certain species of ants. Or maybe it was me that said that, I can't remember.
gregladen | October 30, 2010Yes, it does matter what is in a placebo (as well as how it is administered, and so on) because the placebo is an important part of the experimental protocol used in pharmaceutical research. Before we get to why this question has even been raised, and an interesting point or two about it, lets quickly cover what a placebo really is.
A placebo is a tool used for making a control in an experiment. So what is a control? A control is a subset of individual variates (which may be people, or samples of some kind, or whatever) that is given a "treatment" that is just like the treatment you are…
gregladen | October 30, 2010I already posted my Page One voting choices for this year's election. Now it is time to turn the ballot over and talk about judges. In the mean time, if you are in or near Minneapolis, Hennepin County or the Fifth Congressional District, I invite you to have a look at this ballot, as it might be useful to you.
Judges are difficult as elections are inherently political and judges try to pretend to not be. However, a little digging can help determine the philosophical leanings of judges in a way that may matter, or information about their competence or lack thereof. Or, if the are a…
gregladen | October 30, 2010... and almost as interesting as his enigmatic sister, Shary. Tomas formed farther south than Hurricanes often do, hung around for a long time as a tropical depression, then blew up to hurricane strength very quickly. Having been declared a hurricane just a few moments ago, it may reach Category Three status as early as Monday, certainly by Tuesday. It will track in it's current direction, staying south of DR/Haiti and heading pretty much directly towards Jamaica, though it will likely turn north towards Cuba before hitting Rastaland.
I can't see how Tomas is NOT going to be a serious…
gregladen | October 30, 2010Try to pick out the hurricane in this picture:
Possible but difficult. Click here to see an animation (if it is still on line), then it is easy to see this most unusual hurricane.
Shary is cnfusin the weather experts ath the HPC. words like "conundrum" and "system not handling this well" and "normally ... would not require this much discussion" and "a change ... does complicate matters" and "it is hard to discount" and a note that this hurricane would never have been detected were it not for the most modern of techniques.
Shary will be absorbed by a cold front by the end of the day…
gregladen | October 29, 2010I was wrong. I was expecting Right Eye to turn into Shary, and it did but I was expecting Left Eye to turn into Tomas, but it dissipated. Mouth turned into Tomas.
In any event, we have two new named storms in the Atlantic. One more and we'll run out of names!
Shary, a tropical storm, is the little roundish thing near the top of the satellite image. Bottom line: This storm might barely reach hurricane strength and it might not, and by the time the Vikings-Patriots game is over, it will have been absorbed into a front which I believe may be a wave that came off of the…
gregladen | October 29, 2010Elderly Black Voters Allegedly Intimidated At Their Homes In Texas
Two middle-aged white Republican activists in Texas allegedly harassed and intimidated at least seven elderly African-American voters at their homes in eastern Texas, according to a complaint filed with the Justice Department on Thursday.
Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, submitted a report to DOJ alleging that two unidentified women visited elderly African-American voters at their homes in Bowie County and questioned them about their mail-in ballot applications, Mother Jones first reported.
Read…