Servo3000: Live on the Web

It’s already flooding and storm hasn’t even hit yet.  Check it out here, for as long as the feed stays up.

If the feed isn’t on Galveston, move your cursor to the top of the video.  They change that active channel sometimes and you can switch to the seawall cam.

Also, watch out for bears (or possibly just furries in general).

The sea is angry

This video, by CERN employee Chris Mann, is the best I have seen as far as breaking down exactly how the technology works.

via Neatorama

Check the status here.

I remember seeing this classic Charles and Ray Eames video in a high school science class.  That was a simpler time, when Pluto was still a planet.

via Neatorama

From NOAA:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest on record in March, behind 2002, and the eleventh warmest on record for January-March year-to-date period. Temperatures were warmer than average across Europe and Asia, prompting the March 2008 global and Northern Hemisphere land surface temperatures to be the warmest since records began in 1880. La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, persisted in the equatorial Pacific, damping ocean surface temperatures. The global average ocean sea surface temperature (SST) in March was the 13th warmest on record.

via Climate Progress

I just came across this article about the Colorado State University hurricane team predicting 15 tropical storms with 8 of those becoming hurricanes for the 2008 season. It mentioned that some of their predictions had been a little off, but I was curious for a little more information. So I headed over to the forecast page for the team and found that they helpfully provided a very detailed analysis.

To check their results for accuracy, I am going to use their predictions from around June 1st of each year since that is the first day of hurricane season. Anyway, here are the results:

Named Storms:

• 2000: 12 predicted, 14 actual
• 2001: 12 predicted, 14 actual
• 2002: 11 predicted, 12 actual
• 2003: 14 predicted, 14 actual
• 2004: 14 predicted, 14 actual
• 2005: 15 predicted, 23 actual
• 2006: 17 predicted, 9 actual
• 2007: 17 predicted, 14 actual

Hurricanes:

• 2000: 8 predicted, 8 actual
• 2001: 7 predicted, 8 actual
• 2002: 6 predicted, 4 actual
• 2003: 8 predicted, 7 actual
• 2004: 8 predicted, 8 actual
• 2005: 8 predicted, 13 actual
• 2006: 9 predicted, 5 actual
• 2007: 9 predicted, 6 actual

So how did they do? Ok, I guess. From 2000 to 2004, they absolutely nailed it but then they completely fell apart. 2005 and 2006 are off by margins of 50% and 2007 is pretty shaky. I’m torn on if it is worthwhile to give publicity to these predictions. They can clearly be wildly off, but they do raise hurricane awareness right before the season starts.

I can conclusively say, however, that the members of the hurricane team desperately need makeovers. Believe it or not, the picture below is from the year 2000. Guys, get out of the lab every now and then.

This story is several years old, but I just stumbled across it over at The Fail Blog. The MSNBC story spells out the cause:

The 56-foot-long whale had been on a truck headed for a necropsy by researchers, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.

Ok, that explains the exploding whale, so case closed, right?  No, then things just get weird:

Once moved to a nearby nature preserve, the male specimen — the largest whale ever recorded in Taiwan — drew the attention of locals because of its large penis, measured at some five feet, the Taipei Times reported.

“More than 100 Tainan city residents, mostly men, have reportedly gone to see the corpse to ‘experience’ the size of its penis,” the newspaper reported.

Jeff Masters has a great article on this, and I highly recommend reading through it for all of the details.  There have been a number of talking heads appearing on tv and claiming that, since the winter of 2008 was so cold, global warming is clearly not happening.  There have even been some people claiming that we are undergoing global cooling.  The United States had it’s 54th coolest winter out of the past 113, so it was about an average year temperature wise for us.  Globally, however, this winter was in the top 13% of warmest winters ever.

He also points out the difference between weather and climate, which I think is a very important distinction:

It is important to understand the difference between weather and climate. Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. What we experience in one particular season or year is “weather”. Weather has a large variation from year to year, with cool seasons and years mixed in with warms ones. “Climate” is the weather measured on scales of tens of years or longer. One cool winter or year is not an indication that the climate is cooling back to normal. The climate is warming, and unless we see a series of several years of cool conditions, this year’s cool winter merely represents a normal fluctuation of the weather.

Kinoki foot pads are another of the many mystical medical products so frequently found on late night infomercials.   They claim to pull toxins out of your feet while you sleep which, according to them, is how a tree works.  I know that there is a segment of the population who always falls for whatever snake oil cure-all comes along, but I was surprised to see an animated discussion over at BoingBoing as to whether or not these things works.  As a general rule, if a product is cited as being an ancient Japanese secret held by reflexologists then no, it does not work.

CNN reports on what a disastrous summer it has been for the warming of the Arctic.  From the article:

552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That’s 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005’s record.

A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That’s nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It’s an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers calculated.

The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.

Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004’s total.

Alaska’s frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, “it’s very significant,” said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.

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