Today's TSAF was especially ribiting! I doubt that one was original, I kinda just pulled it out of the hopper.
Today's weather forecast: cold. Tomorrow's forecast: cold. The day after that's forecast: cold. There's a trend there, I think.
I have two nieces in SoCal. Both are safe, but both were evacuated, due to the fires.
Some work news. I had a paper I didn't submit to our big conference on Tuesday (I submitted 2, not 3). Our University "forgot" to renew our Stata License 🤦♂️ so I couldn't finish running the results (I had them done preliminarily, but not the final, finished product). 😡 I'm treasurer for one of the 23 divisions in the Conference, so at our December meeting we chose not to accept submissions for "poster sessions". I could have submitted what I had done as a poster, but since we chose not to do so, I did not. 3 people did, and we were given a dozen poster slots. My colleagues got a laugh out of that!
I finished one paper using excel for run analysis, but that was a simple multivariate regression analysis. The other paper was a probabalistic, hazard rate model. Excel has no tools for that, I looked. It can be done by hand, but takes longer than I had available.
I may have to buy an individual license if UD doesn't renew the Stata license.
It’s good to know that we’re all in this together.
An Irishman corrected me a couple decades ago for using “obligate”. He had a strong grammar-scoldian point. The verb “oblige” gave us the noun “obligation” from which we back-formed the verb “obligate”. Nuts! And superfluous!
It’s time to cleanse the Augean stables of this here English language!
This is a very cool set of maps on US disaster areas/potentials - Hurricane, Tornado, Flooding, Wildfire. For some reason, the links to share a freebie are broken. It is from 2019 though, a different epoch.
Freebie from the NY Times for you; 5 years old, pre current LA fire, Helene. This inward migration from the coasts will be THE eventual number 1 political issue in America. Mixing will be good !
"This inward migration from the coasts will be THE eventual number 1 political issue in America."
I find the idea of inward migration from the coasts to be, yeah, whatever. In my opinion, massive development for rich people in disaster areas was always going to be unsustainable.
If anyone can sustain it, it would be the very rich. Yet, as reality works out, they got FEMA federal flood insurance instituted so that taxpayers stand in for their potential losses…
This goes back to the George HW Bush administration and the hyper-active response after Hurricane Andrew, iirc. Prior to that, flood insurance was an unsubsidized matter of insurance companies and homeowners taking risks.
As to the shrinking frogs: if you wanted to emulate their practice, it would be helpful to have a larva-like tadpole stage during which your bones were merely cartilage. Once you’ve committed your size to a skeleton, there’s not much room for significant shrinkage, I’d posit.
The LA fire thing...wow... I've been looking at the videos, and I texted my nephew who lives in Atwater Village area of Glendale. He said it's nuts, beyond description.
There are a lot places in the US that are not meant to be huge population centers. CA is one, AZ is another. Weather is a huge draw. I can deal with 3 (OK maybe 4 or 5) months of cold to live without wildfire risk or lack of water.
Good morning. As is the recent pattern, in the teens now to rise to the 20s. But the Great Light in the Sky is scheduled to make an appearance today.
The mothership is covering the downfall of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. FP is headlining the California fires, 2 of which are in the immediate Los Angeles area. The Pacific Palisades fire forced an FP reporter to evacuate his home; he provides a firsthand report.
Vlad said the metal band was not really metal, more like punk, and certainly not "thrash" until the very end. I pointed out that the drummer was keeping time, at least, but the song did not go anywhere, musically. It just went along the same.
We have hellbenders in NC, too. They're often an Envirothon Featured Animal or a Current Environmental Issue. (This suggests that someone on the state committee just thinks they're cool.) Mudpuppies are a different kind of large salamander, although they are often conflated, colloquially.
Hellbenders are related to Asian giant salamanders.
Morning! Slept in this morning. Better than sleeping out, though…❄️🥶❄️🥶❄️🥶
We were down to around six degrees this morning, supposed to get to twenty something. Not looking like there’s anything north of freezing in the forecast for the next ten days.
Naw... at that hour when I walk in the barn to feed and do chores it's usually 8 to 10 degrees warmer inside the barn than outside. Those nags work right well as stall heaters.
Now, when I walk in and the mercury in the old glass thermometer on the wall that I saved from my father's greenhouse is below zero, then it might take a little while to thaw out by the time I'm done. Especially back in the day when there were more than just two nags in there to feed and clean up after.
