Stunning Day of Convection and BIG storm coming

There was magnificent cumulus and cumulonimbus today over our region. The reason? A very large change in temperature with height associated with very cold air aloft, coupled with warming at low levels from the increasingly powerful sun. Here is a plot (sounding chart) of temperature and dew point at 5 PM this afternoon at Forks, on the NW Washington coast. This is based on observations taking from a balloon-launched radiosonde. Very rapid temperature decline with altitude.

As the surface heated up during the day, the convection grew and blossomed with some the cumulus forming well-defined anvils. Here is a stunning video from Dale Ireland's cloud cam in Silverdale (click on link or picture to see it):

http://www.drdale.com/lapse/lapse100331.mov

The developing convection was very evident on the high resolution visible satellite imagery today. Below are two images. The first in the morning when the instability was just developing and the latter in the mid afternoon when some of the convection has grown into full blown cumulonimbus with well defined anvils (which look like oval cottonballs from space).


Beautiful to look at and impressive anyway you care to view it.

Major weather changes are in store Friday and Saturday. Moderate to heavy precipitation over the region...with a very strong low moving just north of us. Winds will be very strong over the coast (40-60 kts), northwest Washington (30-50 kt) and breezy (20-40 kt) over the PS lowlands on Friday. Take a look at a forecast chart of sea level pressure and surface winds at 5 AM on Friday. A 988 mb low right off the WA coast and very strong coastal winds (45 kt sustained). We are talking about a very significant springtime event.

Maybe even the Weather Channel will cover it!

How Did That Happen

I don't know who I know on Facebook that knows two of the gentleman who have been recommended to me (because when I click on their accounts I get NO info).



It's awesome just the same.

Tags: facebook, mark hamill, lance hendriksen

Lady Gaga to record Bond Movie Theme

My reaction:



Did they not learn their lesson from the abomination that was the Die Another Day theme song.

If this news came out tomorrow, I would have chalked it up as an April Fools Day joke.

From the Sun: "Bond bosses are all huge Gaga fans. Her sound and sense of drama make her the top choice. Gaga has the look as well as the voice to tackle a thundering ballad. She's a great songwriter too. This is perfect on every level."

Yeah, because Telephone is going to be discussed in the same breath as "Yesterday" and "Like A Rolling Stone". I know she can write songs as her work as a brunette student proves, but that is not who they are considering for that job. They are hiring someone who is flying their freak flag without bringing the goods. I mean, Bowie played a freak too, but he made great music that spanned the generations.

And when they say it is perfect on every level, they are forgetting a word.

Tags: lady gaga, david bowie, james bond, the sun, theme, april fools, calvin and hobbes, yesterday, like a rolling stone, darth vader

OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail service has supported standard API protocols like POP and IMAP at no extra cost to our users. These efforts are consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.

In addition to making it easier for users to export their data, we also enable them to authorize third party (non-Google developed) applications and websites to access their data at Google. One of the more common examples is allowing a social network to access your address book in order to send invitations to your friends.

While it is possible for a user to authorize this access by disclosing their Google Account password to the third party app, it is more secure for the app developer to use the industry standard protocol called OAuth which enables the user to give their consent for specific access without sharing their password. Most Google APIs support this OAuth standard, and starting today it is also available for the IMAP/SMTP feature of Gmail.

The feature is available in Google Code Labs and we have provided a site with documentation and sample code. In addition, Google has begun working with other companies like Yahoo and Mozilla on a formal Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP (learn more at the OAuth for IMAP mailing list).

One of the first companies using this feature is Syphir, in their SmartPush application for the iPhone, as shown in the screenshots below. Unlike other push apps, Sypher's SmartPush application never sees or stores the user’s Gmail password thanks to this new OAuth support.



We look forward to finalizing an Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP, and working with IMAP/SMTP mail clients to add that support.

By Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager

Amazing Winds and Convection

Click on picture for Dale Ireland's time lapse movie of today's action.

Its cold, windy, with heavy rain in places. Convective showers are raking the region and heavy snow is hitting the mountains. A winter storm in spring and a savior to our water supply concerns this summer. Last night and early this morning there was some very powerful winds...hurricane force in places...along the coast, over some inland peaks, and eastern Oregon. Here are a few maximum wind reports:

Mt. Hebo, Oregon 3160 ft 96 mph!!!
HURRICANE Ridge 5200 ft 92 mph (there is a reason they call it hurricane ridge)
Mission Ridge 6739 ft 90mph
Humbug Mt. 50 ft 83 mph
Cape Foulweather 1024 ft 81
Garibaldi 75 ft 79mph
Cape Disappointment 140 ft 77
ANTELOPE (eastern Oregon) 6460 ft 77
Cape MEARES 1421 ft 75 mph

Pretty impressive for late March.

