Google Test

Sooner or later, I will retire from my present job and so will want to get another job, as I am not ready to sit outside every day watching the leaves flutter. So I will make out job applications and write resumes. Well today I saw what could be the most interesting job application of them all, Google's. It wa in my copy of Communications, the primary periodical of the Association of Computing Machinery, of which I am a member. OK, Google, you can spider this and everyone can Google what I say all over the place. But Google has really stepped out of the box. In fact, they have stepped out of a googol boxes. They have constructed the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT. It is a series of math and word puzzles, along with some essay and pictorial questions concering Google the company itself. It finally concludes by asking what the applicant would do if he applied to Google.

A most interesting test. If job applications had looked like this earlier in my life, I would have gotten more job offers than I have had, since this was the thing I was really good at. But wouldn't this deny to the Google people things they really need to know such as work history? Do they really need to know that? What of the work history? What does that say about whether the applicant will do in the present job? Perhaps this thing could come out more in the interview, when the applicant is given the opportunity to provide details. But I don't really think a work history on an application really helps the interviewers. However, a test like Google's may very well pick out those people who would work well at Google. Something good's going on with Google. Over and over again, they have come up with things that have really improved the worth of the web: language translating (although this is somewhat faulty), search news, search newsgroups, and search places to shop. Every one is a blockbuster success. So they must have some brainy guys and gals working for them, and I think Google is trying to get more such people. However, this test is amenable to cheating, but I still think it is a step in the right direction. Other employers, take note. Change your job search procedures, and watch your profits soar!

Woops! - Ladies Chain

Today I looked at the mathematical structure of contra dancing. That link to "mathematical structure" refers to an article I wrote for my mathematics page. It shows how the mathematical structure of contra dancing is like the mathematical structure of changing a mattress, and it ends with a quilt based on contra dancing patterns.

One of the moves of contra dancing is "ladies chain". This is a step where the two ladies in a foursome come to the center and allemande around, going to the opposite side, whereupon the opposite man twirls them around 360 degrees. The result is that the two ladies have switched position, while the two men stay the same. I found an error, or at least a questionable point, in my paper, which makes for an interesting conundrum or paradox.

The part of mathematics that I relate contra dancing to is group theory. A group is a set with an operation (as plus or times) such that the group is closed (adding or multiplying group elements always results in group elements, is associative ( (x*y)*z=x*(y*z) ), has an identity element, as 1, where 1 times anything is that same thing again, and inverses, so that for each a there is an a' such that a*a' = 1. Some operations are easily seen to be associative. For example, let x, y, and z be moves on a Rubik's Cube. then (x*y)*z and x*(y*z) both mean do x, then do y, and then do z, with the only difference being a trivial linguistic difference. So therefore the Rubik's cube group is associative.

So I thought surely contra dancing moves are associative. After all, (x*y)*z and x*(y*z) both mean dance x, then dance y, then dance z. So the two should be the same. No. They are not. It turns out that if y is ladies chain, and x switches the men and women around, then the two are different!

I will explain this in a sequel to my contra dance article, but the idea is this. Imagine a foursome in a square, and from left to right top, then from left to right on the bottom, label the dancers A, B, C, and D, in positions 1, 2, 3, and 4. Then A and D are ladies, and B and C are men. If they do a ladies chain, then A and D trade places. These are in places 1 and 4. But suppose they quarter turn left first. Then the women are in 2 and 3, and ladies chain trades 2 and 3 instead. This means that in (x*y)*z, then y trades 1 and 4, while in x*(y*z), y trades 2 and 3. The definition of y depends on the grouping of the terms. This results in the non-associativity.

I emailed a colleague about this, Larry Copes. He told me that a ladies chain when the ladies are in positions 2 and 3 is not often seen. I thought about it. It is a mirror image of the usual one! It violates the principle of "lady on the right". So most contra dances seen on dance floors do not have such ladies chains. So as far as movements on the dance floor are concerned, they are associative. But that is not good enough for a mathematical group. There one should be able to take any two elements and multiply them. I suppose the way to handle this is to regard ladies chain and gypsy once-and-a-half (which switches ladies 2 and 3) as the same mathematical group element. Then the group of contra dancing is D4, as I say in my article.

Hurricanes Hurricanes and more Hurricanes

I have not talked too much about hurricanes lately, but this has been some season. Since early July, I have been tracking down some hurricane or tropical storm somewhere, even if it is only in modelspace, such as the infamous SUUSI Hurricane that ruined SUUSI this year by striking Virginia Tech with 10 inch rains and 50 mph winds on its third day, and also that did not exist at all. It was a mere figment of modelspace. Some runs of the Global Forecasting System (GFS) showed this hurricane striking Charleston, SC and hitting western Virginia, but after two or three days, it completely disappeared from the runs and we had beautiful weather for SUUSI.

