Category: Current Affairs

Posted on

A Storm Called Alpha

In most years, a storm of the relative inconsequence of Tropical Storm Alpha — it’s of little consequence unless you happen to live beyond blog reach in the mountains of Hispaniola, anyway — would barely have attracted public notice here in the States. But 2005 isn’t most years, and Alpha, which blew westward across the Atlantic for days while Hurricane Wilma got all the ink last week, finally became organized enough that it was officially recognized as a tropical cyclone.

The history has been well discussed: It’s the first time since hurricane records have been kept in the mid-Atlantic/Caribbean/Gulf region that so many tropical cyclones have formed in one season: 22. But that’s a record that goes back just 150 years, a sliver of a sliver of time. Leaving aside the impact we’ve had on long-term climate as enthusiastic burners of anything that will burn, is it really likely that the weather observed this year is of absolutely unprecedented severity? Just asking the question tells you what I think. Maybe someday climate scientists, like those working in the new field of paleotempestology, will produce a definitive answer to open-ended questions like that.

Alpha’s nearly done with. But Wilma’s still a story. Having read the discussions pretty religiously the last week or so, it has defied the model predictions (and thus our expectations) and restrengthened after crossing Florida. This is a boon for researchers looking for clues to storm behavior, no doubt. It’s also a treat for those who see this season’s monster hurricanes as evidence that Giant Weather Machines (GWM) are controlling the behavior of the atmosphere now.

Scott Stevens, former Pocatello, Idaho, TV weatherman and current leading apostle for the GWM worldview, took one look at Wilma last week and saw all the signs of a manufactured event:

“Hurricanes now develop in locations that best suit the weather makers. No longer do they need to spend a week traversing the Tropical Atlantic gathering a name as they first become a depression while slowly strengthening to a tropical storm and then on to become a hurricane. Yes, explosive hurricane development has occurred in the past, but these past few years are different. There has been a discernable shift in how quickly and where these tropical storms develop and mature. Storms now form much closer to where the Powers That Be want the maximum terror effect. These storms are clearly government sponsored terrorist events. The effects are economic, are emotionally draining to the point of exhaustion, certainly financially taxing, and used to cause a victimhood mentality that makes us all feel powerless in some sense. The net effect is fatigue and in the case of Katrina and Rita we have been delivered an infection of poverty that this deeply indebted nation will struggle to overcome for a generation or more.

“All weather is now manufactured. Period.”

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted on

Obligatory White Sox Post 2

Faithful Correspondent Lydell yesterday pointed out some interesting online mercantile activity involving White Sox tickets. The team’s Web ticket exchange had a bunch of Game 2 seats for sale. Top price, when I looked: Just under $10,000 per seat. There’s a lot more serious cash out there — heirloom jewelry being sold off, ancient mattresses getting raided for Grandpa’s rainy-day savings, big lines of credit getting tapped — than I ever imagined. The Sox ticket exchange says all the listed tickets are gone. But check out Chicago Craigslist: Someone offering tickets for the Houston games at anywhere from $1,900 to $2,300 a seat. (And on the other end of the spectrum: A buyer offering to pick up tickets for face value — the range is $125 to $185, which sounds almost modest — generously pointing out that tonight’s predicted rain would kill the scalpers’ market.)

By way of perspective, the eight Sox players indicted for throwing the 1919 Series were reportedly bribed something like $5,000 to $10,000 each.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Obligatory White Sox Post

One sort of obvious statistical things I haven’t heard the broadcast guys talk about is the long roll the White Sox are on. Going back to the last week of the regular season, they’re now 13 out of 14, the only loss coming at home to the Angels in the first game of the second round. The run includes a sweep of the Indians, who had looked like they might be ready to overtake the Sox; a sweep of the Red Sox in the first round; and the 4-1 rout of the Angels. All this from a team that had gone into free fall after the first week of September (losing 10 of 14 at one point and with a record of 7-12 for the 19 games before they learned how to win again).

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Bloggers on the Storm

What I said about the best weather reading in that last post? I want to amend it: Weather Underground is publishing a couple of hurricane blogs that are great fun for storm geeks.

