Lucky I live in the Pacific Northwest

from NOAA

NOAA: May Global Temperature is Warmest on Record

[Via NOAA News Releases]

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for May, March-May (Northern Hemisphere spring-Southern Hemisphere autumn), and the period January-May according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature for May and March-May was the warmest on record while the global ocean surface temperatures for both May and March-May were second warmest on record, behind 1998.

[More]

Some of the warmest global temperatures. And the Arctic ice is melting faster than ever.

But for us up in the Northwest, it has been a very cool year so far. It has failed to reach 75°F in Seattle yet this year, the latest ever – the previous late date was June 9. Houston, for example, first hit 75°F on March 9, first broke 90°F on May 3, and only 4 of the last 30 days has the high failed to break 90°F.

The Dew Point provides some idea of the comfort level, with any Dew Points 60°F or above becoming uncomfortable. Houston first hit this on January 19, although to be fair, it has not consistently broken this barrier until the middle of March. Every day since May 4 has seen the Dew Point exceed 60°F in Houston, with every day since May 7 breaking the 70°F Dew Point barrier.

In Seattle, the Dew Point did not get above 50°F until April 16. The highest was on June 2 with a Dew Point of 57°F. Only 4 days out of the last 30 have had a Dew Point over 55°F.

And it has been much wetter here this year. We are almost 4 inches ahead of our normal rainfall amounts (22 vs. 18.3). And almost half of that difference is from the month of June.

I figure I will be wearing a sweater on the Fourth of July. But some nice Sun would be great.

[Listening to: Nice Guys Finish Last from the album "Nimrod" by Green Day]

[Listening to: Drink Down the Moon from the album "Now We Are Six" by Steeleye Span]

Simply because you may not know about something does not mean it is non-existent

by sskennel

Palin claims that Netherlands and Norway can’t get their calls returned on the oil spill
[Via Climate Progress]

To respond to President Obama’s first Oval Office address, Fox News last night turned to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whom Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) once said “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” As TP reports, when asked about how to stop the leaking oil well, Palin said that the United States needs to accept more assistance from foreign governments:

O’REILLY: Do you know how to stop it?

PALIN: Well, then what the federal government should have done was accept the assistance of foreign countries, of entrepreneurial Americans who have had solutions –

O’REILLY: Who?

PALIN: — that they wanted presented.

O’REILLY: Who?

PALIN: They can’t even get a phone call returned, Bill. The Dutch. They are known, and the Norwegians. They are known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills. They offered to help and, yet, no, they too, with a proverbial can’t even get a phone call back. That is what the Norwegians are telling us, and the Dutch are telling us, and then the entrepreneurial Americans.

[More]

The Gulf debacle is a very complex situation with a multitude of things happening at many different levels. It requires a systems-thinking approach to even get an idea of just how difficult the problem is to solve and what is actually being done.

Unfortunately, too many pundits, politicians and argument talk shows want to make this a simple, linear narrative. This leads them into a fallacy – if I have not heard of something, it must not exist. Thus Palin’s statements above, which have no basis in fact.

Because, as reported in the Washington Post:

In late May, the administration accepted Mexico’s offer of two skimmers and 13,779 feet of boom; a Dutch offer of three sets of Koseq sweeping arms, which attach to the sides of ships and gather oil; and eight skimming systems offered by Norway.

Now, we can perhaps argue whether the aid should have been asked for earlier. Hindsight is always 20-20. But people can not argue in the third week of June that the Administration has not called back the Norwegians and Dutch, when they most certainly had been called back in May.

Palin was flat out wrong.

This is pretty much what fills these sorts of shows – politicians appearing as pundits on an argument talk show. Lack of knowledge is not an impediment to a good narrative in these arenas. Being flat out wrong is not a negative. Informing the public about facts is not a primary purpose of these shows.

Palin presented herself as a pundit on a subject for which she was factually incorrect. And, as far as the show or most of its viewers are concerned, being wrong is not a problem at all. Pretty par for the course for these types of shows.