But most of the other storms I have been tracking have been real storms that have caused some real trouble. Charley and Frances X-ed out Florida with their tracks, and now the Gulf Coast is being hit by Ivan the Terrible as I speak. It's hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, Alex, Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Gaston, Ivan, and Jeanne, plus Karl and Lisa in modelspace. Gaston already has given us the second worst storm that I can remember here, and it was a mere tropical storm.

So the question is, will Ivan and Jeanne strike here? A Virginia DOT meteorologist says no. Neither will affect us. The forecaster at WxRisk.com also says that both will miss. He says Jeanne will be a Florida hurricane. Certainly I don't think Ivan will strike here. He is going straight for the Great Smoky Mountains, and there he will die. He may give us some flung-out spiral arm rain, as Frances did. But that's all. But what about Jeanne? Although WxRisk thinks this is a Gulf hurricane, MillenniumWeather thinks it's headed for the Carolinas. What do the models say?

No model goes out far enough to see where it will strike, except GFS. They do show her approaching North Carolina, but no farther than that. GFS does show what happens to her, and this is really peculiar, almost comical. GFS says that Jeanne will hit Florida twice. After Charley, Francis, and Ivan, this will make for five hurricane strikes this season for the beleaguered state, out of only four storms. It shows Jeanne going out in to the Atlantic, approaching the Outer Banks, but then a huge H of a High bombs out of Canada (the season's first cold snap) and stands right in front of Jeanne and says "STOP!". The big H then pushes Jeanne back to where she came from, and then towards the southern tip of Florida. Not only that, but the 18Z run of it shows it being pushed farther than that, into the Gulf of Mexico, where it hits the Yucatan. The idea of a hurricane going backwards seems comical to me. But then when this big beautiful Autumn High finally leaves, the hurricane then turns around and heads east northeast, hitting Florida a second time and then going out to sea in the Atlantic to spend its last days spinning fish. In my opinion, I don't think GFS knows what to make of this tremendous battle between a strong high ridge and a hurricane. I think the strong high will force Jeanne to move west northwest and hit Florida and go into the Gulf, as WxRisk says. But I am still going to watch this storm.

Funny Hurricanes

Well now what is left of Frances is supposed to strike to the west of Richmond, Virginia, after devastating practically the entire state of Florida. Here's the situation now. There is another storm, Ivan, which is about to cross the Leeward Islands and has made a mess out of Grenada. The models all seem to say that the storm will turn to the north and head towards southern Florida. Not again. Only one model goes beyond this, the GFS, and that one says that the hurricane will follow a trough out into the Atlantic, then when a high goes out past it, it suddenly makes a left turn and plows into, well, at 00Z and 12Z into North Carolina, at 06Z into Nova Scotia, and at 18Z into extreme southeastern Virginia. So this is one to keep a watch of, to see if it will actually do this.

In the meantime I picked up these interesting tidbits about hurricanes from the various message boards and other places:

Ivan is going the wrong way. Russia is east.

Can we just put yellow caution tape along the entire state of Florida?

Hey, when Ivan makes that left turn out in the Atlantic into Virginia or North Carolina, it should put on its turn signal.

There goes the Florida economy for two years.

The Florida State Seminoles at Miami Hurricanes football team got postponed because of a hurricane. That's like a Tampa Bay game being postponed because of raids by buccaneers, a Green Bay game being postponed because the city sent them packing, or a Dallas game being postponed because a bunch of cowboys with their cattle ran onto the field dropping plops. I don't think Frances had any interest in joining the Miami football team.

The funniest of all that I met was when someone reported that NOAA had spotted an area of disturbed weather, a large wave, between the Azores and the Leeward islands, and that there is a chance of this developing into a tropical system. The first reaction of readers to this was "FISH!!!". And then someone displayed a cartoon of a boat with a fisherman on it, reeling in a fish over and over again. The idea of throwing the epithet "FISH" at tropical weather strikes me as being really funny. Of course it is short for "fishspinner", which means a storm that stays out at sea and does little more than spin fish around in circles.

Nevertheless, after experiencing Isabel last year, I never want to encounter any of these storms again.

Tough Hurricane Names

Ray McAllister of the Richmond Times-Dispatch came up with an interesting point about hurricane names. They're too nice for things that destroy buildings and lives with wind and rain. He says we don't need a Hurricane Frances, because Frances sounds like someone you would have tea with. This Frances, he says, is coming for no tea. Perhaps people would listen if it were Hurricane Fidel instead. Ray also suggests Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Godzilla for hurricane names. His article is at the Times-Dispatch web site. This link may become dead in a couple of weeks. Another blogger, A perfectly Cromulent Blog, also suggests using names like Hitler and Attila.