Can’t find it now, but I’ve read interesting discussions on the comparative performance of different thermometers due to different materials’ sensitivities to particular temperature zones. Guaranteed snoozer, I’m sure! The main contenders among analog thermometers is mercury and spirit, but mercury is pretty much out due to hazmat, etc…
That old glass tube thermometer is at least as old as I am. I like it not only for its sentimental value for me, but it's large enough and plain and well-marked enough that I can read the thing from halfway across the barn. Without my glasses. 🤓
I live on the western edge of Michigan's Thumb region about 30+ miles northeast of Flint. Yeah, it's ice fishing country; you see shanties here and there out on local ponds and a few down on Holloway Reservoir on the Flint River or downstream form there out on Mott Lake occasionally (actually another reservoir on the Flint River).
But the ice shanty villages closest to me are up on Saginaw Bay some 45 miles north of where I live. They get some pretty big gatherings there as well as further on north on the larger inland lakes like Houghton and Cadillac.
Haven't been out on the ice in years. Went with friends from work back in the day, but never got into it the way the true enthusiasts / aficionados do. I like fresh fish and fishing, but this time of year, the freezer at the grocery store is about all the cold I'm willing to tolerate just for a fish dinner.
Yes, it's because the tadpoles are larger than the adults. "Paradoxical" is a little overblown: "unusual" is more accurate.
More coffee is good. I don't think I will see any snow. We have choir practice scheduled for tomorrow evening, and I'll have to watch the weather for the participants, to decide whether to call it off, as well as keep on top of the office staff and the pastor, to make sure they don't lock us out of the church.
As my friend Doris's late mother used to say, "If it's not one danged thing, it's two danged things."
My husband says we should just call off the practice now and beat the rush. We had planned very familiar songs in anticipation of this possibility and also because we did a lot of new songs for Advent and Christmas and felt we deserved a rest.
Well, there's a song Paradox, a Paradox movie soundtrack by Neil Young, at least one poem entitled The Paradox ("I am the mother of sorrows,. I am the ender of grief;. I am the bud and the blossom,. I am the late-falling leaf. I am thy priest and thy poet", etc....), a Paradox drink and then there's the Drinkers Paradox, dozens/hundreds of poems using paradox as a literary device, and then there's the Tao Te Ching which is full of Paradoxes...(Paradi?)
So, slippery. It doesn't know what it is, which is a paradox.
Paradoxical Frog (the band) would definitely be an acquired taste. That it's not required that it be acquired is fortunate.
Today's TSAF was especially ribiting! I doubt that one was original, I kinda just pulled it out of the hopper.
Today's weather forecast: cold. Tomorrow's forecast: cold. The day after that's forecast: cold. There's a trend there, I think.
I have two nieces in SoCal. Both are safe, but both were evacuated, due to the fires.
Some work news. I had a paper I didn't submit to our big conference on Tuesday (I submitted 2, not 3). Our University "forgot" to renew our Stata License 🤦♂️ so I couldn't finish running the results (I had them done preliminarily, but not the final, finished product). 😡 I'm treasurer for one of the 23 divisions in the Conference, so at our December meeting we chose not to accept submissions for "poster sessions". I could have submitted what I had done as a poster, but since we chose not to do so, I did not. 3 people did, and we were given a dozen poster slots. My colleagues got a laugh out of that!
I finished one paper using excel for run analysis, but that was a simple multivariate regression analysis. The other paper was a probabalistic, hazard rate model. Excel has no tools for that, I looked. It can be done by hand, but takes longer than I had available.
I may have to buy an individual license if UD doesn't renew the Stata license.
Yeah, I had to buy my own Spanish psalm book, too. Management are fools sometimes.
Good morning. Here’s something I strongly approve of. 100%. It is what it is. Literally. https://www.lssu.edu/resources/about-lssu/traditions/banishedwords/
But I just assimilated "cringe"!
Well, they're saying it would be better if you dropped it. Period.
Well, I won't. So there!
That's sort of a sorry not sorry response. :-)
"At the end of the day" has been banished over and over since 1999. I think they need a better ritual. I could ask Thor and Vlad to come up with one.
It’s good to know that we’re all in this together.
An Irishman corrected me a couple decades ago for using “obligate”. He had a strong grammar-scoldian point. The verb “oblige” gave us the noun “obligation” from which we back-formed the verb “obligate”. Nuts! And superfluous!
It’s time to cleanse the Augean stables of this here English language!
Considering this and that 👇, do I detect a note of Lake Superior not superior going on here?
Game changer not sorry. Skibidi not sorry.
