Fourth of July Forecast and the Upcoming Heat Wave

We are about to repeat an age-old Northwest weather pattern. People complain about the "unusually" cool and cloudy June. The weather prediction for July 4th calls for clouds and a chance of showers, and somehow the fireworks just squeak bye on a cool, but acceptable night. And then the miracle occurs. Like a switch being flipped, our weather warms dramatically. The lawns turn brown and watering our vegetables and plants is mandatory. The best weather in the nation takes hold for roughly 2-3 months.

And it is about to happen again.
For the past weeks a persistent trough of low pressure has bedeviled the Northwest, bringing cooler and cloudier than normal conditions. But lets get one thing straight--June is typically NOT a good month west of the Cascades. Normal is lots of low clouds and hit and miss sunshine.

But as they say it is darkest before the dawn....and tomorrow will not be pleasant. A fairly strong upper level trough is now approaching (see figure) and it is associated

with considerable clouds and showers (see satellite picture). Tomorrow (Thursday) will not be nice. Lower 60sF.


A second weak trough comes through early Friday, leaving that day with scattered showers and a few sun breaks. Perhaps mid-60s

Saturday really should be decent, with little or no precipitation, partly cloudy skies and considerable sun and temperatures in the mid to upper 60s.

On Sunday, July 4th, the air will still be on the cool side and there will be lots of onshore flow; there could be some light, scattered precipitation, strengthened by a weak disturbance moving to our north early in the day. No guarantees. But no major storm.

But then the impossible will occur. Ridging in the eastern Pacific will build.

The pesky west coast trough will be no more and temperatures will warm rapidly on Monday and Tuesday.

Sun will return and temperatures will reach the seventies from Tuesday onward. Here is the upper level flow for Tuesday afternoon...a magnificent ridge.

Even lower to mid- 80s away from the water by mid-week. We are talking a significant heat wave and it will seem more so with all the cool weather we have been through.

Time to purchase a fan....


Finally, if any of you are interested, I will be one of the instructors this summer (August 5-8) at the North Cascade Institute's Northwest Naturalists Weekend: Weather, Wildfire and Biodiversity. I will provide a series of talks on NW weather and the other instructors will be talking about effects of wildfires and about lowland forests. Plus, hikes and canoe trips and good organic food in a beautiful location. For more information go to:

http://www.ncascades.org/programs/seminars/course.html?workshop_id=1018

Coming Soon: Culture Kills: The Layouts Edition

I think I am one of the last people using Blogger to not switch over to Layouts. I like being able to edit the HTML and I've liked having the level of control over aspects of this blog that I will potentially lose during a transistion to the new system.

But I think I am going to have to make the leap, because frankly, there are a lot of features I am missing out on, and the fact that I lost 6 months worth of comments already makes the fear about losing something during the transition a little less scary.

And frankly, I'd rather change over before I am forced to so I can plan out the transition in a way that I am most comfortable with. Because I fear change.



Long time readers know that I value consistency, and I have largely had the same design on this blog with some tweaks here and there for almost the entire lifespan of Culture Kills, so the prospect of a radical redesign is daunting and a little offputting, but going to Layouts may indeed be the perfect time to do a redesign. If I am going to embrace the present, I might as well update things while I am at it. I've been the plaid menace for a long time, but much like a starlet getting a nose job while they are having a deviated septum worked on or someone having to repair flood damage taking that opportunity to finish their basement, I think this would give me a kick in the ass to actually start going beyond what I've been doing as of late designwise.

I don't know what this is going to look like when I am done (I have a test blog to work on things before I make the transition). But I think unlike the other times I said I was working on this site, I actually mean it this time.

Just keeping everyone in the loop.

Tags: blogger, layouts, templates, redesign, wayne's world, garth, nose job, deviated septum

Visual Storytelling: The Little Prince and Our New Embedded Charts

“My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.”

The Little Prince, Chapter 1 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Drawing Number One

Inspired by the Little Prince and in honor of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 110th birthday, we are dedicating this blog post to his timeless masterpiece The Little Prince.

The Little Prince starts with a picture titled “Drawing Number One”, which grown-ups typically interpret as a hat, but only the acute eye of a child can reveal is actually a snake digesting an elephant. Well, unfortunately we were those kids who just saw it as a sum of two Gaussians.

As the team responsible for Google’s Chart Tools, we continuously think about how to enrich your options for visual storytelling on the web. To be able to generate figures like the one above, we thought it will be cool to enhance the Image Chart API with the capability to draw TeX formulas and plot mathematical functions. Once we added these capabilities, we thought it would be even more useful to combine the two into one chart, and therefore developed a simple way to place one chart within another chart. This chart embedding is not just limited to formulas and equations; it can be applied to any combination of chart types.

As you can see, we are working hard to support all of your visualization needs, but please always keep in mind the saying of the little prince’s fox:

(a creative contribution to our user submitted charts by James Andrews)

Before saying goodbye, we invite you to open the figures above in a new tab. This way you can observe how they are rendered using URL based requests to our Image Chart server.