But the other story was the substantial instability of the air coming in off the Pacific and convective showers (some very intense) it produced. I got savaged by one on the way home. I knew it was coming from the radar and delayed five minutes too long. I really enjoy cutting it close, attempting to race ahead of an ominous, dark cloud mass.
An important measure used by professional meteorologists to measure instability is called CAPE, which stands for Convective Available Potential Energy (now that will impress your friends). It is related to the most of energy that will be released by a buoyant parcel of air in a column. Here is the forecast CAPE for this afternoon:
Values of up to around 600 offshore with modest values into western Washington. This is good for us...but in the midwest they can get to 3000+. The instability of this air flow is associated with relatively cool air aloft moving over fairly warm water and the heated land. In fact, the greatest instability in our areas tends to be in spring.
Instability leads to convective clouds (e.g., cumulonimbus) and isolated heavy rain and occasional lightning. Take a look at the radar image this afternoon below--some of the showers were very intense (the yellows). You don't bike in yellows. You don't want to know about the reds.

Here is the high resolution visible satellite imagery at roughly the same time. Can you see the instability showers offshore..with the block being the clearing between the cumulus cells. Showers and sunbreaks...a NW classic. This is exactly the kind of pattern that lays down lots of snow. Below is the forecast 24-h snow amounts ending 5 AM Tuesday morning...some locations get well over a foot. City Light should think about revoking their electricity surcharge.



And if all of the above is not enough...there is a high surge advisory along the coast:

A HIGH SURF ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM PDT TUESDAY.

LARGE SOUTHWEST SWELLS OF 20 TO 24 FEET WILL CONTINUE TO AFFECT
THE NORTH AND CENTRAL WASHINGTON COAST THROUGH TUESDAY AFTERNOON.

Student Applications Open for Google Summer of Code 2010

Want to work on a cool open source project, hone your development skills with the help of a dedicated mentor, and get paid? Look no further - student applications are now open for Google Summer of Code™ 2010.

Since its inception in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide - all for the love of code. Through the program, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. They also receive an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. And best of all, more source code is created and released for the benefit of users and developers everywhere.

Full details, including pointers on how to apply, are available on the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Google Open Source Team

Stumbleupon delivers again

I don't know who took this picture, when it happened or the events surrounding it, but the caption perfectly captures my sentiment.



If Camo'd Arnie was throat punching Mr. T while Molly Ringwald was mouthing for him to stop, it would basically recreate my entire 1980's pop cultural existence.

Tags: rodney dangerfield, paul reubens, peewee herman, david lee roth, molly ringwald, arnold schwartzenegger, mr t, awesome party

Sunday Video: Tik Tok Parody

A great parody of Kesha's Tik Tok.

It totally deserved it.

Tags: kesha, key of awesome, glitter puke, tik tok, parody, dr drew, contract, diddy

Serious Rain and Wind

A fairly strong storm for this time of the year is approaching, but the interesting weather will be late today (Sunday). On Sunday there will be sunbreaks and showers for most of the region, with more serious weather arriving later this afternoon. The media has really been hyping this event up.

Take a look at the 24h precipitation ending 5 PM Sunday and Monday (below). Some mountain areas will be getting 2-6 inches, with moderate rain even over the lowlands (particularly late Sunday and early Monday).
And what about winds? Look at the pressure forecast for 11 PM Sunday night. With an intense low far offshore, we still have very large pressure differences in the coastal waters and over NW Washington--which means strong winds. The wind forecast for the same time shows 45 kt sustained water in the coastal waters and 35 kts over NW Washington. Gust could be considerable larger. Time to batten down the hatches and enjoy some storm watching! And the models are showing significant snow above 4000 ft this week.

Week 46: Pageant of the Transmundane

A man in Pennsylvania was arrested for public drunkenness for trying to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to a long dead opossum along a rural highway. I am thinking he'd have to be pretty drunk, because I wouldn't bring my lips near road kill or a possibly living opossum for any amount of money.

Anyway, sometimes it is a grand sweeping weirdness... and sometimes simplicity and elegance of presentation wins the day.

The latter category of subdued though still strange subject matter has done just that this week.

This week's winner is from Burbanked.

Alan has been creating these little vignettes of Sean Connery saying seemingly mundane things, but he has been presenting them in such a way that it turns into magic. Take a gander at his first effort.

And because this week's entry has to do with Sean Connery, I went with an old stand by... Homer tackling a Connery-like Bond figure from the episode "You Only Move Twice".



Congrats Alan. Here is your badge.



The rules of this little contest: Every week I will be selecting one blog post that I have seen from the vast reaches of the blogging village to bestow with the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award for being one of the freakiest(in a funny way) things I've seen or read during a 7 day period. It doesn't necessarily have to have been written during the week, I just had to have encountered it. That means that if you find something interesting and repost it like a movie or whatever, if I saw it at your blog first, you get the prize. Of course, creating your own content is also a very good way to win.

This is not a meme. This is an award that I give out, and thus, I am not "tagging" you.

Now, if you see a post that you think is worthy of this illustrious prize, just drop me a line at campybeaver@gmail.com and we'll see if we can't get your suggestion up and award-ready while giving you some credit and a link to your own blog.

Tags: homer simpson, pageant of the transmundane, burbanked, sean connery, opossum, simplicity, mundane

Springtime Dust storms

During the past week there has been a major dust storm over east Asia, with dust spreading over eastern China, Japan, and over the Pacific. This is not an academic issue for us here in Northwest because occasionally this dust is carried across the Pacific, influencing visibility and air quality over the Northwest.