This is a very cool set of maps on US disaster areas/potentials - Hurricane, Tornado, Flooding, Wildfire. For some reason, the links to share a freebie are broken. It is from 2019 though, a different epoch.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/mapping-disasters/?itid=sr_1_bb01f029-0d5b-4150-bb96-1235d343f978
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/mapping-disasters
Or this works "Search this link in Bing" this - to see the graphs
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/mapping-disasters
Freebie from the NY Times for you; 5 years old, pre current LA fire, Helene. This inward migration from the coasts will be THE eventual number 1 political issue in America. Mixing will be good !
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html?unlocked_article_code=1.n04.0Y7Z.W_VahvPIblZx&smid=url-share
"This inward migration from the coasts will be THE eventual number 1 political issue in America."
I find the idea of inward migration from the coasts to be, yeah, whatever. In my opinion, massive development for rich people in disaster areas was always going to be unsustainable.
If anyone can sustain it, it would be the very rich. Yet, as reality works out, they got FEMA federal flood insurance instituted so that taxpayers stand in for their potential losses…
This goes back to the George HW Bush administration and the hyper-active response after Hurricane Andrew, iirc. Prior to that, flood insurance was an unsubsidized matter of insurance companies and homeowners taking risks.
As to the shrinking frogs: if you wanted to emulate their practice, it would be helpful to have a larva-like tadpole stage during which your bones were merely cartilage. Once you’ve committed your size to a skeleton, there’s not much room for significant shrinkage, I’d posit.
"Once you’ve committed your size to a skeleton,"
That's my excuse.
"O-O-O-Ozempic!" 🎵
Nope.
"Maybe they are an acquired taste"
Very much so.
The LA fire thing...wow... I've been looking at the videos, and I texted my nephew who lives in Atwater Village area of Glendale. He said it's nuts, beyond description.
When I took the new position in Pasadena coming from Michigan, Ms Pinki had earthquake fear.
Now, we experienced both earthquakes and tornadoes in Massachusetts and Michigan.
So I pioneer us to LA. Talking to Pinki watching TV and the studio shakes and then I shake.
She comes out to join me.
Then wildfires. Wildfires. Crazy Wildfires. 2000 2008. She hated LA, Pasadena.
Wildfires are a lot more dangerous than earthquakes there.
Well until the big 10.0
There are a lot places in the US that are not meant to be huge population centers. CA is one, AZ is another. Weather is a huge draw. I can deal with 3 (OK maybe 4 or 5) months of cold to live without wildfire risk or lack of water.
Wildfires can occur anywhere there is vegetation, if other factors coincide.
“Increased wildfire risk.” There I fixed it. There definitely is more of a risk up north here but very little risk down south.
Good morning. As is the recent pattern, in the teens now to rise to the 20s. But the Great Light in the Sky is scheduled to make an appearance today.
The mothership is covering the downfall of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. FP is headlining the California fires, 2 of which are in the immediate Los Angeles area. The Pacific Palisades fire forced an FP reporter to evacuate his home; he provides a firsthand report.
I offer the West Virginia "Hellbender". Aka the mudpuppy
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d585a7aa233e432385679272152101cf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbender
We had 60mph gusts. The ones akin to the sad Santa Ana fires in LA
Hellbender also appears to be a thrash metal band:
https://youtu.be/yRz_Qvy8rUM?feature=shared
…and a country/Western band:
https://youtu.be/ST2H7GHVmPY?si=VEVO8mdFy34CHFgv
The bluegrass band seems like they have potential, but the sound in the venue is so bad that the performance is unimpressive.
Vlad says there are many other bands called "Hellbender" listed on Rate Your Music.
The search got me a little confused, since there appear to be bands, songs, movies, video games, and whatnot else with the name.
Vlad said the metal band was not really metal, more like punk, and certainly not "thrash" until the very end. I pointed out that the drummer was keeping time, at least, but the song did not go anywhere, musically. It just went along the same.
I shall defer to Vlad’s superior expertise. The first example the YouTube search turned up was more topically on the nose:
https://youtu.be/jBy5U2qpWMw?si=rE1NwwmMpJjdorkC
Gosh, that's weirdly coincidental.
We have hellbenders in NC, too. They're often an Envirothon Featured Animal or a Current Environmental Issue. (This suggests that someone on the state committee just thinks they're cool.) Mudpuppies are a different kind of large salamander, although they are often conflated, colloquially.
Hellbenders are related to Asian giant salamanders.
Definitely an acquired taste but a great band name.
Good morning. It's too cold here for frogs. 22Fs with a forecast high of 38.