"And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!"

Roger Trias Sanz and Nimrod Talmon,

On behalf of the Google Chart Tools team

The Bateman-iPhone "Controversy"

Seriously, there is a huge body of water filling up with massive amounts of oil, and yet, somehow, the fact that a celebrity got pulled into an Apple Store ahead of other people is still getting press (and yes, I am now part of the problem because I am addressing it).

Come on, that wasn't even in the top 10 for rudest thing a celebrity may have done during that day.

Was it really worth covering for days now? Was anyone who wasn't actually there actively outraged that Jason Bateman got taken out of line and brought into the store?

And those of you who were, are you telling me that if you had been waiting in line for 5 hours and someone from the Apple store said you could come in before other people, would you refuse? I don't think you would.

Tags: jason bateman, iphone, apple store, phony outrage

The Best Twilight Quip of the Day

If Ben Elton and Rowan Atkinson wrote this story, they would title it "Abs and Abstinence".

via the comment section of this FlickFilosopher post.

Tags: twilight, flickfilosopher, ben elton, blackadder, rowan atkinson, wit

Save the date for Google Developer Day in your country

We are excited to announce the 2010 Google Developer Day schedule:

• Sep 28: Tokyo, Japan


• Oct 29: Sao Paulo, Brazil


• Nov 9: Munich, Germany


• Nov 12: Moscow, Russia


• Nov 16: Prague, Czech Republic

We will hold technical sessions on mobile and web technologies including Android, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine and more. It will also be an opportunity to meet both the Google team and other developers.

For any cities not listed above, here are some other events we host throughout the year:

• DevFest will be on tour through cities across Asia, Europe and Latin America. See the full schedule here.


• Check for community-run Google Technology User Group meetups near you!

Registration is not open yet, but we will let you know when registration opens for each country in the coming months. For now, be sure to save the dates, and feel free to use our official hashtags for your discussions: #gdd2010jp, #gddbr, #gddde, #gddru, #gddprague.

By Susan Taing, Google Developer Team

Metacritic's 15 Movies The Critics Got Wrong

Over the weekend, I read an interesting article on Metacritic about the 15 Movies the Critics Got Wrong, and I thought it was worth talking about my opinion about their choices.

Their criteria was looking at movies that scored less than a 40 on the site and seeing how they held up.

There are movies on the list that I am not in a position to comment on because I haven't seen them or I don't remember enough about them to say definitively if they were good or bad choices, so I am not going to bring them up in this entry.

I am in total agreement

Scrooged: Yeah, this is a holiday classic to me. You have Bill Murray playing one of his best prick characters ever, Bobcat Goldthwait playing against type and so many other wonderful actors playing integral parts to the story. It is indeed better than a 38.

Predator: I was never aware that Predator was a bad movie critically. I mean, it always seemed to work for me as an action movie and it is one of the 1980's Schwartzenegger movies that aged well. I can understand why filmmakers keep going to the Predator well too, because as a species, it does bring a lot of dramatic and action potential to the table.

Clue: I wrote a Remembering post about this movie, and more than a few of my peers piped in to say that they loved it too. It is a great cast and a wonderfully executed murder/farce (no pun intended), and Tim Curry in particular brings his A-game.

Summer School: OK, I might be agreeing with this pick because I like the movie, but I thought that even when it was released, Summer School had a certain underrated charm. And it is very much an 80's movie, though in a way, it really brought a certain kind of horror geekdom into the light, which is always a plus.

I Could See Where They Were Coming From

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: I see both sides in this. On one hand, it does do some very clever things underneath the veneer of stupidity it has. But it isn't a great comedy. It is enjoyable, but I understand why critics didn't like it then and why some may be softening there view of it today.

The Outsiders: Now I could have probably switched this movie and Summer School in this appraisal of the list, but I would rather watch Summer School than this movie. I didn't know that The Outsiders was not kindly received by critics, but over the years, it seems to have become one of those movies that multiple generations have come to enjoy, and I think that may be the reason that its critical reputation is being reexamined.

But I'm a Cheerleader: I was ok with this movie, but I wouldn't say that I loved it. I think the word I am looking for is I was ambivalent about it from a narrative standpoint, however it does have other admirable qualities.

The first two Final Destination movies: I really liked the premise of these movies, but I could understand why some critics didn't like them. But if there is going to be a shift, I am not going to be upset if more critics change their opinion of these movies, especially the first one.

Questionable

Happy Gilmore: Yeah, I know exactly why this got panned. Will I watch it when it is on? Sometimes. Do I think it is a good movie? No. Well, at least it isn't Billy Madison.

What were they smoking

Freddy Got Fingered: Yeah, I think the critical score for this (15) isn't low enough. I'm on the record saying that this is one of the worst movies ever made in the modern era.

So yeah, while there were a number of movies on that list that I could agree with the reassessment, there were a couple which really still deserve their middling and worse reputation.

After reading their list and my own views on most of the items on it, what are your feelings about it?