One is from meteorologist Jeff Masters — actually, Dr. Jeff Masters to you and me. The other is from Steve Gregory, identified as a weather forecaster.

Both blogs are discursive and have lots of good show and tell (maps, charts and other graphics) that you don’t encounter on the National Hurricane site without a lot of drilling down, if then.

Masters has a comparatively sober and reserved tone to his description of the weather. Gregory is a bit on the overmodulated “you won’t believe this!” end of the spectrum. Tonight, he’s predicting what the next hurricane hunter mission will encounter before it gets there based on what he’s seeing in satellite pictures. He sounds very confident even though his last prediction turned out wrong.

Stick with Masters for the facts. Gregory’s good for the wild speculatin’ we expect on the Net.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

The Discussion

Wilma

The best weather reading out there — and I know one person in Napa who will back me up on this — is the forecast discussion produced several times a day by regional offices of the National Weather Service (for the San Francisco Bay Area, you can find it here). What’s good about it is that, even if it gets a little technical, you’re reading a real forecaster (as opposed to the TV kind) explain all the factors that go into the weather outlook.

The most striking revelation in the discussions is the degree to which forecasters rely on global models to come up with their picture of the weather over the next week. The models aren’t a secret, of course. But a large part of the discussion in any period of complex weather deals with how to resolve the disagreements among the many models, each with its own prediction about conditions 12 and 24 and 48 hours and (much) more from now, that are used to develop the public forecast. The resolution is often done by balancing a model’s behavior in various circumstances with the forecaster’s hunch about which of several outcomes might be true. It’s funny to see the TV weather folks deliver a "this is the way I see it" prediction knowing that a lot of their brow-furrowing is borrowed directly from the forecast discussion.

Now, among weather discussions, the best reading has to be the National Hurricane Center‘s tropical storm discussion. I think the reason is obvious: A lot more is at stake in a hurricane forecast, and the meteorologists wring their hands even more than usual about getting things right. But there’s another factor that makes the hurricane discussions fascinating: Tropical storm systems are so complex, with so many unknowns, that sometimes the models begin to diverge wildly on the forecast. The more powerful the storm — or the more variables to account for, such as adjacent weather systems, in figuring out where the storm is going — the more the models. At the mercy of what a computer is spitting out, the person whose name appears at the bottom of the discussion — another reason I like these writeups — sometimes is compelled to come out and say, you know, we can only guess what might happen two or three days from now with this thing.

I’ve read this kind of concession maybe half a dozen times this hurricane season, and three times in just the last couple of days in discussions of Hurricane Wilma. The statement issued at 5 p.m. EDT today was a classic — it started right into the problems with the models:

"HURRICANE WILMA DISCUSSION NUMBER  18

NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL

5 PM EDT WED OCT 19 2005

"AGREEMENT AMONG THE TRACK GUIDANCE MODELS…WHICH HAD BEEN VERY GOOD OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF DAYS…HAS COMPLETELY COLLAPSED TODAY. THE 06Z RUNS OF THE GFS…GFDL…AND NOGAPS MODELS ACCELERATED WILMA RAPIDLY TOWARD NEW ENGLAND UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A LARGE LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION. ALL THREE OF THESE MODELS HAVE BACKED OFF OF THIS SOLUTION…WITH THE GFDL SHOWING AN EXTREME CHANGE…WITH ITS 5-DAY POSITION SHIFTING A MERE 1650 NMI FROM ITS PREVIOUS POSITION IN MAINE TO THE WESTERN TIP OF CUBA. THERE IS ALMOST AS MUCH SPREAD IN THE 5-DAY POSITIONS OF THE 12Z GFS ENSEMBLE MEMBERS…WHICH RANGE FROM THE YUCATAN TO WELL EAST OF THE DELMARVA PENINSULA. WHAT THIS ILLUSTRATES IS THE EXTREME SENSITIVITY OF WILMA’S FUTURE TRACK TO ITS INTERACTION WITH THE GREAT LAKES LOW. OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF DAYS…WILMA HAS BEEN MOVING SLIGHTLY TO THE LEFT OR SOUTH OF THE MODEL GUIDANCE…AND THE LEFT-MOST OF THE GUIDANCE SOLUTIONS ARE NOW SHOWING WILMA DELAYING OR MISSING THE CONNECTION WITH THE LOW. I HAVE SLOWED THE OFFICIAL FORECAST JUST A LITTLE BIT AT THIS TIME…BUT IF WILMA

