Tag: Severe Weather

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

The sound of TERROR

1 min read

To the Max, manAs I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an occasional fascination with reading up on stuff that scared the hell out of me as a kid, even if the scare-the-hell-out-of-me factor was impossibly silly and irrational. I’ve gotten to where I value reason, and knowing, over knee-jerk emotional reactions. (Let’s face it, in this house, I kinda have to be the one to do that.) Sometimes it’s something as silly as figuring out why a certain movie freaked me out as a kid. Sometimes it’s about figuring out more about a specific sound used to scare the hell out of me. Something like this sound. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Mixed Signals II: tonight’s forecast is…. gguuhhhhh.

Today's forecastSit back for this one. I’m about to tell you how I became a teevee weatherman. And what happened to the teevee weatherman I replaced.

Weather in a broadcast venue has always completely fascinated me. How the hell do these guys know this stuff? Of course, now I know: the nice government-employed meteorologists at the National Weather Service do most of the legwork for them. The TV guys said it with personality. Or at least that’s what it says on the job description when you sign on the dotted line. … Read more

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Podcast Of Extraordinary Magnitude

Podcast: Concrete Bland

Concrete BlandHome improvements (maybe), landing strips, weather warning software, and a king-sized dose of music to make up for being gone for two months. Fair warning, this installment is nearly two hours long.

Listen here:
[sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/concrete.mp3″]

Right-click here and “save as” to save to your hard drive or MP3 player; leave feedback in the forums.… Read more

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And Beyond The Infinite

Death from the skies!

Or… dust from the skies! I’m gonna go all Fred Baker on it and issue my very own…

Martian Tornado Warning

…because… check this out.

Martian Tornado

It’s a giant dust devil on Mars.

A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.

So… it’s giant Martian tornado*, in the late part of the Martian spring. People from Arkansas and Oklahoma should colonize this planet immediately (as I’m from Arkansas, I know of what I speak). We’d be right at home. Let’s land a few well-stocked trailers there and get going.

* maybe not a tornado formed from the same moisture-reliant convection structure that causes tornadoes in the American midwest, sure, but obviously there’s some kind of atmospheric shear making this happen – it’s the same root cause in the end.… Read more

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Funny Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather?

Maybe you’d better rephrase that

Let me be the first to say that there’s nothing funny about the severe weather that’s been killing folks by the dozen across the southern states. I’ve seen videos of Alabama tornadoes tonight that make me want to mess my pants, even though I’m on Youtube. Stuff like that makes me feel pretty sheepish about posting cell phone photos of the relatively mousy little rotating wall cloud that drifted over my house last night.

That being said, I’ve always thought that one of the first duties one has after something like this is to find a reason to smile. And the following gem from CNN.com fits the bill nicely. … Read more