I note that I have been using names like this for decades to describe storms, but not hurricanes. I use them for snowstorms instead, for the very reasons that Cromulent and McAllister mention - nasty things do not deserve nice names. Here is a list of names I am using. The next snowstorm to strike the Richmond, Virginia area will be Snowstorm Warlock. Here are the previous ones:

Ares
Bluto (Massive winter storm of 1993 March 12)
Crimester
Devil
Evil
Fiend (Ice Storm of 1994)
Gargoyle (Blizzard of 1996)
Hades
Infidel
Jabba
King Cobra (Major Ice Storm of 1998)
Loki
Malo (Blizzard of 2000)
Nix
Ogre
Pouncer
Quagmire
Rat
Snake
Tarantula
Ungodly
Vixen (last 2-inch snowstorm we had)

And here is what's coming up this year:

Warlock (for the first snowstorm of 2004-2005)
X-Outer
Yuk
Zorra

These names should satisfy the criteria of McAllister and Cromulent! I am just hoping that Warlock does not hit us too badly.

Ivan is in the act

There are now two storms out there: Frances and Ivan. Frances has nearly, but not quite, stalled just before hitting Fort Pierce, Florida. It now is forecast to go out into the Gulf of Mexico, reenter at Apalachicola, and come up Alabama and Tennessee, going by Memphis, Nashville, and Indianapolis. It has stalled so much now that some of the models, notably GFS, UKMET, and CMC have gone to the east, threatening to hit the western Virginia mountains. If that happens, Richmond will get massive river flooding, and it is already recovering from flooding from 11 inches of rain from a mere tropical storm Gaston. So we will have to wait for that.

But Frances has so occupied the attention of broadcasters and weather people that not a one is mentioning Ivan at all. Gary Gray does not mention it at all, and some of the models are suggesting this could be another Frances. So I will give my Ivan analysis after looking at the models.

Several models are calling for Ivan to go to the north, and follow the same track as Frances, including UKMET, NOGAPS, and GFDL. However, they take it only to the Bahamas before quitting. The only model that goes further is GFS, which goes to 16 days, but this model poofs the storm. After it gets to Puerto Rico, it just simply dissolves into a mess of other clouds. So what do you do when the models strongly suggest one thing, but the only model that will tell the full story is telling something different? I looked at the high pressure systems. There is a big one to the north. That's the one giving us the good weather this week. It is supposed to move off the coast, allowing Frances to take a more northeasterly track. Another high will come in from the US Midwest. In between will be a trough established by Francis and a couple of other non-tropical storms, and I am afraid that Ivan will go up this trough. In other words, it will come up to Florida, then veer off to the north and east and possibly hit the Carolinas and Virginia. It may not be as strong as Francis, but I certainly don't want that to happen. I will have to wait until the time gets to where the short models will pick up landfall, or GFS decided to realize the storm and tell us how it is going to go.

Hurricane Frances Update

Hurricane Frances has turned into a real cliffhanger, like a 13-inning 7th game of a World Series or the 2000 Presidential election. It has even been a little weird. The Global Forecasting System (GFS) showed the storm coming into Brunswick, Georgia, or thereabouts, continuing to the northwest, and then splitting up into two storms! One of them heads for Kentucky and Ohio, west of the Appalachians, and the other goes east of the Appalachians, into western Virginia. In Richmond, it gives us a glancing blow, much like Hugo did. The storm reunites somewhere in the Great Lakes.

The hurricane has stayed on a westerly course, with the longitude increasing about 3-4 times as fast as the latitude, and south of the course predicted by the National Hurricane Center. That course was going to go to Jacksonville, FL, but then it moved to Daytona Beach, and then to the Kennedy Space Center, and now back more towards Daytona again. However, the GFS and GFDL models have indicated all day long a hit at Hardeeville, SC, and then a track to the north northeast towards Richmond. Of course I don't want this to happen. I am not too concerned about the wind, since the NHC reports indicate that although the storm is producing140 mph winds, they quickly go down to about 80 mph at 60 miles inland and 12 hours all the way down to 30 mph. But it would throw about 2-10 inches of rain here in Richmond, and we already had 4-14 inches from upstart Gaston, which was "only" a measly little tropical storm.

Now tonight the GFS and GFDL has been joined by all of the BAM models, including BAM-H and BAM-G, so now the computer models graph on Weather Underground looks like a split, with some models heading to the Kennedy Space Center and some heading towards Savannah, GA and Hardeeville, SC. This is making this storm a cliffhanger. Which way is it going to go? Will it follow GFS, or will it follow UKMET, which up to now has been pretty steady? I of course hope that the UKMET and NOGAPS are right. I imagine that the people in Florida hope that GFS is right. We will have to watch the high and the storm really closely the next few days. The people from Fort Pierce to Jacksonville, FL need to keep a close eye on the storm, and so do the people near the Carolina and Virginia coasts. The next two days will tell the story.

