Frognostication

Many of you come to this blog for state-of-the-art weather predictions based on the latest technology. Others look for insights derived from decades of regional weather research. And I do appreciate your interest in the blog.

But sometimes insights come from sources other than high-resolution numerical models, Doppler radars, and other advanced technology. For example, it is well known that some animals sense upcoming storms or the character of future weather. How many times have you heard about birds finding shelter before a storm, or wild animals getting out of the way of imminent tsunamis? There is great forecasting potential in this innate understanding by nature's denizens.

Many of you are familiar with the most famous animal weather predictor of all, the well-known groundhog Punxsutawney Phil,who reveals the upcoming weather from his underground den in Gobbler's Knob, PA.

Let me be honest--I have my doubts about Phil's ability to predict weather anywhere and particularly the Northwest. Why would a creature that winters underground develop such skill? And could he possibly have any insights into the upcoming storms and temperatures on the other side of the continent? I doubt it and so should you.

There are real reasons to doubt the Northwest forecasting prowess of Punxsutawney Phil

Reliable animal-based prediction for us here in the Northwest could only come from a local resident and one that lives and survives exposed to the environment. And considering our issues with moisture, a wet environment at that.

Thus, it was with some excitement that I learned that a local group based in Snohomish have heavily researched the weather prediction ability of local frogs, and have garnered the aid of one frog in particular named "Snohomish Slew". Documented by Native American sources and confirmed by detailed verification of previous frog-based forecasts, these folks in Snohomish have demonstrated near perfect weather prediction skill using amphibian guidance. As documented in the picture below, the chosen frog is a keen observer.

Snohomish Slew taking a close look at the sky

All this research came to a head in Snohomish on Saturday, a day officially known as Ground Frog Day. Attendants of the honored frog oracle learned of his prediction through means they are not willing to reveal, but you can see the proceedings by viewing this video (click on the picture):


Some of you might be concerned that these priests of the great frog meteorologist resemble escapees from some retro Saint Patrick's day Bacchanalia, but I would give their appearance no notice--looks means little in the weather prediction business.

And what was the noble frog's forecast? Mild and breezy. The former condition is in direct contraction to the "modern" predictions based on La Nina statistical correlations with NW weather.

I for one would not bet against the frog in such matters.

Mean streets

You'd expect a hard-ass game show from Spike, and you'd be right. The network for testosterone types of all ages from 15 to 25 has ordered twenty eps of Repo Games from the producers of - what else? - Jersey Shore.

The network says the show's concept is Cops meets Jeopardy. No, Alex doesn't get hauled off to the hoosegow. What happens is that two repo men give a debtor one last chance to keep his about-to-be-repossessed auto. If the debtor can't answer three of five trivia questions correctly, off goes the car. If he knows his trivia, the debt is forgiven on the spot.

Maybe we could take this format to hospital emergency rooms. Got a broken leg, buddy? We'll fix it and give you five hundred bucks if you can tell me who the president of Ukraine is.

Oh, I shouldn't give Spike ideas.

Javier Bardem: Bond Villain?

Even if it is just a rumor at this point, I really like the idea of Javier Bardem playing the villain in the upcoming James Bond film.

Given some of his other roles, he could definitely bring a lot of nuance and charm to such a role, and I think Daniel Craig would have a lot to work with when the two actors were both on screen at the same time.

I mean, we could end up with a film directed by Sam Mendes starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Javier Bardem and Dame Judy Dench? I don't know about you, but that is a pretty strong lineup.

I think even if I didn't like the Bond movies, I would be interested in the possibilities of such casting.

P.S. While we are discussing James Bond, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the passing of composer John Barry, who worked on over ten Bond songs/soundtracks.

Peter King is Self-Indulgent; GTOG is Anything but Nonplussed

By Artistry

We don't talk too much here about Sports Illustrated's Peter King, because if you think Ron Cook is an easy target, consider for a moment that King has a regular section in his Monday Morning Quarterback column devoted to his "coffee nerdness." Really. I'm making an exception today because King in this week's column did two things that particularly bothered me.