CONTINUES TO MOVE MORE TO THE LEFT THAN EXPECTED…SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES TO THE OFFICIAL FORECAST MAY HAVE TO BE MADE DOWN THE LINE. NEEDLESS TO SAY…CONFIDENCE IN THE FORECAST TRACK…ESPECIALLY THE TIMING…HAS DECREASED CONSIDERABLY. …

FORECASTER FRANKLIN"

There it is: actual bitter irony; from a hurricane forecaster. "With the GFDL [Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model] showing an extreme change … with its 5-day position shifting a mere 1650 NMI [nautical miles] from its previous position in Maine to the western tip of Cuba."

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Play by Play

Pete called me this afternoon to say he’d heard something on the news he found sad and shocking: Bill King, who did play-by-play for the Oakland A’s for the past 25 seasons, had died suddenly after undergoing surgery. Strange to say, I was actually shaken.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to him broadcast on the next-to-last day of the season. It was a nothing game from Seattle, and I can’t say I remember anything about it. But I do remember hearing Bill mention Pat Piper, the legendary and long-gone field announcer at Wrigley Field, and thinking how the one thing I’d really miss about the season would be not hearing him again until springtime.

(I just discovered, though, that if you’re willing to pay $7.95 to MLB.com, you can get the full online archive of A’s radio games (and every other team’s, too) for 2005. Not sure how long the access will last, but I paid.)

I wrote a little something about King a couple months ago, about how he’d casually, and humorously, tossed off a reference to Trotsky while communicating his distaste of interleague play. His obituaries mention something I remember hearing a long time ago but had forgotten — that King was fascinated with Russian history and read avidly on the subject. So Trotsky was right in his ballpark.

King was an institution here not just for his A’s work, but for his phenomenal overlapping tenure with the Golden State Warriors (from ’62-’83) and Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders (’66-’92). Perhaps it was just that I enjoyed his style so much — his panache with language, his knowledge, his energy, his humor, his nearly unfailing sense of dramatic shifts in the contest he was describing — but I really believe he called a different kind of game than most of us are accustomed to hearing.

The mean streak Harry Caray showed in his best years and the mawkish sloppiness that marked his work later (nearly his entire Cubs tenure, from what I can tell, when he became first icon, then caricature) was absent in King. He didn’t indulge in the raw homer-ism and smug know-it-all-ism that makes Giants games so hard to listen to (Krukow and Kuiper, worst offenders; Jon Miller ain’t half bad, though). You would know who he was pulling for, but you never got the sense that he believed his team deserved to win.

A King broadcast was like listening to one of your smartest, most entertaining friends unwinding an elaborate yarn. He was someone you could imagine having over to dinner, maybe, and know you’d be in for an evening you’d never forget. Kate and I actually talked about inviting him, knowing that kind of thing never happens.

Posted on

Hurricane Compulsion: Wilma

The National Hurricane Center has the story: the 21st named storm of the 2005 hurricane season is at large in the western Caribbean. That both ties the record for storms observed in a season (set in 1933) and exhausts the list of storm names. The next storm this year, if there is one, will be called Alpha.

As we wait to see whether Wilma develops into a major hurricane, as some models predict, let’s revisit famous Wilmas in history. Without objection, so ordered.

Wilma Rudolph: Track champion

Wilma Mankiller: Cherokee chief

Wilma Flintstone: Cartoon wife homemaker

Wilma, Arkansas: One-horse town

Wilma Township, Minnesota: One-horse township

Wilmer Cook: Hapless wild-eyed gunman in “The Maltese Falcon”

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

‘Spectator Patriotism’

By way of my brother John:

Christopher Dickey, a Newsweek columnist and thoughtful critic of the Iraq war (translation: I agree with him) has a good piece this week reflecting on John Gregory Dunne and Dunne’s interest in patriotism:

“John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called “the spectator patriotism” exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?

“John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn’t end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their re-election, yet would send America’s sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter.

