Browsing around the Google Earth Community BBS can turn up a lot of interesting things to mess around in Google Earth with.
Thanks to pseabury, you can find a collection of Atlantic hurricanes as a series of .kmz files organized by decade, which you can then load into Google Earth. It’s really kind of neat to have 250 years of storm tracks showing up on Google Earth. What’s even neater is turning them all on. It really drives home the fact that pretty much wherever you live on the Gulf/Atlantic coast, some day a storms going to hit that area.
I thought I’d check out how many storms went past the Charleston area in the past 250 years. With a little bit of clicking, I counted 17 storms that passed through or near the Charleston area (within about 30 miles or so, give or take). Most were tropical storms, with only 1 or two hurricanes. Not as bad as I thought it would be for this area.
Appeasing the referring physician
My job is to make sure what you want me to do is the same as what I’m going to do. – cardiology resident to referring physician.
It’s a Floyd deja vu
It’s all over the news. People evacuating Houston only to get stuck and/or stranded on the highways. It’s deja vu for Charleston residents, who experienced the same thing during the evacuation for Hurricane Floyd. I was lucky enough not to get caught in it, since we left early. I was heading out to Atlanta anyway to take the ABR board exams, so we just left a little earlier than planned. A friend of mine who was supposed to take the same exam left a little later and got stuck in the gridlock. 8 hours to drive what normally takes 2 hours.
After Floyd turned into a non-event for Charleston, there was heck to pay.
The Houston problem is a probably as bad or worse than what happened here. I imagine there will be much accounting and many people being taken to task once everything is over. Well, at least people seem to be taking the potential threat seriously and evacuating. Hopefully my friend Joe is making out ok. Last I heard via another friend was it took him 8 hours to go 60 km. It almost would have been faster to walk that distance.
With Rita back down to a Cat 3 storm, I expect that it will be less catastrophic than most people were anticipating back when it was a monster Cat 5 with 175 mph winds. Fortunately the NHC forecast doesn’t have Rita getting much stronger as it heads towards the coast.
From the 5 AM discussion:
TRACK GUIDANCE IS NOW CLUSTERED ABOUT A LANDFALL ON THE UPPER TEXAS COAST IN ROUGHLY 30 HR…WITH THE MODEL TRACK BEING SPREAD BETWEEN SAN LUIS PASS AND SABINE PASS. THE FORECAST TRACK UP TO LANDFALL IS ESSENTIALLY AN UPDATE OF THE PREVIOUS PACKAGE. AFTER LANDFALL…THE GUIDANCE BECOME VERY DIVERGENT AS HIGH PRESSURE BUILD TO THE WEST AND POSSIBLY NORTH OF RITA. GIVEN THE SPREAD…THE FORECAST TRACK WILL CALL FOR LITTLE MOTION AFTER 72 HR JUST AS THE PREVIOUS FORECAST DID. THIS STALLING WILL POSE A SERIOUS RISK OF VERY HEAVY RAINFALL WELL INLAND.
My Googleprint
Inspired by Blogus Maximus‘ footprints in the internet post, I decided to see what kind of ‘Googleprint’ I had. I’ve been around the net for a good long time, so I was expecting it to be reasonably substantial.
Googling my name returned 237 000 results, with me having a significant presence in the first 5 pages. Sporadic mention in the next 3 or 4 pages, but still there. I didn’t go much farther than that.
Googling my name in quotes returns 644 results with the majority of it actually referring to me. Many of the results are things like mailing list/newsgroup postings or trails I’ve left behind at Amazon.com
Googling my Net alias yields 517 results, the vast majority of them belonging to me (board/blog/newsgroup postings making up the bulk).
Not as much as I expected, but I guess it’s about right considering Google’s only been indexing for the past 7 years.
Oh, and as a side note, I am not this guy:
Police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, said in April that they had stopped a three-year petty-crime spree in a neighborhood of upscale homes when they arrested multimillionaire Eugene Mah, 64, and his son, Avery, 32. According to police, the two are responsible for stealing hundreds of minor and even tacky items, such as garbage cans, marginal lawn decorations and even government recycling boxes, and keeping them at their own posh home. Mah’s Vancouver real estate holdings are reported at about $13 million (U.S.), but among the items he allegedly stole were one family’s doormat and, subsequently, each of the 14 doormats the family purchased as replacements.
Hurricane #9
From tropical storm this morning all the way to a Cat 2 hurricane after lunch. NHC’s 2 PM discussion puts Rita at a Cat 2 hurricane. Judging from the NWS’ Key West radar, it looks like Cuba is getting the brunt of the rain from Hurricane Rita though.
Looks like Rita has it’s eye set on the southern Texas Gulf shore.