Monkey Tale

Today when I went running, I found on the locker room door before I went running at lunchtime a posted notice. The notice told a tale of five monkeys. It goes something like this, although you can get a narrative by searching, say for "monkeys banana attack".

Put five monkeys in a cage. Put a stairs there and a banana so that a monkey, standing on stairs, can reach and get the banana. Then watch. Sooner or later, a monkey will go up to get the banana. At that time, spray the other four monkeys hard with a hose. After that, continue to look (replace the banana). Sooner or later, a monkey will go after the banana. When that happens, spray the other four monkeys. Do this several times. At about this time, when a monkey goes up to get the banana, the other four monkeys will attack it, because this brings water on them. This happens, even after you stop dousing them.

Call the monkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Now take Monkey 5 out and replace him with Monkey 6. Monkey 6 does not know of the situation. He goes for the banana. At that time the other monkeys attack him. After a couple of times of this, he does not climb the stairs any more. Take Monkey 4 out and replace her with Monkey 7. For the same reason, Monkey 7 will try to get the banana and will be attacked by the other monkeys (including Monkey 6!). In turn like this take Monkey 3 out and replace him with Monkey 8, and watch him get attacked upon trying to get the banana. Do the same with Monkeys 2 and 1, replacing them with Monkeys 9 and 10.

Now look. There are now five completely different monkeys in there, numbers 6-10. Monkeys 1-5, who got doused, are not there anymore. None of 6 through 10 ever got doused. But if any of those goes for the banana, he gets attacked! What is this phenomenon? It is POLICY, that is what it is.

This had me really thinking, especially since my workplace went through a 100% turnover a year ago (except for me). Apparently there are two levels of monkey thinking. Level 0 is the monkey who is new to the situation. Everything is fresh, yet to be discovered, including that tasty banana hanging from the ceiling. So he goes for the banana. Not so Level 1. This is a monkey that has learned that going up to the banana gets dousing from others, and gets one attacked by the others. So the monkey does not go up stairs. Now these monkeys, having nothing to do with the original situation, are still stuck with the original Level 1 situation.

To get above this, a monkey in the cage needs to go to Level 2. Why should I be attacked for doing what comes naturally, getting a banana to eat? There is no point to it. There was a point once, but it now has been lost. So the Level 2 monkey would want to get the banana, and would try to get it without getting attacked. Maybe a quick snipe. Maybe even better yet, find out what causes the attacks in the first place. There's a hose in the wall? Maybe take that banana and plug the hole with it?

This reminds me of the world situation. Soon we are going to run out of oil. But no one mentions it. Why not? Because a politician would lose votes, and a hypermediac would lose his job with the network. The hypermedia and the politicians are the other monkeys who would attack you. So what do you do? You need to get something going to get us ready for the oil shortage, but you need to do something about all the Level 1 monkeys out there that would attack you. So you need to attend to world defense, as well as move to a more sustainable economy. This would be taking the world view, according to Spiral Dynamic's Yellow Meme. It would be a courageous action, but it needs to be taken soon. If we remain trapped like monkeys in a cage, that may mean the end.

Gaston Surprise

Last night I was concerned about Frances, because it could come up our way in Richmond, Virginia. I am still concerned about that, but recent paths show it going away towards places farther west, so I am still monitoring that storm.

But tonight we had a surprise from what's left of Tropical Storm Gaston. I am still going to call it Tropical Storm Gaston, and in fact, it may regenerate into a hurricane when it gets out into the Atlantic. This is because the storm held together as a whole. We can't call it "remnants" because the storm is still a unified whole. It came up through South Carolina and North Carolina, where it caused tremendous flooding in Raleigh. Then it came here to Richmond where it literally dumped everything it had, and even produced some gale-force winds.

I got home OK but I was wondering about my wife's evening job. I examined all the reports coming in. I-95 was closed between Belvidere and Boulevard. Semmes and Commerce Avenue were closed. There were huge traffic jams on I-95 north south of the James River. There were floods on Brander's Bridge Road, Lewis Road at Ironbridge Road, Ironbridge Road at Newby's Bridge Road, I-195 between Douglasdale and Broad, Midlothian Turnpike in several places, and on Route 5 near Osborne to our east. I concluded that there was no way she could get to work. All the roads either had traffic jams or high water. So she didn't go in.

Richmond north of the city had 10-14 inches of rain. So far here we have had 4.6 inches, so it isn't the top storm here but it comes close. But it has caused some serious situations, more so than with some storms that were Class 3 hurricanes. Shockoe Bottom is flooded with people trapped on higher floors of buildings. The water on I-95 is so deep at one point that rescuers are having to get people by dragging them up from an overpass. A whole bunch of people are mandatorily evacuated because authorities are concerned about a dam break. Fortunately the center is going off shore, but unfortunately the western half of the storm seems to be strengthening. It will probably move off the coast tonight.