From past experience, I’ve seen evidence that Dickey actually reads the responses to his columns. So I spent some time writing one. The inequity of sending our military volunteers to suffer the consequences of their leaders’ ineptitude and dishonesty is an unresolved problem for the entire society and one we’ll be living with for decades (just as we’re still living with the legacy of having sacrificed so many conscripted soldiers in Vietnam). My “answer” to Dickey:

“I think Dunne’s sense of this issue, and yours, is spot on as far as it goes. Sacrifices must be shared. We must not fight wars to which we’re not fully committed (though bear in mind that that standard kept us out of World War I for nearly three years and, absent Pearl Harbor, probably would have kept us out of World War II indefinitely).

“But what do we do with that knowledge? Do we get behind people like John Conyers and Charles Rangel and demand the draft be reinstated? There’s an attractive school of thought that a universal draft — if one were started, I’d hope that women would be conscripted, too — would give everyone a personal stake in the war in Iraq and make the civilians who launched this thing more accountable. I’m not sure I buy that — more than half the Americans who died in Vietnam were killed *after* the Tet offensive, when the anti-war movement was already rolling along. Yet, a fair draft, perhaps with a national service alternative, *could* democratize the war and perhaps counter a tendency, which Bush encourages with no shame or sense of irony, to lionize the warriors, cozen up to them, and cast those who don’t support his military adventure as fifth columnists.

“Here’s the thing: I have two draft-age sons. I don’t know how I’d sleep if they and their friends were under arms now and their commanders were as casually deceitful and incompetent as the crew we have in charge now. For me, the principle of the thing — that it’s unfair and undemocratic to impose the war sacrifice on a small slice of society, even if they volunteered for service — is at war with my personal horror at the further ruin of young lives to so little apparent purpose. I also wonder about the equity of codgers like me (my draft number was supposed to come up in 1972, but it was never called) sending the young ones off to kill and be killed. If there’s going to be a national sacrifice, all the non-retired generations should be made to play a part beyond our penchant for uttering fine phrases.”

Posted on

In Memoriam

By way of Lydell, who heard this on Air America this morning:

Theodore Roosevelt Heller

Theodore Roosevelt Heller, 88, loving father of Charles (Joann) Heller; dear brother of the late Sonya (the late Jack) Steinberg. Ted was discharged from the U.S. Army during WWII due to service related injuries, and then forced his way back into the Illinois National Guard insisting no one tells him when to serve his country. Graveside services Tuesday 11 a.m. at Waldheim Jewish Cemetery (Ziditshover section), 1700 S. Harlem Ave., Chicago. In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans. [Emphasis added.] Arrangements by Chicago Jewish Funerals, Douglas MacIsaac, funeral director 847-229-8822, www.cjfinfo.com. Published in the Chicago Tribune on 10/10/2005.

(Historical note: The place Mr. Heller is being interred in a couple of hours is close to but not the same as the Waldheim (Forest Home) Cemetery where the Haymarket martyrs are buried.)

Posted on

Shazam! It’s Vince!

Just two oddball notes before I get back to navel-gazing and portentousness:

–The very first time I signed on to my email account at Boalt Hall (the law school at UC Berkeley), I had a queue of phishing emails waiting for me. You know: "Please click this link to update your account details (don’t forget your credit card number!) at eBay." To work or be worthwhile, a phishing scam would seem to need to use the name of a real, recognizable (if not popular) financial institution. But maybe not. Today, I got a phishing email purporting to be from an entity I had never heard of: Shazam Bank. Shazam is real — it’s a banking services firm based in Des Moines, Iowa, that mostly serves customers at smaller banks. In fact, its site carries a notice warning against phishing emails carrying the Shazam logo. Maybe the fact that a relatively small player and its customers are being targeted is a sign that the low-hanging fruit (unwary, unaware, or stupid customers banking with bigger outfits) has been pretty much picked.

–And just because I started on this thing with the tropical storm names: Tropical Storm Vince showed up way over on the other side of the Atlantic, southwest of Portugal, on Sunday. That’s the 20th named storm for 2005, and leaves only Wilma to go before we get into the Greek alphabet.