Tags: billy madison, happy gilmore, metacritic, adam sandler, ace ventura, summer school, the outsiders, clue, tim curry, predator, schwartzenegger, freddy got fingered, but i'm a cheerleader, final destination, scrooged, critics, tom green

The Unending Trough

The weather west of the Cascade crest has gone downhill again and the we will stay in this June funk for the next several days.

The reason: the amazingly persistent trough over the eastern Pacific. But before I get into that, above is an interesting graph, which shows the water usage in Seattle for this year, 2009, and for averages over 1985-1991 and 1999-2008 (courtesy of the nice web pages of Seattle Public Utilities).

The water usage this year is really down compared to either 2009 (a warm, dry year) or normal. It looks like few of us are irrigating our gardens, with usage just above winter levels. Another interesting fact is how much less water we use now compared to the 80s, even though population is up. Clearly, water-conserving toilets and shower heads are making a major difference, and perhaps some individuals are making better landscaping decisions (drought-tolerant plants, drip irrigation, etc). With low water usage and a cool wet late spring, Seattle reservoir levels are above normal!

Now about that trough. Below are the upper level (500 mb) weather maps for last night and for the next few days. A low or trough dominates the eastern Pacific off our coast, and that brings clouds and some light rain showers this time of the year. Highs in the mid to perhaps upper 60s for a while.

The current forecast for July 4th? You don't want to know and I don't want to tell you. And there is plenty of time for the forecast to change. Just have indoor options for your big holiday barbecue!

Sunday Video: Why I Love Wrestling

I think I have a stock video to go to when someone asks me what is so great about wrestling.

There are some great spots in this match.... the backflip is just killer in and of itself.

Tags: mike quackenbush, claudio castagnoli, chikara, lucha, high flying, sabotage, beastie boys, tpi 06

Week 7: Pageant of the Transmundane

This week, Youtube added a feature that allows users to add the sound of vuvuzelas to videos by pressing on a soccer ball icon at the bottom. Yeah, you thought I was going to be the only one not making a joke about them, didn't you?

This week's winning entry comes to us from Stories From Suburbia.

In this case it is a fake CNN report about Toy Story 3 that careens into Tarantino Country. And it is pretty funny.

And because this is in the land of stylish homage, well, this bit of wonder from Max Glikman's Pulp Simpsons seemed the most appropriate.



Congrats David. 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.

EDIT: Wow, this is embarrassing. I somehow got the link to the original CNN story as the entry identifier. I don't know how that happened, but I apologize for that error and it has been corrected.

Tags: pageant of the transmundane, homer simpson, pulp fiction, reservoir dogs, vuvuzela, stories from suburbia, youtube, cnn, toy story 3, quentin tarantino, max glikman, pulp simpsons

Low Clouds over the Pacific

Perhaps the most important characteristic of June weather over the west side of the Northwest is the persistent low-level clouds--the cause of the annual June gloom or Junuary, as some wits like to call it.

There is a reason for the low clouds: -the NE Pacific is full of them this time of the year. Look at the visible satellite picture above (from Friday at 12:30 PM PDT). Most of the Pacific is covered in clouds. In fact, more of the Pacific has cloud cover now than during the middle of the winter! Nearly all of these clouds are stratus and stratocumulus, associated with some drizzle at best.

Even coastal California gets hit by this stuff--in fact it is worse for them than for us. Never plan a summer vacation in Monterrey if you want lots of sun.

Why so many clouds? Ironically, it has to do with high pressure. During the spring and early summer the east Pacific anticyclone (high pressure area) strengthens and moves northward and the Aleutian low attenuates. Below is the sea level pressure for yesterday at 5 PM....you can get a feel for the situation. High pressure is associated with weaker winds and sinking air.

Sinking is strongest aloft and weakens towards the surface (the air can't move through the surface). Sinking causes warming, so there is more warming aloft...this produces a stable situation with little mixing (inversion or near inversion conditions). Air near the surface thus gets moister and moisture without the mixing down of dry air aloft. Another factor is warm air moving off Asia and Alaska....as the air cools down over the warm it eventually can cool to saturation.

The result of both mechanisms: lots of low marine clouds. With higher pressure offshore (associated with the high) and lower pressure inland, the low clouds are pushed into the western lowlands. Generally you can escape them by traveling east of the Cascades, since they are quite shallow.

High pressure and cooler air on the western side and lower pressure east of the Cascades produce a bounty for some of us--strong winds and lots of wind energy downstream of gaps in the Cascades, like downstream of the Columbia Gorge or in the Ellensburg region (I have a section in my book on this).

Anyway, knowing why we have the low clouds won't get rid of them, but perhaps understanding their cause and possible benefits will make them easier to tolerate.

A New Star for Escape From New York?

I just read that Timothy Olyphant may be replacing Gerard Butler as the star of the upcoming remake of Escape from New York.

I am on the record as being against a remake of Escape from New York on general principle, but if forced to talk about it, I could see how Gerard Butler could have played Snake Plissken.

Tim Olyphant on the otherhand? Not so much.