1) He fell victim to the all too common sports media tendency to completely misunderstand the actual meaning of words. Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue was "nonplused" by criticism of the labor deal he negotiated a few years back, King wrote Monday. Meaning Tagliabue was unconcerned or not surprised. OK, first of all, it's spelled "nonplussed." Second of all, it means the opposite of what you think it means. Look it up.

2) He wrote these words:  "Now the only movies I absolutely have to see before the Oscars are The Social Network, Black Swan and Inception. Don't worry. I'll get to them. Can't wait to see them." To which I would respond: I'm not worried. Good for you. I'm pretty sure not even your own family cares. Nonplussed?

Definitely.

Go Daddy Makes The Web Faster by enabling mod_pagespeed

As part of our Make The Web Faster initiative, Google announced the availability of mod_pagespeed, an open-source module for Apache webservers to automatically accelerate the sites they serve. Go Daddy, the top web hosting provider and world's largest domain name registrar, announced that they would roll out the mod_pagespeed feature for their Linux Web hosting customers. The feature is now available and is in use by Go Daddy customers who have already started to report faster webpage load times.

“Who on the Internet wouldn't want a faster website?” asked Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “The benefits of mod_pagespeed are really a slam dunk. It’s built to boost users’ web performance, and ultimately, the bottom line for their business.”

By using several filters that implement web performance best practices, mod_pagespeed rewrites web page resources to automatically optimize their content. The filters improve performance for JavaScript, HTML and CSS, as well as JPEG and PNG images.

Mike Bender, co-creator of photo-blog AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com and Go Daddy customer, detected a 48% decrease, slicing the load time for his image-rich website from 12.8 to 6.6 seconds. mod_pagespeed speeds up the first visit of the site by reducing the payload size and improving compression. Repeat visits are accelerated by making caching more efficient and decreasing the size of resources such as CSS and HTML on the page as demonstrated in this chart (where smaller is faster):

“From the moment we enabled mod_pagespeed, the difference was noticeable,” said Bender. “It was a simple ‘flick of the switch,’ and the site started loading faster.”

For Go Daddy customers currently using the Linux 4GH web hosting platform, find out how to enable mod_pagespeed for your own website here. Other webmasters can install mod_pagespeed binaries or build directly from source.

By Joshua Marantz, Google 'Make The Web Faster' Initiative and Flavio Andrade, Go Daddy Product Line Manager

2 Cylons and 3 Cylon Fleet deployments later

We played a 5 player game of Battlestar Galactica again last night.

Admiral Adama (Me, there is just something about the "Old man" that makes him fun to play - beside the obvious bonus of being Admiral of the fleet)

Tom Zarek (president)
Gaius Baltar
Lee "Apollo" Adama
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace

Thins started out OK for the fleet, some minor crisis cards that didn't do much impact on our resources. However we lost lots of time by drawing Crisis Cards without any "Jump preparation" symbols making the fleet pretty much stationary. Gaius Baltar acted weird very early on, in an open bidding, leading us to throwing him in the brig. The problem was that the Gaius Baltar player was new to the game, on the other hand he was certain of what he was doing and insisted on playing a bad card in our open bidding to overcome the crisis. Everyone else was weirded out and as a precaution we locked him up while remaining confused about his motives. Was he a Cylon or just screwing around?

I myself caused some unintended confusion and suspicion at the start of the game by bidding with the wrong type of cards making everyone to believe that a Cylon had sabotaged the bidding when it was just me screwing up - and not being able to tell about it lol!

Soon after Baltar had been thrown in the brig "Apollo" joined him as well - much nagging and complaining from the "Apollo" player. I myself was not certain of any of those two in the brig being Cylons. The weird play from Baltar, and complaining from Apollo could be interpreted any way. What followed was relative peace and good progress without any apparent sabotage. If someone had become a Cylon during the first Loyalty phase then it surely must have been someone in the brig.

As the Admiral I got to pick the destination cards, and I think we were lucky enough to draw the jump distance of “3” during our first draw. Travel 3, lose 3 fuel. An even trade, but I myself think it is much more important to go far very early on in the game before your resources start to dwindle due to crisis cards. So in our first two jump we had traveled the distance of 5. I’m pretty certain that the “Starbuck” player was dealt a “You are a Cylon” card during this phase because he had played straight up to this point. I got the Cylon sympathizer card but it had no effect since we were down to red on one resource already.

