GZ Expat, Part II

No Respect at all

Rodney has some company in the no respect category...

Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet on Thursday when astronomers from around the world redefined it as a "dwarf planet", leaving just eight major planets in the solar system.

With one vote, toys and models of the solar system became instantly obsolete, forcing teachers and publishers to scramble to update textbooks and lessons used in classrooms for decades.

"Pluto is dead," Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology bluntly told reporters on a teleconference.

Segway...the next generation

This is like a unicycle crotch-rocket ...very cool.

Boiling Cloud

What happens when you toss a pot of boiling water in the -40C air of Saskatchewan??  Cool, eh?

HT:  Boing Boing

Here she comes...

Hurricane Rita has been given that immortal status...a big 'un!

Category 5 Hurricane Rita

10:51 p.m. ET 9/21/2005
Tim Ballisty, Meteorologist, The Weather Channel
Hurricane Rita's rapid intensification cycle that began Tuesday afternoon continues. Top winds are up to 175 mph, now a category 5 hurricane. Rita's pressure has dramatically dropped to 897 millibars! Even as a large and extremely intense category 5 hurricane, further strengthening is possible as the atmosphere remains favorable for development over the next 24 hours.

OK...so you want to know how bad this one is??  Here is what we were saying about Katrina when she turned to a Category 5 off the coast of Louisiana...

The real news was the center's chilling declaration that, at 902 millibars of internal barometric pressure -- the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico -- Katrina was "comparable in intensity to Hurricane Camille of 1969 . . . only larger."

So...before Katrina hit, it was measuring the 'lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the Gulf".  Well...Rita weighs in at 897.  People of SE Texas...do you get it??  No...try this...

Go to your household barometer...you know, the one that is hanging in the family room.  You rarely  look at it...because it rarely moves off the 'Fair' indicator.  Take a real close look at it.  Go down the numbers and find 900.  Huh...you can't???  No, you can't...because those household gauges don't go that low (the one to the right only goes down to 950).  THAT is how bad this storm is.  It is beyond the 'Stormy' indicator on your wall...this one is downright nasty.

For those of you in Oregon...for comparison sake...the windstorm of December 1995, which was in essence a tropical cyclone, has a barometric pressure reading of 954 mb.  That storm, although not a hurricane, was considered to have the force of a category 3 hurricane at that point. 

Michelle Malkin has a good round-up of this storm.  Michelle also links to Jason who is blogging from Houston during the evacuation.  He's got pictures of routes and traffic.  As usual The Weather Channel is a great resource for weather info, as is the Weather Underground.  And for those intense photo (like the one of Rita above), go to NOAA's Operational Significant Event Imagery website.  Their photo's are incredible.

Boom!

Expat in-laws will at least have a fast way out of town with my Cougar in storage...

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - A large, slow-growing volcanic bulge in Eastern Oregon is attracting the attention of seismologists who say that the rising ground could be the beginnings of a volcano or simply magma shifting underground.

As Austin Bay notes...will Bush provide magma relief?

Put your money where your warming is...

Global warming...is it man-made or not?  That is the great debate.  Two scientists in Russia believe they know the cause, and they have put their money where their mouth is...

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.

The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.

The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun's activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases. They say the Earth warms and cools in response to changes in the number and size of sunspots. Most mainstream scientists dismiss the idea, but as the sun is expected to enter a less active phase over the next few decades the Russian duo are confident they will see a drop in global temperatures.

How to tie your shoes

From the files of...Too much time on my hands (apologies to Styx):

How many possible ways are there to lace an average shoe? This simple question, when answered with mathematics, results in some surprisingly big numbers - on an average shoe with six pairs of eyelets, there are 1,961,990,553,600 ways to feed a shoelace though those 12 eyelets.

Courtesy...KJ Lopez of The Corner

And so...that concludes my 200th post.