Take a look at a picture in Beijing before and during the current dust storm above. Pretty amazing change. Visibility can drop to 1/8 mile or less in major events. And such dust storms are very evident in satellite imageryover east Asia a few days ago, as show below. The dust is the tan looking stuff.

East Asian dust storms tend to occur in spring and generally start over the deserts of Mongolia, northern China and Kazakhstan when strong springtime winds lift fine, dry soil particles into the air. Overgrazing, deforestation and drought have contributed to an increase in this phenomenon.

Unfortunately, here in the Pacific Northwest we can feel the effects of major dust storms. The dust can mix high into the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere which tops out around 30,000 ft) and the strong winds there (the "jet stream") can blow the dust across the Pacific in a few days. Spring is a good time for the dust to make it over since the jet stream is still fairly strong and at the right latitudes for transport from Asia to our region. There have been a number of such events with ones in 1998 and 2001 being particularly memorable. Visibility can plummet here in the Northwest as the Asian dust overspreads the region; take a look at an example below:

One study found that ∼50% of the interannual variability in springtime average visibility here in the NW can be explained by changes in Asian dust emissions.

But the situation is worse than just dust. Not only dust makes it across the Pacific, but so does some nasty pollutants, both on the dust and in the free air. Professor Dan Jaffe, of UW Bothell, is an atmospheric chemist who has extensively studied cross-Pacific transport of pollutants. He has run two Northwest observatories to collect Asian pollutants--one at Cheeka Peak on the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula and at Mt. Bachelor, Oregon. He has a nice web page on the Asian pollution and dust transport at http://faculty.washington.edu/djaffe/FAQs.htm

The bottom line of all this is that the atmosphere is highly interconnected and pollution and dust storms half a world away can affect us here in the Northwest.

Kevin Smith Attacks His Critics

Kevin Smith is mad at film critics in general, and specifically, people like me because they didn't like his latest movie Cop Out.

And here is the thing, Smith compared that criticism to... well, I will just share his tag on it: #YesIcomparedMyFlickToARetardedKid. He said it was as if the critics were making fun of a mentally handicapped child. He also said that with a name like Cop Out, the critics shouldn't have expected high quality entertainment. "Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it's called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you?"

I don't know about you, but somehow that indicates to me that his heart wasn't in that movie to begin with. Like he isn't really happy about the movie or doesn't think highly of it. And that is okay. But you can't then get bent out of shape when people call you out for being involved in a substandard product.

He has also admitted in the past that he isn't the greatest filmmaker out there. He's said it on stage and in interviews, one of which I will quote now. When asked by the BBC why he became a director, he stated:

Because I wasn't much good at anything else, and oddly enough I'm not very good at this - but nobody seems to notice, so I get away with it. I'm not really a strong visual stylist and that's kind of called for in the job description, because it is all about putting visuals together, and I'm not really I interested in that. I'm more interested in character, story, and dialogue, so to that degree I could have done radio shows, but radio is not nearly as popular in my country as it is here.

But one of those other little bits that has come up from his Evening DVD's is that his budgets are small, so the studios are taking much smaller risks bankrolling his work, so his career is relatively safe no matter the financial outcome.

See, the problem I am seeing with Smith's rant (and yes, it is a rant), is he is lumping bloggers into the same boat as professional critics. So he hates people critiquing his work from both an educated and amateur point of view. He wants the reviewing process to be democratized, because all the established critics are too authoritarian, but the online culture of wanting to see people fail is a result of that.

I'd rather pick 500 randoms from / Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why's their opinion more valid?

Hmmm. Picking 500 people from your feed to watch your next movie as your reviewers vs. professional critics. Yeah, that is exactly the same thing.

Would anyone else like to stack the deck like that if they were in that position? You know... just grab 500 people who follow your every move on Twitter and have them judge your work.

But let's say for the sake of argument that Smith meant just 500 people from Twitter in general. If he thought his reviews were bad before.... wow, I'm an asshole, and I write on the internet, and even I can see the disaster that could befall that (well, after you factor out all the people who are so honored that they were asked to go to that screening that they would be superpositive about what they saw no matter what).

It is like Kevin Smith forgot the whole basis of one of his movies was having his two most famous characters getting upset because people on the internet would insult them because of a movie-within-the-movie that was based on their likenesses. If he just picked 500 random people on Twitter to review his movies, that's what would happen.

See, the difference between me here and a professional critic is, I am not accountable. I can say whatever I want with little to no consequences. I am allowed to have vendettas and grand hatreds and orgiastic loves with things and act them out daily if I choose, and no one is going to reign me in, or edit me down or whatever. I don't even have to worry about peer approval.

Professional critics have to worry about all those things. But I think that somehow, Kevin Smith has it in his mind that the critics have it in for him, and always have when that is overwhelmingly not the case. He got really dinged this one time (I mean, even Jersey Girl got 41% on Rotten Tomatoes), and he is acting like a tubby bitch (in Smith's own parlance). Cop Out's 19% rating at that same site is really Smith's first real widespread lambasting by critics as a body.

Then again, he has never appreciated criticism. Allow me to quote from that aforementioned BBC interview again.

