Defining Drought
Daniel Collins has a nice post on the problem of defining drought.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
ENSO Forecast
The latest ENSO forecast came out Thursday. No big surprises here: El Niño is strengthening, as expected, expected to continue into northern hemisphere spring 2007.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
I did not know this, but apparently the whole Hindenburg thing (“Oh, the humanity!”) is something of a problem for hydrogen fuel fans. It stands to reason that images of a giant bag of flaming hydrogen with bodies falling hither and yon is bad PR, it just had never occurred to me. Not to worry. …
Mailing List Dynamics
Mailing list dynamics are often fascinating: a complex self-disorganizing system, like a bunch of really dumb ants who are neither very good at finding food, nor at finding their way back to the nest. When they work their best, they’re a fabulous tool for decentralized group communication, thinking and decision-making. At their worst… Today’s case …
Why I Heart Google Earth
Playoff baseball tonight in Yankee Stadium, and the game’s start has been delayed by rain. Back in the olden days, I would have been perfectly happy with tracking the storm on National Weather Service radar. But that is so spring 2006. I mean really. Fire up Google Earth and type “Yankee Stadium” in the search …
Pi
Perhaps our resident translator of things Japanese can help explain this: A 60-year-old man from Mobara, Chiba Prefecture, recited pi to 100,000 decimal places early Wednesday, smashing the world record. It took clinical psychologist Akira Haraguchi–who also held the previous record–more than 16 hours to achieve the feat, which ended with the number 6. The …
Adding to the Blogroll
A great comment discussion with Daniel Collins reminds me that I always like his blog when I read it, but I forget to read it. Adding it to the blogroll (I’m thinking “meta science”) and to the Planet as soon as I can figure out how to get his RSS feed.
The Nature Problem
James Annan has had several posts that were spot on over the past year (see here and here) about what I call “the Nature problem” – scientific results that get hyped all out of proportion because they appear in Nature. My favorite case in point is the paper in Nature last year by Bryden et …
Postseason Baseball
It is that time of year when I awake from my sporting slumber and begin paying close attention to the telly. I admit to being a fair weather baseball fan, with a love for the game but a lack of patience for the 162-game season. I’ve come to see the season as statistics, and the …
Bad Drought Reporting: A Visual Aid
More on the bad drought story I wrote about yesterday, an AP piece with heart-rending stories about drought in Kansas. Standardized precipitation index data showing that, since December, conditions in the area in question have been “near normal”: It’s not like there hasn’t been drought in the United States, just not in Kansas in any …