Condolences.
I want to say thank you to everyone who looked at, shared or submitted to this blog in the past few weeks. Yesterday, when I was standing in line to vote at a middle school in Brooklyn, I overheard some people behind me talking about binders full of women and I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t…
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We’ve got approximately half as much sea ice in the Arctic in the fall now as we did say, 30 years or so ago — there’s been this dramatic decrease. There is emerging research — my colleagues and I published a paper last February on this — suggesting that as that sea ice melts it’s changing the jet stream, a current that steers weather in the mid-latitudes, places like New York. As sea ice melts, our research suggests that the jet stream is going to tend to get weaker. As the jet stream gets weaker, it’s easier for storms to stagnate or in some cases, maybe even move to the west, which is what this storm did.
Most hurricanes, as they get as far north as a place like New York, especially late in the season — September, October — [the] standard pattern is for that strong jet stream to push those storms to the east. What we saw with this storm was that it moved to the west. It’s a very unusual track and I would say it’s a big research question whether we might see in general more stormy weather and storms taking a track like that as sea ice melts.
"— Dr. Radley Horton on melting sea ice and how it can steer hurricanes like Sandy in unusual directions (via nprfreshair)
For your Halloween enjoyment: 13 horror posters scarier than their movies. You can enjoy the best part of the film while still pretending to do work.
File:First Web Server.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Description This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the en:World Wide Web. It is shown here as displayed in 2005 at Microcosm, the public science museum at CERN (where Berners-Lee was working in 1991 when he invented the Web).
The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of “Information Management: A Proposal,” which was Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the World Wide Web.
The partly peeled off label on the cube itself has the following text: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: “At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server.”
The book is probably “Enquire Within upon Everything”, which TBL describes on page one of his book Weaving the Web as “a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents’ house outside London”.
That “DO NOT POWER IT DOWN” label needs to be on a t-shirt.
[PHOTOS] Thousands in Hollywood to Celebrate Largest Day of the Dead Event in the U.S.
Adela Marquez is not only a family counselor at the Hollywood Forever Funeral Home — the resting place of many of Hollywood’s greatest stars, she is also part of the family which founded the first Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebrations in a U.S. cemetery. She says, from what she knows, it is the largest celebration in the U.S. – with 30,000 attendees expected to attend from as far as Japan.
Wish I could be there! :)
"Next week, the candidates devote an entire debate to foreign policy. After they are done arguing about who is a better friend of Israel or a more devoted enemy of the Taliban and Iran, what will they possibly talk about? Romney and Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan have both been repeating lately that Obama’s foreign policy is “unravelling before our eyes.” That is such a strange, vacant stretch of an argument that it will be entertaining to watch Romney try to extend it across ninety minutes. Surely by now, when he looks abroad, he no longer trusts his instincts."
— - Steve Coll on the Libya moment during the second Presidential debate, and Romney’s foreign policy limitations: http://nyr.kr/TxlMVm (via newyorker)
(via newyorker)
"Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. The unemployment rate is below eight percent. The day after the Benghazi attack the President called it an ‘act of terror.’ Do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel better, but do not confuse your World Net Daily-caliber, therapeutic, conservative, alternative-reality, fantasy babble for what actually happened. Because stuff really does actually happen. And eventually you really do have to deal with it."
— Rachel Maddow (via alittlecoconuttart)
