Author: geoff

Four months and counting

You should check our my colleague Dan Templeton’s account of his recent visit to Biloxi, MS. Recent journalistic coverage of the aftermath of Katrina has become predictable and formulaic; I liked the direct simplicity of Dan’s observations.

The part that is truly mind blowing is the scope of the damage. It’s not just a town or a city or a stretch of the coast that is damaged. It’s the entire Mississippi gulf coast. Miles upon miles upon miles of homes and businesses are gone. Four months after the storm most of the coast still looks like the destruction happened last week.

A damp squib

Well, it looks as if “the first big one” is going to turn out to be a non-event. It seems that the pressure gradient was so great that it sucked in more (relatively) warm air from the ocean than was expected, keeping the temperatures quite a bit higher than needed for snow. (Right now it’s 39F in Boston.) I drove in to the office without any problems….

Arrogance, not the price of oil

For an aviation enthusiast like me, the new blog at Enplaned is essential reading. For a good example of the anonymous author’s work, check out today’s obituary for Independence Air, which has announced that it’s ceasing operations this Thursday. Twisting the knife:

In the event, Independence Air described a bone-headed catastrophic year-and-a-half arc through the airline business. This is, without question, one of the epic flameouts in the airline business. Nothing excuses taking this extraordinary risk, though Independence Air management has tried to pin the tail on fuel prices. At the end of the first quarter of 2004, ACA had over $350mm in cash. All gone now. The Independence Air press release manfully attempts to find some good in what’s happened, but to balance the enormity of the disaster, Independence Air would have had to have incidentally found a cure for cancer.

Elsewhere in the same blog there’s an intriguing look at the U.S.Airways/America West merger, and the enduring legacy of the three airlines (PSA, Allegheny, and Piedmont) that were brought together to create U.S.Air back in 1987. As someone who’s involved in merger and acquisition work at Sun, I suspect that there may be some lessons here.

Arguments and relativism

Step 1. Go to Alec’s blog and read this fine piece on the frustrating tendency of people to turn arguments about substantive issues into debates about how we feel about these issues.
Step 2. Go to Edge.org and read through the pieces that were submitted in response to this year’s Edge question: What is your dangerous idea? Note how a number of the pieces address the question of relativism. On a radical relativist view, how can we have a substantive discussion about anything, since my “truth” is as good as your “truth”. (Ugh!) Note also how many of the contributors chose to talk about the concept of a “dangerous idea”, often expressing reservations that seem to be rooted in the same fear that real argument is becoming impossible.
Step 3. Pour yourself a stiff single malt Scotch and contemplate the futility of the world. Or go ride your bike down the M3. Or grab an axe and split a few cords of firewood. Or write a Zen koan. (Don’t try to combine these activities.)

The first big one of the new year

It looks as if I’m going to be working from home tomorrow: the first serious snowstorm of the year is headed our way. As usual, the geek in me prefers to get this forecast in metereologist-speak, straight from the NWS Taunton Forecast Discussion (my emphasis):

THIS WILL NOT BE A VERY DEEP LOW WITH SFC PRESSURE JUST BELOW 1000 MB BUT COUPLED WITH HIGH PRES TO THE N WILL RESULT IN VERY STRONG ENE GRADIENT WITH IMPRESSIVE ATLANTIC INFLOW. IT WILL ALSO BE A SLOW MOVER AS IT GETS CAPTURED BY UPPER LOW RESULTING IN LONG DURATION OF PRECIP AND HIGH WINDS ALONG THE COAST TUE/TUE NIGHT.
NAM/GFS AND EVEN REGIONAL GEM ARE SIMILAR WITH QPF TUE/TUE NIGHT OF 1-1.5" SE NEW ENG...0.5"-1" VCNTY I-90...BUT SHARP CUTOFF N OF PIKE DECREASING TO LESS THAN 0.1" ACRS S NH. ...