I might wish for a show where people actually discussed complex things using facts but there does not appear to be any such show on (Bill Maher’s show on the left often has almost as many problems with facts). Things that SHOULD be true are much more likely to be discussed, even if there is not factual underpinning to them at all.

The article had another little fact that also adds to depth to the idea that “the Federal government is not doing enough.” This deals with the inability of Louisiana to build sand berms to protect the marshes.

A plan by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) to create sand berms to keep oil from reaching the coastline originally came from the marine contractor Van Oord and the research institute Deltares, both in the Netherlands. BP pledged $360 million for the plan, but U.S. dredging companies — which have less than one-fifth of the capacity of Dutch dredging firms — have objected to foreign companies’ participation.

Garret Graves, who chairs Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, wrote in an e-mail that state officials “have made it clear to our contractors from the beginning that we want to use American dredges to complete this sand berm as quickly as possible . . . Ultimately, any effort to expedite these berms will be fully considered, but we remain committed to our American companies.”

The Plan was developed by the Dutch, who are already in New Orleans doing work. But the state wants to get American companies involved, even though they do not have the capacity of the Dutch. The Feds may have some involvement here but it is not solely their views that are holding things up.

Now, I happen to think getting entrepreneurial Americans involved is important and may be a part of the proper consideration by the state. However, these Americans, the ones that Palin suggests have not been involved – have not gotten the proverbial phone call back – are actually helping slow things down.

Being factually accurate is not an important trait of these types of shows, nor of the people on them.

But having the facts certainly adds a little more complexity and nuance to the problems we face. And having real facts makes it much more likely that we can arrive at a solution that will work.

[Listening to: Echoes In the Dark (Edit) from the album "The Magician's Birthday (Expanded Deluxe Edition)" by Uriah Heep]

Who is buying?

by closari

What’s driving iPhone 4 sales?
[Via Brainstorm Tech]

It’s a potent mix of new customers and old, says a Morgan Stanley analyst

One of the unanswered questions about Apple’s (AAPL) latest hit product is how many of the 600,000 iPhone 4s that were pre-sold on Tuesday were ordered by iPhone owners upgrading from their older models and how many by new customers who’d never owned an iPhone before.

Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research, is a skeptic. “I doubt that a meaningful percentage of these buyers are new,” he told the New York Times.

Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty is more sanguine. In a note to clients issued Wednesday evening she cites a proprietary Morgan Stanley survey that suggests the upgrade rate will be more than 50%, but not that much more. Even 50% is considerably higher than the 18% upgrade rate found in a November 2008 survey and 25% since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007.

A loyal and growing installed base is a good thing for Apple, she argues. She estimates that if 30% of current iPhone owners upgrade this year, Apple will sell 42 million units in 2010. If 50% upgrade, it will sell 48 million. In her model, the iPhone installed base rises from about 30 million at the end of 2009 to 100 million by the end of 2011.

[More]

It seems that people are always surprised when Apple presents another item that sells at fantabulous rates. The fact that Apple seems to be the only one totally focussed on the user experience, rather than simply adding new specs, seems to escape most of them.

An example is discussed by David Pogue in the NYT, the Sprint HTC Evo. The specs have all the tech guys in fits of ecstasy.

For example, the Evo has an enormous 4.3-inch touch screen that dwarfs those of most phones. You can turn the Evo into a pocket Wi-Fi hot spot, so up to eight people can get online with their laptops. The 8-megapixel camera has dual LED flashes and records hi-def video.

The Evo is also one of the first app phones that can run Flash videos and animations on the Web, which the iPhone, notoriously, can’t. There’s even a second camera on the front, so you can actually make video calls to other Evo owners. Now you, too, can play Dick Tracy, or at least show your Evo-owning grandparents the new baby.

Above all, the Evo is the first 4G phone in America. That is, it can exploit the fourth-generation cellular towers that Sprint has been building, to bring you much, much faster Web pages and e-mail, and skip-free Internet video.