You know, unfortunately I tend to believe the bad reviews more than the good reviews. I should probably regard them both the same, which is... Whatever. It's one person's opinion. The problem with most reviews is that they're written in this authoritative voice that never states that it's an opinion. You're supposed to take for granted that it's an opinion, but they're always written as fact, or as mass opinion. I find that really irksome.

I know it might be taking up too much space to have them write "in my opinion" after every sentence, but you might want to throw it in there somewhere, because they come across as if they're speaking for the whole public. And they're really, really not. It's subjective, you know? For every guy who doesn't like the movie, I have another guy who does like the movie. Unfortunately the guy who does like the movie doesn't write for the newspaper.

Personally, I don't think any of this would have come up if Cop Out would have made more money at the box office. Do any of you think that Kevin Smith would have had this twitter-fit if the movie made 100 million dollars or more at the box office? I think he would have looked at those reviews and laughed his ass off.

As a comparison, here is how Quentin Tarantino framed his own problems with critics:

I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I’m a better writer than most of the people writing about me. And I can write film criticism better than most of the people writing about me too.

Now that is how you make a statement about the people reviewing your films... not crying out that they are somehow being mean to you because they are either too elitist or just internet trolls.

And when people tell you to stop complaining and just make a better movie... they mean it.

I wear my bad reviews with honor. He should too.

Tags: kevin smith, twitter, bbc, critics, bloggers, silent bob, criticism, thin skin, miramax, quentin tarantino, whiny, cry baby, make better movies, bad reviews, blockbuster, evening with kevin smith

Where economics and psychology meet

Here is the scenario: 5 year old gets herself out of bed at 6:30am. She picks out clothes for the day. Puts them on. Neatly folds her pyjamas and puts them away and makes her bed. She then goes downstairs and makes her breakfast and eats it. All without adult supervision or coaxing.

Sound like a fantasy? Well, that is what happened in our house this morning. And why? Because our 5 year old daughter would earn herself a point if she did all that. This happens most days.

I thought about this when I read today's piece in Slate by Alan Kazdin and Carlo Rotella that looked at the differences between bribing rewarding your child. It talked about the resistance many parents feel to rewarding good behaviour. There were lots of concerns including moral outrage (why should I reward things that they should be doing anyway), the future (if I reward stuff when will it stop), intrinsic motivation (if I reward them explicitly they won't be intrinsically motivated), it will spread (she'll need rewards for everything -- in life!), and they just don't work.

Well, I don't know about all of these objections (although I clearly object to them all) but the last one -- whether they work -- I think clearly they actually do but they have to be done right. Kazdin and Rotella list the ways which don't work and the psychological reasons for it. I looked at those same things and thought they wouldn't work because they were poor economically. Let's go through them:

• Winging it: trying to reward on the fly. It is hard to get the prices right on the fly. What is more, you create expectations of what the future price should be. If you want to set incentives, you do need to think about it, and doing things as once offs don't cut it.
• The Hail Mary reward system: awarding for a raft of good behavior in a big bang. This sounds good in theory but requires lots to work out in practice. The main economic objection is the end game. The child has achieved 90% of the behaviour you want. However, they miss it at the end. They miss out on the reward entirely which is demotivating. You know it and can't commit to 'cancel Christmas.' Alternatively, they miss out at the beginning. Then what do you do? You have nothing to work with to get the rest of the behaviour up to scratch. What you want from economic rewards is smoothness whereby the effort to reward relationship is continuous and proportional. That means on-going rewards and not big bangs.
• Complex reward systems: these are systems designed to get every price right and cover all bases. Nice in theory but normal people -- including children -- have trouble understanding them. If you can't work it out, it isn't an incentive.

The end conclusion is that for rewards to be effective, they must be on-going but also restricted in supply. You have to avoid temptation to reward everything but make sure you target the stuff that is hard but also stuff that can be habit forming. That is why points work. You can set the rate of exchange and you can put performance on a chart for everyone to see. It is also transferable between parents and comparable across children.

Our fridge has an adorned point system with milestones each week that involve the ability to get a cafeteria lunch among other things. It doesn't work every day but it does work. Today, when my daughter finished her breakfast, she immediately asked "can I have my point now?" And that's the point.

A warm day and then rain

Today was very warm around western Washington, with some stations (like Sea Tac) breaking their all-time daily record. Now let me make one thing clear...breaking a daily record is not that unusual. We break a few of them every year for highs or lows. Breaking monthly or all-time records like last summer's 103F...THAT is impressive.

Here is a map showing the temperatures at 3 PM..near the time of highest temperatures (note: you can click on it to expand). You will note that some of the warmest temperatures (70-72F) are on the east side of the Puget Sound basin away from the water. You will also note some easterly flow.
Today was a good set up for warmth. First, we had only limited high clouds and sun is fairly strong now--the same sun as mid September. Second, we had an approaching trough that brought southerly flow and relatively warm lower-atmosphere temperatures into the region. To see this, take a look at the temperatures and winds at around 5000 ft for 10 AM Wed morning, shown below. The solid lines are the heights of the 850 mb pressure surface...think of it as like pressure, with the winds roughly parallel to the height lines. You can see the southerly winds bring warmer air (reddish colors) into our region. You will also notice the easterly and southeasterly flow over the Cascades. Easterly flow adds to the warming because air warms as it sinks and is compressed. That is why the warmest temps are over the Cascade foothills and the east side of the Sound.


