Texans are good people. I imagine there will be something of a ring of refugees and relocations around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, many of those places won’t be rebuilt for generations, if ever. I have faith in Southerners, they’ll do everything they can to help out. I wish I could do more, or anything. I’m waiting to donate money to relief efforts until it the destruction is better accessed and we can better see where the money is needed and who’s best able to distribute aid. Why does it seem like I’m giving to the Red Cross twice a year these days? Times like this I really wish I was able to go there and help, or was trained or a member of the National Guard or something. I hate these feelings of uselessness. I can give money, what I really want to give are sweat and labor.

All the mentions of this storm being the result of global warming are ill-informed and crassly political. Hurricanes have a 20-30 year intensity cycle. If anything, the last 150 years of records show hurricane numbers trending downwards. The New York Times noted that even advocates of global warming aren’t claiming this was related.

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught “is very much natural,” said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

The disruption of Lousiana oil production seems like good reason to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A far better reason than the discomfort of expensive gasoline. A disaster like this, which is one of the reasons for having the SPR, also reflects on the level of irresponsiblity in recent calls to tap it.

What I’m afraid to say out loud is that this seems normal from a natural perspective. It’s the bayou refreshing itself. This makes me wonder about long-term natural history of swamplands. It also makes me concerned that swamps want to be swamps, noting that Washington D.C. and my neighborhood (the East Village) were both swamps.

Also thinking about Mississippi’s massive Indian Mounds. If the area is historically prone to flooding, anyone who made a habit of creating higher ground had the right idea.

I’ve never seen anything like this advisory:

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA 413 PM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA…

…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WATCH IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR HURRICANE FORCE…OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE…ARE POSSIBLE WITHIN THE NEXT 24 TO 36 HOURS.

Wikipedia’s Hurricane Katrina page is proving to be an exceptional resource for additional information.

(Via Jeff at Shape of Days)

Updated Feb 16, 2007, after a reddit link: Fixed formatting and pointed the first link to NOAA archive thanks to CB’s comment for the url, though a quick quick Google Search finds this text all over the place.

• TheMathPage:  Skill in Arithmetic  Topics in Trigonometry Someday I need to go across town, find Prof. Lawrence Spector and thank him in person. I learned more from this site than 6 years of high school and college math classes.
  tags: algebra math trigonometry tutorial +

• Photo of your fridge I’ve got this idea in a notebook from a few years back. I wanted to couple it with each household’s demographic profile and tax-return status
  tags: art photography refrigerator +

• Blogger Twins: Help Us Get Cast on The Amazing Race Cameron and Damien Barrett are trying to get cast on The Amazing Race
  tags: Amazing_Race twins +

Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts for Date Manipulation have been updated. I’ve been working on these for a while towards the goals of making Automator actions and a standalone Application, but some unknown incompatibility introduced by iPhoto 5.0.4 pushed this to the front burner.

Some areas of improvement:

• Better UI Date Entry – Dates entered directly in info pane, no more popping the Batch Change window
• Language Independence – All language specific UI calls removed, should work with any language or date format
• Date format sniffing – The date format is now discovered gracefully and checked for accuracy.
• Faster – Extensive refactoring and efficiency tuning, now I can really blame iPhoto for the slowdowns.
• Works with iPhoto 5.0.4 – I’ve been testing it all evening with absolutely no problems (I probably shouldn’t say that)

I still don’t know why the previous scripts stopped working with 5.0.4, but I was thankfully able to get these all working with the newest iPhoto in a few hours this morning. Good application design really does make a difference. I know I’m still not working in true OOP, but breaking the code down into simple, self-contained chunks really makes maintenance simpler. The return curve (that agonizing time spent staring one’s own code and having no idea how it works) is much shorter when each component is named descriptively, has a concise, easy to grasp function and doesn’t draw from anything but it’s explicity input parameters.

Idea for next time: If these scripts obliterated the existing clipboard, would that be a dealbreaker? Or just an annoyance? What if they ran a lot faster?

I’m looking for a way to save and restore pre-existing clipboard data.

I have a few Studio projects that use UI scripting. Sending text to a non-scriptable control by pasting from the clipboard is significantly faster than using the Keystroke command. What I’d like to do is store the complete contents of pasteboard “general”, execute my UI stuff, then repopulate the pasteboard with the archived values.

Because my goal is to leave the clipboard data as I found it, this needs to work with any kind of clipboard data. The problems I’m having relate to complex data being dumbed down. For example, an image copied from Safari becomes a plain text URL after storing and retrieving. Conceptually, moving a big lump of data should be possible, regardless of supported formats.

One other related question: Is the list returned by types of pasteboard “general” prioritized? If I had to pick one of the returned types, how would I know which was best?

MacScripter: Store and Retrieve Pasteboard

Anyone have an idea about this one?