I liked him in Go and a few other things, but when I think of him, I can't see him being Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell made that role and Gerard Butler probably would have been able to do something with that opportunity.



I am hearing his voice trying to play Snake Plissken, and it is just so wrong in my head. And that is the thing that is really turning me off his potential attachment to this remake that didn't need to be made in the first place. Kurt Russell he is not. He plays anger in a completely different way, and I don't think that what he does will do the character justice. Well, no one but Russell can do the role justice, but he would do a little less than Butler.

Tags: escape from new york, tim olyphant, gerard butler, remake, action movie, john carpenter, travesty

Finally! The 75F Ceiling is Broken

Today, temperature at Seattle Tacoma Airport has reached the the magic number--75F-- in fact later this afternoon temperature climbed to 77F. This is the latest into the summer season that Sea Tac has reached 75F for the first time. As apparent in the high resolution visible satellite image below--a clear zone existed today over western Oregon and Washington. Offshore extensive low-level cloudiness was in place, while eastern Washington was generally cloud with some convective showers over the northern portions.


Significant pressure changes have occurred during the past several hours, with the onshore pressure gradient reversing: pressure is now higher on the coast than inland, and some cooler ocean air will move in. Tomorrow will not only be cooler, but there will be considerable clouds and some light showers over the region.

I have gotten a large number of comments suggesting that the Iceland volcano has been the cause for our cool weather. Let me be absolutely clear on this...there is no reason to think this is true. None. The continuing eruption is NOT putting large amounts of sulfuric acid aerosol into the stratosphere---which is the only way that volcanic eruptions can have climatic impacts. Remember--Mt. St. Helens had virtually no climatic signal for the same reason.

I Can't Believe This Actually Exists

South Park, you've doomed us all (even though this was published before that episode).

Tags: cameron pierce, south park

What the Blogging Village Told Me Yesterday

Literally, I saw this message (in these words and others) in tens of blog posts, comments, etc. yesterday:

I had reservations about The Green Hornet movie, but after watching the trailer, I think it may be good now.

And I was starting to get into that too. But MaryAnn Johanson brought up an excellent point which made me reconsider that position myself.

The release date.

It is coming out in January. You know the month that for the most part, the studios dump their awful movies into like toxic waste.

Yes, there are lists of good/great movies that were released during that month, but they are few and far between.

So let's just say, I have greater doubts about The Green Hornet today than I did before this trailer was released based on its release date alone.

Tags: green hornet, seth rogen, trailer, january, junkyard, comic adaptation, release date

HTML5 Rocks!

The term "HTML5" covers so many different topics that developers have a hard time getting up to speed on all of them. Some APIs and features are part of accepted standards, while some are still a work in progress. Additionally, there are a number of great resources out there, but most are still very hard to find. As announced on the chromium.org blog, Google is releasing a new developer resource dedicated to all that is HTML5, HTML5Rocks.com.

The site is broken up into four main sections:

Interactive Presentation
The presentation everyone is talking about! An interactive slide deck written entirely in HTML5 which demonstrates many of HTML5’s features. It even includes inline examples you can tinker with.

HTML5 Playground
The best way to learn this stuff is to try it out. The Playground is a sandbox area for editing and experimenting with live samples.

Tutorials
We're launching the site with an initial set of nine tutorials covering a bunch of different areas. We’ll continue to add more over time based on your input.

Resources
We've hand-picked some of our favorite tools, reference material, and sites; all generated by the online community. Do check them out. They’ll come in handy when developing your next web app.

We hope HTML5Rocks will help developers put HTML5 to use in the real world, today. We’d love to hear your thoughts on improving the site! Send us a tweet at @ChromiumDev or post to the Chromium HTML5 group with requests for content.

By Eric Bidelman, Google Chrome Developer Relations

I Want to Live La Vita Lucha

If it was socially acceptable, and I didn't wear glasses, I would totally be into wearing a lucha mask all the time.

I mean, there is just something cool in my mind about being the masked man all the time. It is as if you are hiding your identity, but at the same time, you are still very recognizable.



It doesn't even look out of place with a suit. Then again, both El Santo and the Blue Demon are cooler than I will ever be, so perhaps it is just the two of them that can pull off such a combination.

If I was going to be bold, I guess I would have to be worried about going into a bank or shop and having the teller/clerk freak out because they thought I was wearing a balaklava and was therefore there to rob the joint. Once again, criminals ruin it for the rest of society.

I mean, ideally, I'd want to be dapper and suave like the aforementioned El Santo, or work it like Rey Mysterio.



But in all likelihood, this is more representative of me with a lucha mask.



Sigh.