Starbuck revealed herself as a Cylon after a few turns and started bothering us with sporadic Cylon abilities. Things started to go downhill from there. Cylon Fleets started to deploy, at one time we had 4 heavy raiders at our door carrying boarding parties and our armory location was destroyed meaning we would not be able to handle any boarding parties at all!

We had a lucky break with me commanding unmanned Vyper fighters and managing to shoot down 3 of the 4 heavy raiders. The following turn we freed Apollo as well – much to this players joy making at least me a bit cautious and slightly more uncertain if that was the right thing to do. But we could not handle the Cylon BS with only 2 players operating the fleet and having 2 players in the brig.
We halfheartedly released the Baltar character as well, he had acted very weird throughout the game so far (in true Baltar fashion), helping us out in every single bidding from the brig. I was quite certain that he could be the 2nd Cylon – and since I had become the President as well due to a crisis card I had gotten hold of a presidential Quorum card allowing me to take a look at 1 Loyalty card of my choice. My intention was to use this card in my next turn to check out Baltar (now in possession of 3 Loyalty cards!).

That plan didn’t play out as planned as Baltar revealed himself as a Cylon just before I could do this. At least we were certain who the Cylons were now. Things didn’t look that bad yet, the odds were about 50-50 for a Human victory. However soon the Cylon Fleet deployments started appear in successive order (as they always seem to do even with a well shuffled deck of destiny cards). No less than 3 Cylon Deployments in about 5 turns time. I managed to destroy 2 base stars with the 2 nuclear weapon tokens in my possession earlier in the game. So without powerful weapons we were up to our knees in shit. 2 base stars firing ordnance weapons, and enemy fighters and transports wearing our fighter capacity down. The game ended when we were about to make a risky jump where we could lose 3 Population (all the population we had left). However since enemy fighters closed in on or unprotected civilian fleet tokens there was not much choice. In one last desperate attempt we played a card which tweaked the die roll giving us a +2 bonus, giving us a chance of successfully jumping without losing any civilian ships with 5+ on a D8 die roll. We rolled a 1…. Last civilian ships were left behind and we went down to 0 on Population.

However, when we turned the “Destination cards” to see how it would have ended if we had managed to jump – It turned out we would have ran out of fuel and become unable to make that final jump to victory!

A very exciting game of Battlestar Galactica, started out with a lull and ended with epic space combat and the extinction of mankind. Just the way we like it :-D

Morning Skate: Letang, Bang; Super Bowl Storylines Now so Tired, Game May Need to be Delayed

By Artistry

Much like Mario Lemieux finally learned how to be a champion by playing with Gretzky, Messier, and Coffey in the 1987 Canada Cup tournament, Kris Letang took a major step toward fulfilling his Hall of Fame potential by leaping into the fiery crucible of the 2011 NHL All Star Game and emerging with two dazzling goals. Not really. I'm pretty sure Henrik Lundqvist scored two goals in "Team Lidstrom's" 11-10 victory over "Team Staal," and Letang worked harder at the team's holiday party than he does here:



Still, it's a good thing he gave us some highlights, because Marc-Andre Fleury reportedly gave up 13 goals in 4 minutes of play. Asked this morning if he was sorry he missed the game, Sidney Crosby replied, "What ga....Oh. No. Er, it was a special day for the league and the people of Carolina." When asked the same question, Evgeni Malkin said, "Girls like."  In other news today:

- Packers Coach Mike McCarthy is from Pittsburgh. The Staals are brothers.

- I was reaffirming my decision never to watch NBA games Sunday by sitting with my buddy as he took in the Celtic's convincing win over the Lakers while sporting a hideous Robert Parish t-shirt. "How are you feeling about the Super Bowl?" he asked me. "Concerned," I replied. "It's no secret how you attack the Steelers' defense."

"Do what the Patriots do," he said.

"Spread them out," we said, in unison.