Among storms we have had, it ranks with Fran and Floyd, but in terms of rainfall, it tops them all. Last year was the Windstorm Isabel. This year it is Rainstorm Gaston. So I am hoping that Frances and her companions stay away. Latest guidance now suggests a landfall in Florida, so that may be good news, especially since it then is supposed to go out to the northwest. One storm like this in a year is enough.

Hurricane Party

It's hurricane time again, and sure enough the Great Den of Hurricanes, namely the Atlantic Ocean, is brewing trouble. Now it is Hurricane Francis, following a course somewhat similar to Isabel last year and to Floyd in 1999. Further, there are two more. Gaston just landed in South Carolina, and is supposed to make this area of Virginia diluvian, with several inches of rain. Hermine is out in the Atlantic but the Global Forecasting System (GFS) does not show it much; I think it will simply disappear.

Francis is the one I am concerned about. I have been following this storm for about a week or maybe even longer, before it even existed! The GFS makes it possible to follow a storm up to 16 days in advance. Some of the previous runs had it turning around in Florida and heading up here to Virginia, and that had me concerned. This past weekend, they started to head Francis into the GOM (i.e., Gulf of Mexico) after striking southern Florida, which sure does not need such a hurricane. It then would hit the Gulf Coast somewhere and head to the north northwest, perhaps affecting Indiana or Michigan.

As of late, the GFS started to move it to the east. The 12Z run today was really scary. It showed it going into Savannah, GA, and then heading into western Virginia after clobbering Charlotte like Hugo did in 1989. Not only that, but then after that a long train of hurricanes was following in its path, ready to strike the Carolinas in turn: Ivan, Jeanne, and Karl. I got the 18Z run today and it shows a more southerly path, hitting Fort Pierce, Florida, and then into Georgia and Kentucky. We would just get a little rain. And the traffic jam of hurricanes in the Atlantic is gone: just one little storm (Ivan) that turns away long before hitting the East Coast.

The runs are consistent enough to show clearly that someone is going to get 'caned. It is probably in Florida, but I hope we don't have another Isabel. So I am going to keep a watch of this storm, and also Ivan.

Everything's a Goat

I ran into an amusing site today, Goatism, in which the author maintains that the main principle of the life, the universe, and everything is that everything is a goat. That's right, a goat. You're a goat, I'm a goat. Ba-a-a-a. Bleat, bleat. The whole world's a goat. He has devoted some pages to the consequences of this. But his most interesting parts are when he proves that everything is a goat. His first proof has some obvious non-sequitors in it, so I will present a revision of his proof, and show that indeed, everything is a goat:

Theorem: Everything's a goat.

Lemma: If a set X contains a goat, then all elements of X are goats.

Proof: by induction on X = n. If n = 1, then if X contains a goat, then the only x in X is a goat, and since x is the only element of X, all elements of X are goats.

Suppose that for all Y with Y <= n, that if Y contains a goat, then all y in Y are goats. Let Zbe an n+1-element set with at least one goat g. Pick an h in Z<> g, and pull it out; i.e., consider Z- {h}. This set has n elements and it has g in it, so all elements of Z- {h} are goats.Remove another element k from the set, not g, and replace it with h. That is, consider Z - {k} union {h}. This set also has n elements, and contains g, so all elements in it are goats. This means that h is a goat also, so all elements of Z are goats.

There exists a goat g. I can take you to the zoo and prove that for you, or click here. Let a be anything, and consider {a,g}. This set has at least one goat in it, so it is all goats. Hence a is a goat. So anything is a goat. This completes the proof.

Note that I can also use this proof to prove everything is a leprechaun, since leprechauns do exist. I can use it to prove everyone's an orange, everyone's a genius, and everyone's anything. So where is the flaw in the proof? I say to remove another element k from the set, and that it can't be g. Of course not, since then I could not guarantee that there is a goat in the resulting set. But it also isn't h, since h has been pulled out. So the set out of which I pull my k has two elements less than the overall set, so it has number n - 1. However, when n+ 1 = 2, then n - 1 = 0. So the set out of which I have to pull my k has nothing in it, so I can't pull anything out of it. That destroys the entire proof, since we can't even proceed to n = 2 in the induction.

There are lots of neat little tricks on the site, such as a proof that if there is a goat, then there are not two goats, so the Entire Universe is One Big Goat. It's good for a laugh, but watch the math. There are traps ahead that will get your goat.

Hurricanes and the Coyote

This has been an active hurricane year, and already we have had A, B, and C storms come by our way in Virginia. I want to know about these monsters well in advance, so I go to the Internet to find information on upcoming hurricanes, such as Weather Underground, the Weather Channel, Terrapin, and others. But this is information processed either by news organizations or by NOAA. The Internet provides raw data now, so you can look at it and make up your mind. This data consists of results of weather simulations such as NOGAPS, ETA, GEM (a Canadian model), and GFS. The last one stands for Global Forecasting System and is an amalgam of the former MRF (Medium Range Forecast) and AVN (Aviation) models. As of late, GFS has been somewhat of a clown on the hurricane scene. In fact, it has been a trickster, the Coyote of weather models.