But the warmth is over now. As seen in the satellite image below, a front is now entering the region and tomorrow will only reach the mid-fifties and there will be light rain. And we stay in a cooler, wetter pattern for a while, which will include some needed snow in the mountains.

I Was A Midnight Movie Club Contributor or I Spit on John Cusack

I was recently a guest on the Midnight Movie Club podcast for that seminal 1980's comedy, Better Off Dead after years of planning and months of rigorous recording.

Listen to my disembodied voice trying to blend into the professional interplay between Lee Sargent from Quit Your Day Job and Dan Hughes of All That Comes With It. Yeah... I'm not good. The two of them are total pros, but me, yeah, I sort of sucked.

So for those of you who never heard my earlier podcasts either here or for Lee back when he was doing things pretty much solo at QYDJ and you want to laugh at me, or you remember Better Off Dead and/or you want to hear me rip on John Cusack, well, go take a listen.

Tags: lee sargent, quit your day job, better off dead, dan hughes, all that comes with it, john cusack, savage steve holland, mellow gold

Will Issaquah Pick Poor Math Books?

Issaquah and Sammamish are home to a well educated population, many of which are employed in professional and high tech occupations. Thus, it is surprising that the Issaquah School District administration is doing everything possible to place very poor math books in its schools.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, March 24) night the Issaquah School Board will vote on the administration's recommendation for the Discovering Math series in their high schools. These are very poor math texts:

(1) Found to be "unsound" by mathematicians hired the State Board of Education.
(2) Found to be inferior to a more traditional series (Holt) by pilot tests by the Bellevue School District
(3) That have been rejected by Bellevue, Lake Washington, North Shore, and Shoreline (to name only a few)
(4) Whose selection by the Seattle School District was found to be arbitrary and capricious by King County Judge Spector.
(5) That are classic, weak, inquiry or "reform" math textbooks that stress group work, student investigations, and calculator use over the acquisition of key math skills.

The Issaquah school administration is trying to push these books through with little input from parents or other interested parties. Their curriculum committee has only teachers, and fairly inexperienced ones at that, with no parents allowed. The Superintendent is actively lobbying for the books. One of his big arguments is that Discovering is consistent with the current (very poor) math books they already have.

If you want more information on this potential disaster for district kids, please go to:

http://saveissaquahmath.blogspot.com/

If these books are approved, it will be very, very difficult for any Issaquah child to secure a decent math education. It is critical that parents and interested parties attend the board meeting tomorrow night and email their board members (schoolboard@issaquah.wednet.edu) and the Issaquah Superintendent. If the wrong books are selected, the damage will continue for another decade, unless a parent lawsuit ensues.

Meeting info:

The board meeting will start at 7:00 PM at District Offices. Public comments will be taken before the vote.

The Beard... DUN DUN DUN!

I'm not good at a lot of things, but I can certainly grow hair on my face.



I always miss my winter beards when they are gone. I was sporting that back in January.

I grow Galifianakis beards!

Tags: beard, zach galifianakis, the hangover, winter beard

Making APIs Faster: Introducing Partial Response and Partial Update

At Google, we strive to make the web faster. Today, we’re proud to take our first big step in making APIs faster by introducing two experimental features in the Google Data Protocol, partial response and partial update. Together, partial response and partial update can drastically reduce the network, memory, and CPU resources needed to work with Google APIs.

It’s easy to understand the benefit of partial response and partial update. Imagine that you are writing a new Android calendar widget, and you want to display the time and title of the recently changed events on your Google Calendar. With the old Calendar Data API, you would request your calendar’s events feed and receive a large amount of information in response -- including lots of extra data like the attendee list and the event description.

With the addition of partial response, however, you can now use the fields query parameter to request only relevant information -- in this case, event titles and times. Constructing such a request using the fields query parameter is simple:

GET http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/zachpm@google.com/private/full?fields=entry(title,gd:when)

By including the entry argument and specifying title and gd:when, this request ensures that the partial response contains only the title and time for each event, along with a small amount of wrapping metadata.

But say you want to also enable the widget to change the time of calendar events. With partial update, you can easily accomplish this: simply edit the data you received in the partial response and use the HTTP PATCH verb to send the modified data back to the server. The server then intelligently interprets your PATCH, updating only the fields you chose to send. Throughout this entire read-modify-write cycle, the unneeded data remains server-side and untouched.

Now for a quick demo. If you’re currently logged into a Google account, compare the size of your full calendar feed and your partial calendar feed. When we ran this test, our full calendar feed contained 160 kB of data while the partial feed only contained 8 kB -- the partial response successfully reduced total data transfer by 95%! Performance enhancements like this are especially apparent on a mobile device, where every byte of memory and every CPU cycle count. In nearly all clients, partial response and partial update make it more efficient to send, store, parse, cache, and modify only the data that you need.

As of today, partial response and partial update are supported in four Google APIs:

• The YouTube Data API supports partial response and partial update.


• The Calendar Data API supports partial response and partial update with Java client library support.


• The Picasa Web Albums Data API supports partial response and partial update with Java client library support.