You see? Not a secret. You would not know this by listening to ESPN's Mike & Mike this morning, as they tried to pass off Kurt Warner's "insights" in this regard as somehow groundbreaking or, at the very least, "fascinating." No, it is not a revelation that this is a way to beat Pittsburgh, provided you have the personnel, which the Packers do. Nevertheless, prepare yourself to listen to breathless punditry on this very topic over the next six days, because these people need to sound like they're breaking news. Take solace in the fact that if either James Harrison or Lamarr Woodley gets around the corner and pops Aaron Rodgers just once, that game plan could backfire completely.

- The Ravens have fired quarterback coach Jim Zorn. Quarterback Joe Flacco, who, at last check, has retained his job, salary, and benefits, interpreted Zorn's firing as "a personal attack on me." It's completely understandable that Flacco is upset, but GTOG advises him a) to work on his game; and b) to remember that Zorn once tried to run a fake field goal against the Giants, the Giants realized the fake was on and called timeout, and then Zorn ran the exact same play anyway.



Could be he was fired on the merits.

Sunday Video: Emily Jane White Sings Liza

I stumbled upon One Track Mind's 10 Best Tracks of 2010, and at number 3 was this gem by Emily Jane White.

Hauntingly beautiful.

Freezing

This post's title is not a description of the weather in northern areas lately. Instead, I'm talking about GSN's new pdf schedules that Alex Davis posted at BuzzerBlog. I've provided the links in the sidebar, but I have my reservations. As I wrote on the GSN Schedule board...

Might miss my guess, but I wouldn't be amazed if these files prove one thing more than ever...don't trust the pdfs. GSN will go through two months with a virtually unchanged schedule? Except for dropping World Poker Tour when the new season of High Stakes Poker debuts, and the Valentine's Day marathons of Newlywed Game and Baggage?

Whatever. I'll put links to the files on the blog, but the caveat - "last-minute changes can make these files unreliable" - will probably be plenty important. It's just really hard for me to believe the schedule will more or less freeze for two months.

Anyway, we'll certainly see big changes when Drew arrives March 28.

Polish Anti Mech and captured packed LMG

Two more Polish models, one standing anti tank rifle, and one captured German MG34 which will serve as a "Packed LMG" rulewise for my Polish SoTR platoon. The MG34 is not originaly included in the "Sharpshooter" blister and that kneeling model was intended to serve as a spotter for the sniper. But since there are no spotters for sniper teams in SoTR I figured I would use this spare model and arm him with a weapon that I actually needed to boost the firepower of my rifle teams.

Net Mouth Scramble: Athletes Continue to Struggle With Concept of Twitter; We Get It, Pouncey is Out; NHL Players Got Skillz

By Artistry

Add the Green Bay Packers to the list of professional sports franchises who may want to join the Miami Heat in sponsoring mandatory educational seminars on the perils of Tweeting. Injured Packers Nick Barnett and Jermichael Finley turned to Twitter this week to complain about the organization's treatment of its injured players, and now they seem puzzled that anyone noticed. Barnett blames the social networking service for taking his statements and making them available to others through, uh, social networking. So now he is quitting the service. Take that Twitter. Finley is laughing off his remarks that the team disrespected him and that "someone is going to pay," explaining that sometimes tweets happen in the heat of the moment. For morons players like Barnett and Finley, sending out thoughts on Twitter is apparently no different than talking to themselves. GTOG is considering offering a Twitter powerpoint presentation to professional sports teams, entitled "Tweet of the Moment; Your Players are Stupid, but Not Everyone Needs to Know About It." I think we could have something here.

Antonio Cromartie: Just Threatened via Twitter to Assault Matt Hasselbeck, Promptly Fathered Another Child

Other headlines this Sunday afternoon:

- ESPN filed its sixth report indicating that "sources" say Maurkice Pouncey will not play in the Super Bowl. GTOG's sources were telling us this as early as one week ago, when they saw Pouncey during the second half of the Jets game wearing street clothes and on crutches.