Tags: la vita, lucha, luchador, rey mysterio, el santo, blue demon, balaklava, billy madison, revolting blob, mexican wrestling, mask, superhero

Food and Character Labels

According to this study in Pediatrics, children are more likely to choose food with a 'Shrek' or other character on the label than ones without. This is something food marketers were well aware of. Also, interesting in the study is that the 'Shrek effect' is lower for healthy foods than unhealthy ones. That is all very well but then, the study's authors making a flying leap into policy:

Overall, our results provide evidence that licensed characters can influence children’s eating habits negatively by increasing positive taste perceptions and preferences for junk foods. Given that 13% of marketing expenditures ($208 million) targeting youths are spent on character licensing and other forms of cross-promotion, our findings suggest that the use of licensed characters on junk food packaging should be restricted.

In fact, the study shows no such thing. It shows that labeling can induce a preference for less healthy foods but it says nothing about whether that will lead to more consumption of those foods. That depends on price and also on parental-child relative bargaining powers which can easily mean that a Shrek label allows parents to negotiate a lower consumption of unhealthy foods.

To be sure, it may be that the Shrek effect implies all of the problems the paper conjectures but that has to be studied directly. For instance, is it the case that when offered a deal between 2 carrots and one Shrek labeled 25g chocolate versus 1 carrot and plain labeled 50g chocolate, the children always the latter? What precisely is the rate of exchange? We need to know that before jumping to policy conclusions. 

At the moment, the study does explain why unhealthy foods may attract labels while healthy ones do not. So it is a useful contribution to the business of food marketing.

Interactive Transcripts and Automatic Captions for Developer Videos

Did you notice the new Interactive Transcript feature that lets you scan quickly through the full text of any owner-captioned video that you’re watching on YouTube? For videos from I/O, that means you can quickly scan through a 60 minute talk to find just the part of the talk that you need to see. Or use your browser search with the Interactive Transcript to find a mention of an API call, and then click on a word in the transcript to jump straight to that part of the video.

Because developers don’t all speak English (and because some developers speak really fast when presenting) we caption every video that we post to http://www.youtube.com/googledevelopers. Most of the year, that’s a pretty easy thing to keep up with. But last year, when we posted all the videos for Google I/O 2009, it took us months to get everything done.

This year, we captioned everything within 24 hours or less of the videos going live. I’m excited about that, because it wouldn’t have been possible without the new auto-caption and auto-timing features in YouTube. We also did something a little nerdy -- we used four different methods of captioning.

If you use YouTube to share talks from your own developer events, you might find this summary useful.

The two fastest options for producing and cleaning up our captions used auto-timing. We uploaded a transcript and had YouTube’s speech recognition calculate the timecodes for us.

The two auto-timing methods were:

• CART live real-time transcript + auto-timing
  Because we had professional real-time transcriptionists at I/O, we could instantly caption anything that had a live session transcript. That’s how we got the keynotes captioned on the day of the event. We also used this method for the android talks.

• Professional transcription + auto-timing
  This was less expensive than CART, and faster than full captions with timecodes, but slower than real-time transcription because we had to get video files to the transcribers.

Although these methods were fastest, auto-timing turned out not to be perfect for all videos. When mic quality varied, or we had too many speaker changes in a short period of time (e.g panel discussions or fireside chats), the timing sometimes slipped out of sync. You can still use the Interactive Transcript to see what was said, but it’s not ideal.

The two slower methods that we used were:

• Pure 'traditional' captioning
  This is what we did last year for Google I/O 2009 videos. It’s slower, and more expensive, because you have to transcribe and set all the timecodes correctly. But the end result is 100% accurately timed. We did this to fix a video that the auto-timing had a lot of difficulty with.

• Speech recognition (auto-captions) with human cleanup and editing
  This gave us perfect timecodes, just like traditional captions, and took less time than traditional captioning. It took slightly longer than auto-timing alone because we had to download the machine-generated auto-captions from YouTube to do the edits.
  
  Automatic captions are fantastic if you don't have time or budget to put any work into your captioning. But for I/O, we wanted our captions to be perfect on technical terms, so fully automatic captions weren't the best fit.

Not all of these methods are equal in terms of quality, but it’s interesting to compare. To see which method was used on a video, look for the track name in the caption menu. To compare owner-uploaded captions with pure machine-generated auto-captions, you can always choose ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the caption menu for our videos.

If you’d like to help improve caption quality, please watch a video and fill out our caption survey to tell us what you think of these captions! We know some of them are going to be a little off -- if you report issues, we’ll fix them.

By Naomi Bilodeau, Google Developer Programs

Culture Kills Reviews: Kung Fu Movies

After playing God Hand, I got really nostalgic for the kind of movies I used to watch as a kid, so I went a little nuts at a video store (as an earlier post indicated) and bought some quality kung fu movies.

Now, my definition of what is and is not a good kung fu movie is likely as nebulous as Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography. Basically, I know it when I see it. I've seen some really bad ones over the years, but I got lucky and got a bunch that all fit together nicely.

These reviews are also listed in the order I watched them, and the order I watched them in seemed to increase my enjoyment of each individual movie.