• The read-only Sidewiki Data API supports partial response with Java client library support.

... and we’re planning on adding support for most of the APIs that are built on the Google Data Protocol soon. Stay tuned for more information, and if you can’t wait, feel free to lobby for partial update and partial response in your favorite API’s public support group. And for those of you who’ll be at Google I/O this year, be sure to check out the Google API sessions that are in store.

Thanks for joining us in our effort to make APIs on the web as fast and as efficient as possible!

By Kyle Marvin and Zach Maier, Google Data Protocol Team

Don't touch that cheese!

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been a literary phenomenon, at least in our house. The two eldest have both read it and my 9 year old son consumes everything wimpy. So it was no surprise that I found myself this weekend at the movie theatre with all three kids and about a 100 more parents to see the movie version; which had real people and not cartoons.

Having not read the book, this was an open slate for me but the kids say the movie was a pretty faithful representation. Basically, the movie revolves around, not surprisingly, a wimpy kid called Greg who begins the movie being terrorised by his older brother and ends the movie having been terrorised by (almost) everyone else. It is a far from an advertisement for 'stay in school' or indeed 'go to school' and its baseline message (although it does this better than most similar things) is that you should be yourself because there is bugger all you can do about the social status that you have been handed. That is not to say that that status might change, it is just that you can't really do anything about it (at least not in an upward direction; downwards can be achieved with action).

Which brings me to the issue of cheese [caution: mild spoilers ahead]. A sub-plot in the movie (but me with my keen eye could see right from the start that it was the device by which the main conflict in the movie is eventually resolved) is a piece of moldy cheese in the playground. No one removes or cleans it. The reason is that some kid once touched the cheese and got watch was appropriately named, 'The Cheese Touch.' He was then an outcast. Fortunately, like any good caste system, he himself was untouchable unless he touched someone else in which case, The Cheese Touch and its harmful social powers transferred to them. There in lied a set of clearly obvious reactions until such time as these American school children realised that they could export The Cheese Touch to Europe (via an unsuspecting German exchange student) thereby ridding themselves of the game. The ever mouldier cheese remained and the movie keep subtly and not too subtly reminding us of it at regular interviews. 

Now the Cheese Touch mechanism sums up much of the issues facing Middle Schoolers. The whole thing is a social construct (and our wimpy kid makes an impassioned speech to that effect) and it is designed to be randomly unfair. Nonetheless, it is all consuming and all of the children buy into it. Eventually, our wimpy kid who has had a fall out with his seemingly less socially apt but more socially successful friend, saves his friend from the Cheese Touch by unilaterally opting to carry to stigma. Of course, he does this by touching the cheese but I thought he would do it by touching his friend. In the end, however, in the final scene of the movie, our wimpy kids 'buys' into the Cheese Touch or something by all knowing when the 'mean' kid touches the 'real' carrier and I guess becomes the carrier herself. Although it didn't make sense. Could two people carry the Cheese Touch? I'm still struggling with the game.

I think there is one aspect of this whole mess that parents can applaud, "you shouldn't touch moldy cheese." The social apparatus seems to correlate nicely with good hygiene. And if they didn't find this to create a random social game around, they would have found something else. What is more, from the behaviour of my own kids, I am pretty sure none of them will be touching moldy food items in the playground anytime soon (well, at least not where people might seem them).

One final note. Parents will of course identify with and love the mature 7th grader who sees through all of the social graph and just keeps to herself. Now that is the kid we want our kids to be like. It is also exactly the same kid we may fret and worry about given her social isolation. Ah the irony.

Summer Outlook

A number of you are asking about the outlook for the summer. Warm summer again? Drought conditions? El Nino effects?

The bottom line is that my ability and the ability of my colleagues are very limited in such predictions---even though seasonal forecasts are made by the National Weather Service.

Weather forecasting skill, the ability to predict the specific weather situation, fades out between five and ten days into the future. Numerical and theoretical studies demonstrate that we are unlikely to have forecast skill of specific weather features beyond 14 days. So don't believe the Farmer's Almanac.

But it is possible to have limited prediction skill beyond two weeks for the average conditions in the future, such as whether an upcoming season will have temperatures above or below normal.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center provides monthly and seasonal forecasts of the mean or statistical properties of the atmosphere. Their most important tool is the correlation of U.S. weather with El Nino/La Nina with midlatitude weather conditions. They have others: current soil moisture and snow distributions, the current and predicted states of other major atmosphere or ocean variations (e.g., the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Arctic oscillation, etc), and other parameters. Their predictions really don't verify that well, but have marginal skill.
I should note that El Nino/La Nina correlate fairly well with our winter weather (as shown by the low snowpack during this El Nino year), but it has minimal value for predicting summer weather.

So here is their latest NWS forecast graphics for temperature and precipitation for June, July, an August:
Their call: warmer than normal and drier than normal. Basically persistence.

But quite frankly, I would not bet the farm on such predictions, their skill is marginal.

But there some things we do know. As shown in the map below, our snowpack is well below normal--roughly 65% of typical values at this time of the year. Not a disaster, but low. Looking at the weather models for the upcoming week, you cannot expect us to get anything significant during the next five days.