Morning! Slept in this morning. Better than sleeping out, though…❄️🥶❄️🥶❄️🥶
We were down to around six degrees this morning, supposed to get to twenty something. Not looking like there’s anything north of freezing in the forecast for the next ten days.
6*? PPFffffffttt!
-7* at 7 here this AM.
We laugh at single digits that don't have minus signs in front of them around these parts.
It took you all day to thaw out enough to post that, I presume.
Naw... at that hour when I walk in the barn to feed and do chores it's usually 8 to 10 degrees warmer inside the barn than outside. Those nags work right well as stall heaters.
Now, when I walk in and the mercury in the old glass thermometer on the wall that I saved from my father's greenhouse is below zero, then it might take a little while to thaw out by the time I'm done. Especially back in the day when there were more than just two nags in there to feed and clean up after.
Can’t find it now, but I’ve read interesting discussions on the comparative performance of different thermometers due to different materials’ sensitivities to particular temperature zones. Guaranteed snoozer, I’m sure! The main contenders among analog thermometers is mercury and spirit, but mercury is pretty much out due to hazmat, etc…
ZZZzzzz...whu... oh
That old glass tube thermometer is at least as old as I am. I like it not only for its sentimental value for me, but it's large enough and plain and well-marked enough that I can read the thing from halfway across the barn. Without my glasses. 🤓
We get subzero temps maybe once or twice a decade hereabouts
I forget where you live M, but you must live in ice-fishing country, the kind where they setup shanty villages on the ice
I live on the western edge of Michigan's Thumb region about 30+ miles northeast of Flint. Yeah, it's ice fishing country; you see shanties here and there out on local ponds and a few down on Holloway Reservoir on the Flint River or downstream form there out on Mott Lake occasionally (actually another reservoir on the Flint River).
But the ice shanty villages closest to me are up on Saginaw Bay some 45 miles north of where I live. They get some pretty big gatherings there as well as further on north on the larger inland lakes like Houghton and Cadillac.
Haven't been out on the ice in years. Went with friends from work back in the day, but never got into it the way the true enthusiasts / aficionados do. I like fresh fish and fishing, but this time of year, the freezer at the grocery store is about all the cold I'm willing to tolerate just for a fish dinner.
I live in the South.
Paradoxical why? Because the tadpoles are larger than the adults? Is that a paradox? Do I need more coffee? How much will it snow?
It actually sounds as of you’ve had TOO much coffee 😉
Not possible.
Agree
Yes, it's because the tadpoles are larger than the adults. "Paradoxical" is a little overblown: "unusual" is more accurate.
More coffee is good. I don't think I will see any snow. We have choir practice scheduled for tomorrow evening, and I'll have to watch the weather for the participants, to decide whether to call it off, as well as keep on top of the office staff and the pastor, to make sure they don't lock us out of the church.
As my friend Doris's late mother used to say, "If it's not one danged thing, it's two danged things."
And so I find myself pondering the essence of what it means to be a frog in search of something that would make one truly paradoxical.
I'm glad there's a band.
Fortunately frogs are not given to reflection on the meaning of their existence. 🙂
M. Sartre could not be reached for comment.
True. And they tend to just jump right into things without thinking much about it either.
I should have put a comma between "frog" and "in search of." Oh, well.
Introspective frogs. Hmmmm.
I like it that way. A frog in search of something other than a bug to eat.
Sounds like Gilda Radner's SNL character Roseann Rosanadana: "It just goes to show you, it's always something."
My husband says we should just call off the practice now and beat the rush. We had planned very familiar songs in anticipation of this possibility and also because we did a lot of new songs for Advent and Christmas and felt we deserved a rest.
Thanks. “Paradox” is one of those words that I use all the time, yet find the definition slippery.
More or less slippery than the frogs?
Well, there's a song Paradox, a Paradox movie soundtrack by Neil Young, at least one poem entitled The Paradox ("I am the mother of sorrows,. I am the ender of grief;. I am the bud and the blossom,. I am the late-falling leaf. I am thy priest and thy poet", etc....), a Paradox drink and then there's the Drinkers Paradox, dozens/hundreds of poems using paradox as a literary device, and then there's the Tao Te Ching which is full of Paradoxes...(Paradi?)
So, slippery. It doesn't know what it is, which is a paradox.
That was also a song in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, “HMS Pinafore”.
A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.
F asked me the other day, "What if someone were born on February 29?" and I explained that it was an important plot point.
Hence my confusion. An fuzzy definition is the ultimate paradox.
Like the frogs!