In early July, GFS models suggested that a hurricane would strike the Carolinas in the week of July 18-24, which for me is SUUSI week. The worst thing that could happen at SUUSI is a hurricane. Even though it is inland, a sufficiently powerful one would produce another Isabel. The fun and renewal that we would get at SUUSI would have ended abruptly with the first power outage. But a few runs after the one suggesting such a SUUSI hurricane, the hurricane simply vanished. Poof. Gone. No trace of it any more and we had good weather for SUUSI with only one rainy day.

GFS could not track Alex until he became a fully-grown hurricane. It had some problems with Bonnie and Charley, too, although eventually it got on track. But it is now that it is clowning around. First of all, it said that Tropical Depression 5, then Tropical Storm Earl, would not do much of anything. It would peter out in the Gulf of Mexico. The meteorologists said that it was wrong, that it would intensify instead and become a major storm, and one run of NOGAPS suggested a monster storm striking Louisiana, causing oil prices to hit the roof before the hurricane could blow it off. But guess what? It petered out and became a mere tropical wave. GFS was right, and the meteorologists were wrong!

Then there was Danielle. It looped to the north and east well before it could get close to North America. But one run of GFS suggested it would escape from the Bermuda high and head for the Canadian Maritimes. It is clear now that this won't happen. And now there is Frances. Yesterday evening, GFS was calling for Frances (now an unnamed wave in the eastern Atlantic) to strike the Carolinas and go up to SUUSI land, just like the SUUSI hurricane threatened to do. Then it showed it wimping out near Florida today So now they are all saying this wave won't amount to much. But the latest run (2004 Aug 17 18Z) shows that it's back now, and it is turning away from land in the western Atlantic. So it's off again, on again with this storm, and it says another one may be following it, either Gaston or Hermine.

So keep a watch of the hurricane and weather reports, and also the GFS (which now has loops or movies, which are interesting to watch at high speed), NOGAPS, and other computer models, brought to you courtesy of the Internet.

Hurricane Coincidences

This hurricane season is producing a number of interesting coincidences, including some that are nostalgic. This week two hurricanes hit the US mainland. Their names were Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, it's just like in the movies. Except that Clyde was Charley, instead. Sorry, Charley. Only the best hurricanes … er, we don't want the best hurricanes here. These hurricanes arrived on or about my 58th birthday, 2004 August 13.

On this date 49 years ago, I celebrated my 9th birthday. There was a hurricane that day too, Hurricane Connie. That's right, in 1955, it was Connie, and in 2004, it was Bonnie. Connie and Bonnie. I was in Rochester, New York then, and I remember that it poured rain and was windy all day long. My father took me to swimming lessons at the Y in the morning. Both Bonnie and Connie had devastating follow-on storms after them. In Connie's case, it was Hurricane Diane, which caused major flooding all over the Northeast, when it poured its rain on soil that was saturated with Connie. In Bonnie's case, it was Charley, which pounded Punta Gorda and other Florida communities into the ground.

And yet another storm is coming. This is Tropical Storm Earl. The Global Forecasting System (GFS) shows it fizzling out, or maybe wimping into Mexico, but the Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS) shows it increasing in strength and headed towards the oil platforms of Louisiana. If that occurs, the price of crude oil will skyrocket. In fact, it will probably top $50/barrel. It's interesting that this storm will do that, because Earl sounds like Oil. Hurricane Oil. In fact, Earl is pronounced almost the same as the German Öl, which means oil. Let's hope Hurricane Oil stays away from the oil.

Bonnie and Charley

Well this week it's Bonnie and Clyde! A pair of outlaw storms on the run from the meteorological law. Well actually it's Bonnie and Charley. Talk about hurricanes. This one's a 1-2 punch. They are calling for Bonnie to come up to Richmond, VA, on Friday, and then the very next day, Charlie arrives. Both will have the wind pounded out of them by the time they get here (hopefully! Hope they don't get a refresher in the Atlantic.) but they will still pour all kinds of rain here. It will be raining. It will be raining. It will be raining. And this is no ordinary rain. It will rain cats, dogs, pitchforks, potatoes, oil, kitchen sinks, condoms, SUV carburetors, terror alert levels, political campaigns, and ordinary differential equations, as well as all kinds of strangled salamanders and frogs. A total of 4 inches will fall here, and when that's over, I will need a canoe to go to work. If you live on the East Coast, better outfit your ark now. The Great Deluge is coming. And not only that. After Bonnie and Charley, the Global Forecasting System's runs suggests that there are two or three more tropical storms or hurricanes coming. Fortunately, a cold front will push Danielle and her buddies out to sea.