This is enough snowpack to insure plenty of drinking water this summer, and in fact because of smart management and nearly normal winter precipitation (much of it rain), the water in Seattle reservoirs are above normal (see graphics).


It does look like agricultural and fish will suffer from below normal snowmelt this spring and summer. But you never know....

Sunday Video: Jon Stewart's Epic Glenn Beck Takedown

On Thursday, Jon Stewart did something astonishing. In a long opening segment, he took down Glenn Beck... and took him down hard.

And I loved every second of it. So much so that I had to have it on the Sunday Video in its entirety. And if you remember, Glenn Beck is on my enemies list.

I found the whole clip over at North of Westminster, so you should check out what they are doing over there too.

It was truly a thing of beauty. I want to see what he says on Monday about it.

Tags: jon stewart, glenn beck, north of westminster, fox news, daily show, enemies list, crazy, insanity, teabagger

Week 45: Pageant of the Transmundane

An elderly Brooklyn couple has been asked to open their door to the police looking for criminals 50 times over the past 8 years. Apparently the police computer shows that 15 other people are living at that residence... when it has only been the two of them living there for years (and they don't know any of the other people the police are looking for.

Anyway, this week's winning entry comes to us from a blog called Eat Skeet.

What got me going this time out? How about a pug dressed as Teen Wolf. I just love how uncomfortable that dog looks.

And because this has to do with werewolves in a vague way, I thought an image from one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes. I thought it worked.



Congrats Skeeter (Trevor). Here is your badge.




The rules of this little contest: Every week I will be selecting one blog post that I have seen from the vast reaches of the blogging village to bestow with the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award for being one of the freakiest(in a funny way) things I've seen or read during a 7 day period. It doesn't necessarily have to have been written during the week, I just had to have encountered it. That means that if you find something interesting and repost it like a movie or whatever, if I saw it at your blog first, you get the prize. Of course, creating your own content is also a very good way to win.

This is not a meme. This is an award that I give out, and thus, I am not "tagging" you.

Now, if you see a post that you think is worthy of this illustrious prize, just drop me a line at campybeaver@gmail.com and we'll see if we can't get your suggestion up and award-ready while giving you some credit and a link to your own blog.

Tags: eat skeet, new york, teen wolf, pug, costume, homer simpson, pageant of the transmundane

Warmth

Update at 6 PM. Really got toasty today....upper 60s to 70 on Puget Sound eastside and the southern Sound. But clouds are now rolling in now . I went cross country skiing at Blewett Pass today on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. At 4000-4800 ft there was snow, but it wasn't pleasant in many spots. Icy in the shade, rutted and full of holes everywhere. Spring skiing (which is ok) in the sun. Driving across Snoqualmie Pass, conditions looked pretty marginal. On the other hand, my vegetable garden is doing well and my pea seeds germinated in the warming soil.


Today will be very warm west of the Cascades. With offshore flow this morning and southerly flow this afternoon, temperatures will rise to the mid-60s in many locations, and at some upper 60s, approaching or reaching daily records. Probcast, the statistical package that works with ensemble forecasts (www.probcast.com), is very good at high temperatures under full sun...and here is the prediction for max temps today:


Note the cooler temps on the upslope (eastern) side of the Cascades. Another thing that is helpful is that the sun is much stronger now (equivalent to the middle-end of September!). And only some scattered high clouds to intercept the solar radiation.

Tomorrow things will go downhill...so today is the day..

Giving away ad space to my fellow bloggers

For a couple of years now, I've had ad space on my blog, mainly because I wanted to advertise my t-shirt shop... the one that went nowhere, and I made a few bucks from those spaces.

However, there is a lot of downtime for those slots, times when no one is buying ads, and during those times, either my default t-shirt shop ads appear or in the case of my skyscraper, there is no ad.

Seeing that there is space available, and a lot of people I love in the blogging village, I thought I would offer up those spaces during non-paid times to you my readers to advertise your own blogs for free.

As I said, I have three spaces available... the square ad (125 X 125), the skyscraper (160 X 600) and the leaderboard (728 X 90).

So if you want to use the space to advertise what you are doing and you can make a graphical ad in one of those sizes, I'd happily consider running it, as I said, for free.

Drop me a line at campybeaver@gmail.com, and we will discuss the matter.

Tags: project wonderful, blog ads, free exposure

Faster Subversion Hosting for Project Hosting on Google Code

When we launched our first Subversion-on-Bigtable service in 2006 our goal was to scale to support hundreds of thousands of projects, with the idea that we could continue to improve the service over time. A year ago, however, we realized that we would have to rebuild our Subversion service to make dramatic improvements in performance. So, we did what we had to do: we rebuilt our service from the ground up, focusing on speed and reliability.

We are now happy to announce that we have rolled out our new service to all our Subversion users. As a result, most common Subversion operations are about 3 times faster than they used to be.

One of the features of Subversion's HTTP-based protocol is that anyone can browse repositories through a normal web browser. Many open source projects hosted on Google Code use this feature to host websites for their project or post the latest versions of their software. We didn't anticipate how popular this would be when we designed our first Subversion service, but our new system has special optimizations for browser access. Latency for these pages are much lower and international users will see a dramatic improvement. We also set the appropriate caching headers, which can be manually controlled with the google-cache-control Subversion property.