King Boxer: Originally released as The Five Fingers of Death, this was one of the first kung fu movies to be given a decent sized release in North America, and it beat Enter the Dragon to the theatres by a few months. It tells the story of a promising kung fu student named Chi-Hao (Lo Lieh), who must win tournament for the glory of his school and to win the hand of the woman he loves. From the trailer, you can see where Quentin Tarantino got the idea for putting the theme from Ironside in Kill Bill in the same kind of context. It was also one of the first films to use powder/fuller's earth to show the impact of hits, a technique that really caught on with other filmmakers. What I liked about this movie, aside from some of the excellent fight scenes, was the number of identifiable characters who were in play, and the story went in directions I really wasn't expecting based on genre conventions.

Kung Fu Hustle: Taking place in 1930's Shanghai, the film follows the battle between the Axe Gang and the residents of Pig Sty Alley, a semi-slum owned by an loud demanding woman and her lecherous husband in a world where it seems that nearly everyone knows kung fu. In the middle of this situation is Sing (Stephen Chow), a good hearted man who wants to join the Axe Gang to forget the humiliations of the past and repress that side of himself. This is a movie which is very much a comedy, and the kung fu is heavily augmented with CGI often for comic effect. It is a movie that owes as much to Warner Brothers cartoons as the work of the Shaw Brothers. It was a very funny and entertaining, but as I was in the mood for hardcore kung fu action, so it may not have been the right time to watch this movie for that. For the humor, it was pure class though.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin: One of the essential "training" movies in the genre, Gordon Liu stars as San Te, a student whose friends, family and teacher are all killed by the Manchus and he plots his revenge by becoming a master of Shaolin kung fu. But to do so, he must conquer the 35 grueling training chambers. And for a movie whose entire second act is entirely training, it is really kickass. I highly enjoyed this, and this was exactly the kind of movie I was looking for in terms of action. When San Te succeeded at passing a challenge, I was super pumped for him, and the inevitable retribution to those that did him wrong in the first reel was satisfying. Gordon Liu shaved his head for the starring role in this movie, and he kept the look throughout the rest of his career. Fun Fact: Both Gordon Liu and Lo Lieh went on to play the infamous Pai Mei (the man who destroyed the Shaolin temple).

Fist of Legend: This is basically a remake of the 1972 Bruce Lee film, Fist of Fury starring Jet Li in the same role. And it was awesome. This film takes place in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and concerns the events following the suspicious death of a Chinese kung fu master and the return of one of his top students, Chen Zhen (Jet Li), from his studies in Japan. What follows is the application of so much foot to ass that the whole thing is an artful example of brutal, elegant beauty. Great pacing, exceptional fight choreography (there were fights that I watched mouth agape) and a story I cared about... that is a triple threat really. This is going to be a hard movie to follow, as I was thoroughly impressed on every level.

I would highly recommend all four of these movies, but if I had to recommend just one, it would be Fist of Legend.

Tags: potter stewart, kung fu, god hand, i know it when i see it, king boxer, lo lieh, five fingers of death, kung fu hustle, the beast, stephen chow, warner brothers, cartoon, enter the dragon, fist of legend, fist of fury, jet li, gordon liu, quentin tarantino, bruce lee, comedy, shanghai, pai mei, shaolin, 36th chamber of shaolin, training movie, shaw brothers, ironside, kill bill

About.com partners with Google to make the web faster

At About.com we've always valued coding and serving our Web pages efficiently. It's good business sense: reducing operating costs while delivering on the promise of giving users the relevant, quality knowledge they need to quickly and easily accomplish their needs.

Our collaboration with Google's 'Make the Web Faster' team this spring has focused on the following projects:

• Combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files to reduce external page calls.
• Serving static content from a domain without cookies.
• Leveraging browser and server-side caching wherever possible.
• Compressing image file sizes on output, and serving .png wherever possible.
• Asking rich media vendors and the Internet ad industry at large to take performance considerations into account when building and serving rich media ads. Any improvements made will ultimately benefit the advertiser, the server, the publisher and the user.

Our efforts thus far have yielded positive results: we've improved page load-time by an average of 19% ¹, and we expect to see further improvement through the fall as we incrementally roll changes through all 700+ sites on our network. While it's hard to see a causal impact on network-wide CPC² RPM³ exclusive of market and other seasonal factors, results from two A/B tests have been promising: one showed a 0.9% increase in CPC RPM⁴ and the other a 0.4% increase in CPC RPM⁵ on the page and throughout the user session.

Overall, we're extremely pleased with the results and excited to move forward. The experience has invigorated About.com's commitment to providing quality content and good user experiences on light-weight pages.

By Tara Long Lawner, Senior Product Manager, About.com

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[1] Percentage based on Google Webmaster Page Speed performance 03/15/10 vs. 06/03/10 on About.com's top ten sites.
[2] CPC is Cost Per Click, cost for the advertiser when the ad is clicked
[3] RPM is short for Revenue Per Mille (roman for thousand) pages. This is the revenue a website makes per thousand views of pages
[4] About.com network-wide A/B test combining external CSS and JS conducted 03/26/10.
[5] About.com network-wide A/B test serving images from a cookie-less domain conducted 04/02/10.

Unusual Murk Strikes the NW

Even for me, a lover of rain and clouds, this is going too far.