But yes, it's time to prepare for hurricanes again. These two storms will not harm Richmond too much, although they will give trouble to two areas in Florida. They are forecasting more hurricanes than usual this year. Let's just hope we don't have another Isabel.

The Green Flower

During SUUSI on 2004 July 18-24, I wrote a song about a green flower. I have not completed the song and have not settled on a melody except that it is probably going to contain major 7ths. But it is interesting to look at the ideas which led me to write a song about a green flower.

My workshop leader, singer johnsmith, asked us all to do a free-association exerecise to come up with some kind of song that involved compassion. I thought about this and came up with the idea of giving my love something for her birthday. Right away I thought of a flower. But this was too conventional. All men give their significant women flowers of some sort at times. What's so special about giving her a flower? What's so special about giving her a purple iris, or a red rose, or a yellow daisy? I thought of all the different colors of flowers, then I found one that almost no one gives; in fact, there are hardly any flowers of this color, namely a green flower.

And so I wrote the song about trying to get a gift for my beloved. I said that I could give her an iris, but I have already given her the iris of love. I could give her a daisy, but I have already given her the daisy of happiness. And so forth. Then I concluded by giving her the green flower, because that is not any of those, but it expresses my love for her that is beyond rose passion, happy daisies, and serene bluebells. I give her a flower that is so rare that it expresses my rare love for her.

And that brings us to the concept of a green flower in the first place. When I mentioned the green flower to my group, they said that flowers aren't green. They were being literal. johnsmith said that it was a left-brain concept. I thought about that a moment, and realized that to some extent it was. I mentally listed all the flowers there were and found that there were no green flowers.

And why aren't there green flowers? The purpose of a flower is to attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other animals to them so that the pollen from one flower can pollinate another. It is nature's aboriginal advertising gaud. The flower therefore has to stand out from the green vegetation, so it has to be a bright color that isn't green. A green flower would not attract insects because it would be indistinguishable from the leaves. If there was a green flower, the leaves would be some other color, such as orange or red.

So the flower is built to stand out beyond mere vegetation. Well, I created the green flower to stand out among flowers. It is the one unique gift that I had not given yet. And as such it represents the concept of "beyond"; that is, one can go beyond any concept that that one conceives. The green flower is beyond flowers. So the green flower represents the ability to go beyond where one happens to be in life to go to the next stage, as in the memes of Ken Wilber's theories (e.g., the Theory of Everything).

There is one other color of flower that I never see, and that is the black flower. To me, the black flower represents either sexy sophistication or the mourning of the loss of a loved one, depending on the context. But I was looking for neither sexiness or mourning in looking for my flower beyond flowers.

So to this woman in my life, I give her the green flower. I will have the song written soon.

A Blogellation of Bloglets

Here are a few bloglets that I have come up recently. It's been busy and I haven't had the chance to blog much.

Last week I went to SUUSI, that wonderful Unitarian Universalist camp and conference in the Blue Ridge mountains, in Hokieland, where anything seems possible. I wrote a song about giving my love a green flower, in a songwriting workshop given by singer johnsmith. I have not finished it yet, but like "Dancing under the Rainbow", this one is about a woman friend of mine, and like with Rainbow, I will let you guess who it is, except that the two women are different. The service on Friday with its dancing Jewish rabbi was one of the best I have attended. I feel that you need to move around to feel religious or spiritual things; there is more religion in dancing to "Brick House" than in all of the Catholic liturgies in the world.

My most favorite quote from SUUSI 2004: "The God that I am talking about is not the God that you don't believe in." This indicates that the speaker, when he says "God", is not referring to the Jehovah or God of the Christian Bible, but to a higher-order concept. To me this is a miscommunication on the part of both speaker and listener. The speaker makes the unwarranted assumption that he knows what the God of the listener is like. The listener makes the unwarranted assumption that the God that the speaker is talking about is the Christian God, which I sometimes now call the Blue God, after Ken Wilber's hierarchy. (The Allah of Islam is also the Blue God.)  What Unitarian Universalists need is a course in interpersonal communication.

Ouch! I know that mirages can be deceiving,  but sometimes they can be smashing, as some pelicans in the Arizona desert found.

Fawn among the Lies

Every once in a while I look at What Really Happened to find alternative stories about current events, things that never appear on ABC, NBC, the Washington Post and so forth. The site claims that it is anti-war and anti-lie. Over and over again, it features articles on the Web that claim that the Bush administration and others have lied to us about what has been going on; they claim to know what really happened. I realize that as I read these stories that there could be as many lies in these sites as there are in our current administration, and the entire site has a subversive, melancholy feel to it; it is definitely depressing.

So I find among the storm on the site a pretty flower, or rather, fawn. Featured on the site is a reference a site called Fawn and Dog . If you want to have your friends and associates go "awww…" and say how cute these creatures are, show them a printout of this site. My wife and the people at my church really liked the three pictures of the dog taking care of the fawn. This to me is a rare find. Not always do you find a Fawn among the Lies.