To improve our reliability, our new service now has a custom replication system based on the Paxos algorithm. Whenever you make a change to your repository, the new data is now copied to several different data centers before our service reports that the commit has succeeded --- so you can code in peace knowing that your data is stored safely in multiple locations.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to try out our new Subversion service and let us know what you think.

By Jon Trowbridge and Tony Zale, Google Project Hosting

Diurnal Variations

Now we are in a dead weather period (no precipitation until Sunday), it is good time to look at the typical daily (diurnal) variations of various weather parameters. One of my favorite charts is shown above...a 24-hr plot of the surface observations at a station (in this case Seattle Tacoma Airport) for the past day (ending Thursday afternoon). Time is in UTC (aka GMT or Z time), subtract 7h to get PDT (12 UTC is 5 AM, 00 UTC is 5 PM). The top line is wind speed....sustained (black) and gusts (red). In meteorological parlance sustained winds are usually averaged over 2 minutes, with gusts defined as the highest 3 or 5 second wind during that period. Why are their gusts? Generally from the turbulent mixing of higher winds down from aloft.

Notice something about the winds? They tend to be stronger during the day. Why? As discussed in an earlier post, there are several reasons, the most important being the atmosphere is less vertically stable during the day when the ground is being heated. As a result there is more mixing of higher winds from aloft.

Temperature and relative humidity are mirror images of each of other. The reason? When temperature increases the air has more capacity hold water vapor. Since relative humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air divided by its capacity, increases temperature (and thus increasing capacity causes the RH to drop).

What about pressure at the surface? Here is an interesting thing. If there are no weather systems over an area the surface pressure still changes! There is a typical diurnal cycle with pressure being higher at 10 AM and 10 PM and lowest at 4 AM and 4 PM. The highest high is 10 AM (+or- one hour) and the lowest low at 4 PM. Why? The biggest forcing is the diurnal tide in the stratosphere. It is like a lunar tide in the ocean (two highs and two lows), but instead of being forced by gravity, it is the heating of the stratosphere that does the forcing.

You can see the solar radiation at the bottom. It looks like a cosine function (for those of you who remember your trig), with the few imperfections in the shape due to clouds.

Finally, the second strip of observations is wind direction. Not how it flops around when the winds are light. In fact, you really can't believe wind direction for most wind vanes until the winds get above roughly 2-3 knots.

Finally, you can help in an important study:

A group of UW graduate students created a survey directed at western Washington residents with two main goals:

1) Determine how often, from where, and why residents seek weather information
2) Determine residents' level of understanding associated with weather terminology

The information gathered by the questionnaire will help guide more effective techniques for communicating important weather and flood information. The following link connects to the survey. Thanks for considering this.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G3FKPDG

Midweek Video: Telephone Cover

Well, I went years without knowing a Stephani Germanotta/Lady Gaga song... and now I know a couple. Of course, I learned about them on my own terms.

Of course, I went to Pomplamoose for a cover version.

You remember Pomplamoose, don't you? I posted their take on Michael Jackson's Beat It about a month ago.

This time out, they tackled Lady Gaga's Telephone. I think it is likely better than the original.

Classic.

Tags: pomplamoose, lady gaga, cover version, beat it, telephone, nataly dawn, stephani germanotta

Comparison with Michael Lewis

I am not sure that Michael Lewis (the great financial journalist) and I have much in common but we did both write a book about our experiences as a parent. His book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, I'm sure is the much better seller but in many ways was far more personal and even less tied together (if that is possible) than Parentonomics. Anyhow, Robin Rogers, a sociology professor, saw sufficient things in common -- economic bent + father -- that she reviewed the books together in January's Society (here is the link but it is gated). Suffice it to say, I am happy with the review if only for the comparison:

Michael Lewis was drunk at the hospital while his, presumably sober, wife gave birth to baby number one. ...

I'm guessing that Gans was sober when his wife was in labor.

She was guessing right although after a little time we took numerous steps to make sure my wife was far from with it. That is the way to go.

To Rogers, Home Game was funny but also uncomfortable if you were hoping that paternal and maternal obligations and parental status might be becoming more equal. Having read Lewis, I definitely felt the same thing (which is why I never reviewed it here) although I could not but envy his ability to tell a funny story. If you liked Parentonomics, you will probably find much to enjoy in Home Game.

Ignite at Google I/O 2010!

Ignite will be at this year’s Google I/O! Last year, we had talks on big data, cartography and DIY devices -- a "typical" Ignite line-up. This year, our line-up includes folks like Cheezburger CEO, Ben Huh, and digital artist, Aaron Koblin. However, we also want you! We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, how-to's, and war stories.

Each Ignite talk is 5 minutes long -- with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance) -- and I'll be hosting the talk at I/O. If you’re not sure what to talk about, watch Scott Berkun's excellent How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk.

Submit your talk by March 31st, and we’ll announce the selected speakers on April 3rd. Those who are chosen to give an Ignite talk will receive a free ticket to Google I/O.

If you need further inspiration, you can watch any of the hundreds of Ignite videos at Ignite Show.

By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly/Ignite

@brady