On Friday there will be some upgrading of the site so commenting will be off for a while, and possibly, comments will be stuck in moderation. That is all thank you very much. The work on the upgrade is over. Apparently it did not go as planned so there will be a third attempt at upgrade at some time in the future. This blog has dozens of individual blogs with thousands of posts on each. What a monster it must be to process that database. I'll keep you posted.

I used to secretly like Johnny Winter and his brother. Secretly because they (and Rick Derringer IIRC) were all idolize by my friends and I tended to avoid going along with what everybody else did or thought. But I did manage to get to all the concerts invovolving any of the above. Anyway, Johnny Winter has died, apparently.

Roger Pielke Jr, who is some form or another of climate change contrarian ... his main schtick is that global warming has no negative effects and he uses questionable analyses to "prove" this ... was brought on to the well respected FiveThirtyEight run by Nate Silver, blog site a while back. Soon after joining the team he seems to have stuck his foot deeply into his mouth a few times and got called on it. One could say that FiveThirtyEight's fame and respect has been earned by being straight forward and methodologically rigorous and professional in its handling of predictions about such…

Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed today on MorningJoe about the just released report to the UN Secretary-General on climate change and energy. The report addresses the goal of reaching a low-Carbon economy by mid century in the countries that release the most fossil carbon today. One interesting thing about this report is that Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe himself, seems to be pretty much on board with the reality of climate change science. Since Joe occupies a centrist to right position in Mainstream Media, this is important. Good for you Joe. Here is the show:

There is a major typhoon (hurricane) in the Western Pacific, Rammusan, which has already caused flooding and damage in the Phillipenes, where it killed 12 people, heading for southern China, and expected to affect northern Vietnam later on. From Accuweather: Warm ocean waters combined with light wind shear will allow the storm to remain well organized through Friday as it approaches Hainan Island. Rammasun will likely bring widespread winds of 100 mph to northern Hainan Island on Friday afternoon and Friday night with higher gusts. Widespread wind damage is expected across northern Hainan,…

Possibly both. Climate change certainly has a huge effect. Increased evaporation, decreased snowpack, the stalling of air masses that cause more drying and less wetting, which in turn is caused by changes in the jet stream, which in turn is caused by "Arctic Amplification," an effect of global warming, are major causes of a three year drought coming hard on the heels of a decade of near-drought dry. But also, Californian approaches to water management have been an issue. I recently learned that there are communities in California that don't even have water meters on people's houses. What…

How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up.* DFL activists and party leaders were both surprised and annoyed when perennial candidate Matt Entenza filed at the very last moment to run for Minnesota State Auditor against sitting Auditor Rebecca Otto in this year’s primary. He claimed he would fight corporate giveaways at the local level and scrutinize spending on education, addressing the state’s achievement gap. Also, he would be nice to out-state local governments and not favor the Metro, because he was born out-state. Entenza has a habit of…

Music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic performing Word Crimes. (C) 2014 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

Over 600 (as of this writing) neuroscientists from around the world, but with a very large proportion representing Europe, have written an open letter expressing concern with the Human Brain Project (HBP) and its cousin the U.S. BRAIN Initiative. It appears that the neuroscience community regards these projects as of relatively low value, while at the same time, these projects are sucking up a very large proportion of the funding for neuroscience. From the letter. ... Many laboratories refused to join the project when it was first submitted because of its focus on an overly narrow approach…

This is funny. Sort of. Well, actually not funny at all.

The American Tradition Institute a.k.a. ATI a.k.a. Energy & Environmental Legal Institute is a "think" tank that supports or engages in climate science denialism. You can read about it here and here. Michael Mann is a climate scientist, famous for bringing to the world's attention the alarming problem of hockey-stick style global warming. According to Wikipedia: The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize... The ATI, Michael Mann, and the University of Virginia have been…

Islamic distain for Islamic extremism Muslim people in the Middle East are getting fed up with Islamic extremism. This is indicated by a new poll from the Pew Research Center. Nigerians, regardless of religion, dislike Boko Haram. Ninety-two percent of Lebanese are concerned about extremism in their country (that's the highest number in the poll) up from 81 percent last year. Majorities in most of the nations polled are concerned about extremism. And in most Middle Eastern countries, concern about extremism has increased in the past year. In Lebanon, which shares a long border with…

Showtime's Years of Living Dangerously is one of the most important and well done documentaries addressing climate change. The 2014 Emmy Nominations were just announced and this series has received two nominations: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming (Adam Bolt). While often portrayed as an unsettled debate, the reality is that 97% of scientists agree global warming is happening and humans are to blame. Top scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association and…

How ironic is an advertizing partnership between the worlds largest toy company and Shell, a fossil fuel corporation, whose profits depend on destroying the very future of those toy buying children? Amelia Urry at Grist writes about this nonsensical arrangement which has been in place since the 1960's and has grabbed the attention of Greenpeace, which is hoping to bring an end to the lunacy. Read about it here.

When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the…

Update: The new forecast track of Neoguri is shown above as well as the location of two nuclear power plants. The forecast track has moved south, and is now in a very good (and here good means bad) position to strike the Sendai nuclear power plant very directly. Keep in mind that this forecast may change. On Tuesday mid day UTC the storm will likely be in the later phases of a turn to the right, aiming roughly at the Sendai plant. At this point maximum wind speed near the center of the storm will likely be about 90 mph, which puts the storm in the middle of the Category One range. That…

Regret Labs is a new science podcast by Aric McKeown and Levi Weinhagen, produced in the Twin Cities. It is a lot of fun. I did an interview with them and it has just come out. You can listen to it here. We talked about science, science advocacy, climate change, and the use of social media to promote good science.

Earlier this week a dude driving a truck while texting meandered off the road and ran over a woman, killing her. More horrifically, she was on a bike towing a child trailer occupied by her two children, one and four years of age, so they got to watch their mom die. The man who apparently killed this woman, on a road in southern Minnesota, is Christopher Weber of Madison, South Dakota. Apparently he was texting. Assuming this happened as reported, we have here a case of someone being a complete moron and a lot of other people paying a terrible price. "A person who ... causes the death of…

The Hurricane may (or may not) directly strike the Outer Banks.) I've updated the title of the post to update concern that Hurricane Arthur has a much increased chance of directly striking coastal regions in North Carolina. Scroll down to the most recent update below to find out more. I'm adding updates to a single post rather than writing new posts because I'm almost out of paper for blog posts. No, not really, it does not work that way. I'm doing this as an experiment in keeping things organized, especially handy-dandy images of the process unfolding. The previously mentioned tropical…

The Constitutional Accountability Center has released it's annual report The Corporate Court. ...Let’s begin with the numbers. This Term, the Chamber was involved in 17 cases overall—directly representing one of its member companies in Canning, litigating as a party in UARG, and filing amicus briefs in 15 other cases. The Chamber’s 17 cases represent just under a quarter of the total cases set down for argument this Term. All told, the Chamber racked up a record of 11 wins and 5 losses—or a 69% winning percentage. (One of its cases—Mt. Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action—…