Today was an amazingly murky day for much of the region, in addition to tying the record low-high at Seattle Tacoma Airport (55F). 55F is the typical high for mid April. You have heard of all the notable records for monthly precipitation and daily temperatures--I won't bore (or depress) you with more (and there are lots more!).

But here is something interesting. Today, June 20st, one day short of the day when the sun's ray should be the strongest over the northern hemisphere, was one of the most sunless days in months...many months.

Want the proof? Here is the solar radiation received at the top of the UW Atmospheric Sciences building since March (click on image to improve quality):

Today got up to around 50 W per meter squared, which is less than ANY day in the plot (which starts on 29 March). In fact, looking at a longer period, this is the darkest day (in terms of maximum solar radiation) since early February (see figure below)

Here is more information from Mark Albright, past Washington State Climatologist:

A scan of the last 15 years of rooftop June solar radiation data shows today (20 June 2010), just one day short of the summer solstice, to be the darkest June day over at least the past 15 years on campus. We received only 2.65 MJ/m2 of solar radiation today under very dark overcast gray skies. You have to go all the way back to 10 Feb 2010, with 2.40 MJ/m2 to find a day with less solar radiation than 20 June 2010! For comparison, the darkest day of the 2009-2010 winter was 11 Jan with 0.73 MJ/m2 of solar radiation.

Considering all the comments I am getting, people are starting to get depressed. Seasonal Affective Disorder in JUNE? I don't even want to ask about the sales of sunglasses and sunscreen. But at least we won't have to worry about rattlesnakes.

Finally, if any of you are interested, I will be one of the instructors this summer (August 5-8) at the North Cascade Institute's Northwest Naturalists Weekend: Weather, Wildfire and Biodiversity. I will provide a series of talks on NW weather and the other instructors will be talking about effects of wildfires and about lowland forests. Plus, hikes and canoe trips and good organic food in a beautiful location. For more information go to:

http://www.ncascades.org/programs/seminars/course.html?workshop_id=1018

Formula Pixar: Toy Story 3

In 1995, my soon to be spouse and I saw Toy Story. It was a great movie in its own right but I recognised then that it was also a great reason to have children. We had one by the time Toy Story 2 rocked around but she was too young to come to the cinemas. She was not too young to have herself a Buzz Lightyear and being able to soon chant, "to infinity and beyond."

So it was a great pleasure to be finally able to take all three children to see Toy Story 3. Pixar have done it again. It is hard to put my finger on just what they have done. The characters are now fully realised and familiar but are still of great interest. The plot is a natural and touched on all of the themes from the previous movies including existential angst and divided loyalties. And then throughout there is a layer of comedy that, for the most part, only adults would appreciate. Suffice it to say, this movie is perhaps the first to 'get' Ken (of Barbie and Ken fame) and it is worth it just for that alone. Put that together with a tightness of composition that is error free (well, virtually error free as I am not sure "not suitable for children 3 or under" toys should be given to toddlers), and there is unlikely to be a better movie this year.

Pixar have never failed to have a hit. It is a creative legacy that now surely exceeds that of the early Disney. And the fact that they can carry it through to a third movie in a series -- which, let's face it, no one ever seems to manage (save for Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings) -- is a testament to a winning formula. These movies come around once a year at the moment and they will have our money each time.

Sunday Video: HAWP- Psychonauts

You don't even have to know what this game is to get a laugh from this video.

Some great physical comedy in this.

Tags: hey ash whatcha playin, destructoid, psychonauts, double fine, scanners, peanut butter jelly time

What's the deal with the rubber bands?

A few weeks ago:

"Dad, can we go to the store? I need to buy some rubber bands."

"We have plenty of rubber bands. What do you need them for?"

"Daaaad, these are special rubber bands. They aren't just circles but all sorts of shapes and colours."

"So what you are going to use them for?"

"We put them on our wrists and occasionally swap them with other kids."

That piqued my interest. When we got to the store, I found that these were the most expensive rubber bands in the history of the planet (clocking at at 20 cents a piece). And at no point were they intended for normal rubber band use. Suffice it to say, this is what pocket money was for.

It was a marvel to me. The company that created Silly Bandz was Brainchild products; specifically, Robert Crock according the website. They had clearly stumbled across massive profitability and it is hard to understand how. But all these elementary school kids are walking around with 30 rubber bands on each wrist. It is both ridiculous and ingenious at the same time.

But it gets better. At the moment, Silly Bandz are the most traded item on eBay -- reminding me of Beanie Babies in an earlier day. They have become a collecting phenomenon selling for 10 times their  original retail price in some cases.

Usually these crazes are trading cards. In my day, everyone had a Coca Cola YoYo but that craze was usually short-lived on account of the danger posed. The potential is there for rubber bands too but, at the moment, they are so valuable that the kids don't seem to be weaponising them yet.

[Update: some school kids' insights on Silly Bandz]

Week 6: Pageant of the Transmundane

The CEO of Facebook could be face the death penalty in Pakistan because someone created a group for Let's Draw Mohammad Day back in May. It has been reported, I don't know if it is true, but it is floating around out there on the web.