Note that QPF denotes the precipitation measured as liquid water. The challenge with a storm like this is to translate QPF into snowfall:

SHARP QPF GRADIENT AND PTYPE ISSUES WILL MAKE FOR VERY DIFFICULT SNOW FCST FOR TUE. PARTIAL THICKNESS PROFILES SUGGEST PRECIP CHANGING TO MOSTLY SNOW ON TUE IN THE INTERIOR NW OF I-95 INCLUDING BOS AREA BUT THIS IS NOT A SLAM DUNK NEAR I-95 AS THERE IS A HINT OF WARM AIR ALOFT WHICH COULD AFFECT SNOW ACCUM IN THIS REGION. ... CROSS SECTIONS SHOW BEST SNOW GROWTH NEAR MASS PIKE FROM BAF-ORH-BOS ALONG WITH STRONG BANDING SIGNAL IN DEFORMATION AXIS. ...
GFS SNOW AMT TOOL INDICATING OVER 12" IJD-ORH-BOS AND EVEN 10" PVD BUT DUE TO UNCERTAIN THERMAL PROFILE AND QPF GRADIENT DECIDED TO TONE THIS DOWN AND GO WITH 4-10" IN THE WATCH AREA WITH HIGHEST AMOUNTS NEAR OR JUST S OF MASS PIKE. ...
WINDS WILL BE A CONCERN WITH THIS STORM AS 50-60 KT NE LLJ REACHES S COAST TUE MORNING PERSISTING INTO TUE NIGHT.

So although the official forecast says “New snow accumulation of 6 to 10 inches possible”, we see that this is the result of interpreting the output from a tool that’s predicting over 12 inches! We’ll see…. And the forecast of high winds suggests that power outages are likely; time to check batteries in flashlights. (I also tend to bump up the thermostat program before a storm like this, so as to keep the house a few degrees warmer than usual.)
UPDATE 5:48pm: Well, the forecast seems to be changing rapidly. Latest prediction is for just 2 to 4 inches of snow, with more ice and sleet. The heaviest snowfall is now predicted to hit Smithfield in northern Rhode Island – 8-12 inches. I wonder how it will actually come out…..

On our inability to use Java to separate the sheep from the goats

Kate just drew my attention to a wonderful rant over at Joel on Software

When I started interviewing programmers in 1991, I would generally let them use any language they wanted to solve the coding problems I gave them. 99% of the time, they chose C.

And the problem with this is…?

[W]hat I’d like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that’s not today’s topic.

Essential reading, complete with Monty Python references and a picture of a card punch.

Power

A couple of days ago we woke up to find that one room was without power. No lights, no power to the wall sockets. While we couldn’t think why that room should have been singled out, the fix was obvious – a circuit breaker must have tripped, so I went downstairs to reset it.
Except it hadn’t. All of the circuit breakers were fine. None had tripped. None was even a little bit wobbly. I became puzzled, and more than a little bit nervous – if the breakers were fine, this suggested a wiring issue. And wiring can mean arcing or heat…. It was clearly time to call an electrician. Specifically, it was time to log in to Angie’s List.
A couple of hours later a young electrician turned up. Initially, he was as baffled as I had been. Was there a secondary panel somewhere in the house? (None that I knew of.) We searched from basement to attic, without success. Which breaker covered that room? Ah, well, bit of a problem there: the 40-circuit panel was unlabelled, unmapped.
Since we bought the house six years ago, we’d only made two changes that involved electrical work: a yard sprinkler system, and bathroom extractor fans. The electrician identified the breaker that controlled the fans, and pulled it. This looked like it might be the culprit: there were several circuits connected to this one breaker. He added a temporary splice, reconnected the breaker, and everything came back to life. Excellent trouble-shooting!
But of course this was just a short-term solution. The next day the senior electrician came by, and we assessed the situation. The 40-breaker panel dated back to the 1970s; it now had at least 42 circuits coming in to it, and it wasn’t up to (current) code. So next month we’re going to replace it with two 30-breaker panels, which will give us some headroom. And this time we’re going to label everything.