Sounds great. But, as David says, the fine print makes a huge difference. These wonderful specs produce a phone with very short battery life. The feel may be closer to a Newton than to an iPhone if you have small hands. The WiFi is great but it drains a battery in an hour. And it costs $30 a month to use.

Flash is hit and miss. It works on some sites and not on others. And what about video talks:

All right, what about video calling? Surely this is the killer app. Imagine: your friends and family can not just hear you, as with normal phones, but see you as well (assuming they also bought Sprint Evos, of course).

Well, let’s hope they’re NASA engineers, because this feature is head-bangingly unstable. After two days of fiddling, downloading and uninstalling apps, manually force-quitting programs and waiting for servers to be upgraded, I finally got video calling to work — sort of. Sometimes there was only audio and a black screen, sometimes only a freeze-frame; at best, the video was blocky and the audio delay absurd.

Apple worked to come up with a video calling system that seems to be mostly invisible to the average user, not something requiring NASA engineers.

And its battery is simply inadequate to actually use all the wonderful things it has available, like actually using it as a cell phone.

If you charge this phone all night long, then leave the house at 8 a.m., you’ll find its battery charge at 50 percent by early afternoon, even if you don’t make a single call or send a single e-mail message. By quitting time, or dinner time if you’re lucky, it’s completely dead. On this phone, the battery gauge practically shrivels as you’re looking at it.

Spint’s position is for the user to turn off all the things that make the phone such a technical wonder – 4G. WiFi hot spot, etc. What sort of tech wonder is it if you have to disable them in order to use it? Or render the phone an im-mobile device by tethering it to a power source?

Apple makes sure that its device will actually provide the user with a better experience, not one that just looks great on paper or that only works for a small minority of the population.

Perhaps that is why people trust it to make their lives easier, not simply to make the specs look amazing.

[Listening to: Sunrise from the album "The Magician's Birthday (Expanded Deluxe Edition)" by Uriah Heep]

Just another thing to pay for

I guess it was bound to happen. As I mentioned with oil wells and disasters, if you do it enough times and wait long enough, even low probability events can happen.

I work a lot in coffee shops that have free WiFi. I always buy some coffee to pay them back for the service. But I always get a cup with a lid, since I do have my computer there.

And I always have the coffee cup at least a hands width from the laptop. Spills can be a real problem.

But eve those good plans can go awry. Such happened yesterday.

The cup hooked my hand, fell sideways with just enough motion to pump out maybe half a teaspoon of coffee on my laptop keyboard – right on the A, S, D and W keys. I immediately shut down the computer, unplugged it, mopped off a little of the coffee, removed the battery and mopped off the rest.

I was hoping I cut any electric circuit before anything got through the keyboard. Maybe nothing would get fried and I would end up with just a few sticky keys.

I’ve been using this laptop – a 17 inch Macbook – for something like 4 years. I really could not believe that

It has been a real workhorse for me, even as it has gotten a little beaten up. Four years of lugging it around, upgrading the memory and hard drive. It did everything a desktop did.

When I turned it back on, after using napkins between all the keys, it was obvious that something was wrong. The ‘S’ key did not work. Unless the ‘X’ was and then a long stream of ‘S’ would rip out. The Command Key looked like it was off also, making it really hard to close windows from the keyboard. Crap.

I got home and plugged in a USB keyboard. Everything worked fine. So the logic board seemed okay. But the keyboard was no longer pristine.

Four years of a wonderful relationship.

Now it had been debauched by a few drops of coffee.

I took it into my favorite Mac shop – The Mac Store. Handed it over for them to check out. Looks like it is just the keyboard. A couple of hundred bucks to fix. But I may not get it back until early next week.

So, now I am realizing that not having a full featured back up is a problem. My iPad can do some work but it is not ready for really heavy lifting, especially for creating presentations, etc. I am going to have to figure something out.

I guess if I only have such a problem once every 4 years, that is not so bad.