This week's winning entry comes to us from TV Casualties.

In this case, Timothy Kozar has discovered a few videos that present the AMC drama Breaking Bad as a sitcom on ABC. Having never had the chance to see the series, I did my research and it looks like the clips are from Season 3, so there may be some minor spoiler action going on.

And since the parodied material has to do with a man creating illegal chemical concoctions, I thought an image of Homer making bootleg booze would be the best representation of this week's winning entry.



Congrats Tim. 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, tv casualties, breaking bad, pageant of the transmundane, facebook, pakistan, amc, abc, drama, parody

The Great Weather Divide

Today, some of the media are forecasting general showers over western Washington, but the reality will be very different between north and south. A tight upper level low is moving SE into Oregon (see graphic above) and a band of clouds and precipitation are wrapping around it (see image).


Try this animation of the visible satellite imagery:
http://sat.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/loopsat.php?wfo=sew&area=west&type=vis&size=1

The current radar picture shows that showers are limited to the south Sound area...so north of Seattle it might be completely dry. This kind of pattern brings precipitation into eastern Washington and of course the Cascades. In fact, with easterly flow approaching the Cascades, normally dry locations could get hit by heavy showers. The air will be somewhat unstable after the surface heats, so thunderstorms are possible over eastern WA and over the mountains. As the low moves SE the showers should follow.

If you dig down on the Seattle National Weather Service web site you can see their graphical forecasts (http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/wfo/sectors/sew.php)...here is their prediction today for 12-h precipitation ending 5 PM--the probability of rain varies from 83% in Olympia to 32% in Bellingham.

So advice for today....want dry condition...go north.

Friday Favorite: A List Without Controversy? Is it Possible?

The answer is no.

You see, I was looking through this book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and I love lists and such, so I thought it was a great concept. And then I saw something so horrible that it made me question the merit of the entire book.

How would this have happened you ask? Well, I flipped to page 864 and found out that one of the albums I must hear before I die turned out to be Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit.

Allow me this Sheila Broflovski moment: wha Wha-WHAT?

Now, truth be told, yes, nu-metal is not my thing, and personally I think Fred Durst is about as appealing as an entertainer as a bowl full of septic tank runoff is as a meal. No, this wasn't about the fact that I don't like the band. It is the fact that they picked a horrible album by them, one that was largely panned. I mean, if they had taken one of their earlier albums, then I wouldn't have blinked an eye at it.

Now, I know the argument can be made that lists like these are a subjective kind of thing, and in all honesty, I agree with that. However, on some level, there is some concensus on what is and is not a good album, and I would have thought that a panel would have sifted through this process. I mean, there are always albums on these lists that I disagree with, and others that I think belong there, but never before have I been so stunned by an inclusion where money or services didn't change hands.

Maybe there is some critical gap between North America and Britain that caused this to happen. I mean, there has to be some explanation aside from the fact that Interscope records was underwriting the book, which is a tactic they've used in the past.

The proof is in the pudding really.



I mean, does this picture lie? Or does it represent too small a sample? How about this rating amalgamation then?

So I'll put it this way. I would rather die than listen to that album in this lifetime.

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I am a little bummed because last week I noticed that most of the posts from my first 6 months of blogging are now without comments (they've seemed to have disappeared sometime over the last month). I've written Google about it, but I haven't heard anything. I hope they come back soon.

Tags: limp bizkit, 1001 albums, before you die, interscope, allmusic, robert dimery, nu-metal, fred durst, king of the douchebags, south park, broflovski, wha-wha-what, chocolate starfish, hotdog, water

Don't Forget Portland...and the weekend

Snow at Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood on Wednesday

I talk a lot about Seattle wather in this blog (for obvious reasons), but as bad as it has been in western Washington, Portland and vicinity have been worse. For example, Portland has broken its ALL TIME MONTHLY RECORD precipitation for June, HALFWAY through it. Impressive. There has been a persistent trough over the WA and as a result Portland has often got the brunt of incoming systems.

Here are the temperature and precipitation records this month for Portland. Few days have risen to the normal highs, and the last few days have been extraordinary cool with highs not even reaching 60F. Some days have experienced all time record low highs. The soggy conditions reached a pinnacle on the 6th when Portland had 1.48 inches in a day.

There is one major silver lining in this heavy-duty cloudiness....the waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge are running very high. I love waterfalls and headed down there this week and was not disappointed. Big flows, huge sprays, and warming up near the big fire at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson makes the cold go away. And all the while sun was always close by...just head east to Hood River or beyond and sun and relative warmth beckons.

Or if you prefer fresh snow...no problem! Head for Mount Hood, where several inches fell at Timberline Lodge (see top picture).

We are now in a short improving trend and tomorrow should be partly cloudy and temps in the 60s. But I am afraid that things will go downhill on Saturday with a new upper low over us (see graphic), bring temps in the 50s and some precipitation.