Some weather anomalies

I got alarmed a number of days ago when I looked at the Global Forecasting System (GFS) model runs. This weather prediction run goes the farthest of any of them, 16 days, but is not notoriously accurate past about day 7. I was surprised by what I saw. It clearly showed a storm now over Sierra Leone, Africa, moving off the African coast, moving and strengthening across the Atlantic ocean, riding up Puerto Rico to the Bahamas, then crashing into Myrtle Beach, heading to Charlotte, then hooking to the right towards Richmond, on 2004 July 21, Wednesday evening. It then hooks back to the left and hits Washington, DC. In other words, it calls for a hurricane to strike the US East Coast two weeks from now, and I figured it would be called Alex.

I thought, maybe this was a fluke of this run of the GFS. After all, this is two weeks away, and the next run of the model may show something different. So I looked at the 12Z run, one run before this one. That one shows Alex heading straight up the peninsula of Florida, then whipping around to hit Charlotte, finally exiting to sea somewhere near the Outer Banks. So there may be some reality to this one. I looked back one more, and there it nicked the Florida keys and hit Louisiana. The one before that had it turning north out to sea long before it approaches the mainland. Each run seems to get worse as far as the East Coast was concerned.

I am going to SUUSI that week, and so I got concerned that Alex (or Bonnie; a storm is developing southeast of Bermuda) would either strike SUUSI or strike my home.So I looked at subsequent runs. One of these showed it missing the coast and going out to sea, but the last two runs don't show any hurricane much at all; what there is peters out over the open waters of the Atlantic and don't show much motion at all. So much for this storm.

In fact, the weather is going to be great the next few days in central Virginia. Here a local TV station, WWBT-TV, Channel 12, predicts that there will be a chance of storms each day, and showed a 7-day pictorial forecast with a rain symbol on each day of the week. However, the official NOAA forecast, as seen for example on Weather Underground, does not show any rain at all. In fact, after two days, it gets monotonous in predicting partly cloudy with high of 90 and low of 70 each day. One or the other of these two contradictory forecasts is right and one is wrong. We will see the next few days which it is.

Goes to show that weather sometimes plays a fickle tune.

Saturn and Titan

1991 was the year for eclipses. 2001 was Meteor Shower Year. 2003 was the Year of Mars, with its close approach and the two Rovers. It looks like now that 2004 will be the Year of Saturn, for the Cassini spacecraft has just arrived.

As usual, it gives its host of interesting images. The rings show up as a set of parallel lines etched in space, closer than we have ever seen them. The biggest interest point for me now is Titan. The probe is not supposed to eject a probe onto the Titanian surface until this (Northern) winter, but already Titan has given us some interesting images. Finally the surface of Titan has been seen! I remember long ago, in 1981 or something, when Pioneer 11 approached Saturn. It was to take a temperature of the cloud tops of Titan, but a Soviet satellite interfered. I immediately printed out a headline: "The Temperature of Titan is Sputnik." Since then astronomers have been wondering about the surface of Titan. It gives a solid orange to optical telescopes. But with an infrared and other cameras and some photo work, pictures showing the features of Titan have just come out; check out the NASA web site, which, by the way, frequently throws 404s in your face. But once in a while you get the site and you can check out the Titan photos.

The surface, like anything else, is raising more questions than answering them. The features look like Mars' canyons, but what kind of oceans could produce these? Water? Too cold. How about carbon dioxide or nitrogen? But it has a nitrogen atmosphere. So we await the answers and look with awe at Saturn's image in a telescope.

Fireworks 2004

Yesterday I went out to see the fireworks, and saw one of the best fireworks displays of my life. Usually I go out running on July 4, running to all the fireworks displays that I can find. Last year I did not see much in my neighborhood. But yesterday, I saw three good displays, including one that would have rivaled the local community's official display, and further, the displays were enhanced by lightning flashing in the distance.

I walked this year rather than ran, because Anne was with me. We went down one street to a dead end bulb, and saw some sparklers and some shooting fireworks, which fizzled when they exploded. But then we went to another display that shot sets of fireworks three or four times. These fireworks produced colorful and bright bursts in the sky, causing the ground to seem like it was lit by a strobe light. This effect was enhanced from lightning strobing up the sky from about 30-40 miles away. The combination of flashing and bright colored lights was one of the most impressive I have seen, and it beats battling huge traffic jams to go to a public display. There were even a few fireflies around. We also went to a third display, which featured two fireworks trees and several high-flying fireworks with bursts.

Later on that evening, the storm producing the lightning struck and gave us some rain and thunder. It was fortunate that the clouds and rain cleared enough for all the fireworks displays to go on OK. An excellent display, which will be tough for 2005 to beat.