- Marc-Andre Fleury and Kris Letang took part in the NHL All-Star Saturday Skills Competition yesterday, and no one watched except maybe their families. But word is that Fleury did do a few jumping jacks before stopping Alex Ovechkin on a shootout try, so that's always worth a Youtube clip. 



Major points to Ovechkin for creativity. What a personality.*

* GTOG's official position is that Alex Ovechkin has a terrible personality. As discussed in Saturday's podcast, no amount of Skills Competition histrionics can change this.

Dry, Sun, and Modified Arctic Air

Well folks, the threat of snow around here is over for a while. Cool, dry, modified arctic air is pushing over the region, showers are rapidly dissipating, and the sun is breaking out. If the models are even half correct, the next 3-5 days will be generally dry here without any significant weather activity other than a cool down (mainly east of the Cascades) and strong easterly flow in the gaps, such as the Columbia Gorge and the Fraser.

In sharp contrast, the East Coast is going to get hit AGAIN Tuesday by a major snowstorm.

Is there a connection between our opposite weather regimes? You bet there is. As shown in this upper level map for Tuesday, when we have a big ridge, a major trough tends to build downstream (east) of us--bringing stormy weather to the central and eastern U.S. Think of the atmospheric flow aloft as analogous to a rope that you are swinging up and down. There are a series of undulating waves in the rope. The wavelength of the waves (the distance between ridge to ridge or trough to trough) in the atmosphere has a typical scale of thousands of kilometers, for reasons I won't get into now, but which is based on basic physics. So the persistent ridging over us, bringing dry, cool weather this week over the NW, brings the opposite to those poor folks east of the Rockies. Want dry weather with lots of sun...forget Florida...head to Seattle.

Locally, the cold, dry air started pushing through the Fraser Valley into Bellingham and NW Washington yesterday. Here is the latest surface weather plot for NW Washington:You can see the northeasterly flow passing over the San Juans and then moving south and west. Winds have been gusting to 40 mph and more in some locations around Bellingham from this Fraser outflow. It is interesting that the first sign of this continental air from the BC interior is often not temperature, but humidity, or rather dew point. Look at the lower, right red numbers (dewpoint) on these plots and you will see what I mean. And here is the high resolution forecast for 10 AM this morning of the winds..the Fraser outflow is quite clear.



Taking a look at the latest visible satellite image, you will see a residual band of clouds over the middle of the state (with lots of holes) and completely clear skies to the north. This full clearing will move south during the day. With cooler, drier air over us and clearing skies tonight, expect cold overnight temps--20s everyhere and some lower values in valleys and cold spots. Protect your plants!

Even colder air is surging southward into eastern Washington (see plot of current observations)
--and that will help strengthen an east-west pressure difference (higher to the east), which will accelerate the winds in the Cascade passes and the Columbia Gorge. Here is a forecast plot of the pressure pattern today...you can see the packing of the isobars...lines of constant pressure..near the Cascade crest. The colors provide lower-atmosphere temperatures and you can see the colder air (blue colors) east of the Cascade crest.

I wanted to mention that I will be speaking next Saturday (Feb 5) at Port Townsend HS at 3:30 PM about regional implications of global warming...more information is found in the link to the right.

Finally, thanks to all of you that have contributed so far....you have provided funds that are sufficient for two uninterruptable power supplies for our main modeling cluster ($900 each).

Week 37: Pageant of the Transmundane

OK, this one isn't funny, it is just weird. A couple from Ohio who moved is being prevented from selling their house because they owe 6 cents to the local water company. 6 cents.

This week's winning entry comes to us from All That Is Interesting

In this case, it is the actual advertisement for the casting call for audience in the Smells Like Teen Spirit video.

Since this week's winning entry has to do with Nirvana, I thought Homer's stint in a grunge band would be the most appropriate way to express that.

Congrats! 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.

GTOG Podcast: 31 Minutes of Heart Pounding Podcasting -- The NHL All-Star Fantasy Draft, Pens at the Break, and Super Bowl Week Preview

In a podcast that might elevate your heart rate over 200bpm, we talk about ways to improve the new All-Star format, the Pens' outlook at the All-Star break, who has the inside track on Super Bowl MVP, current Steeler Hall of Fame chances, and how to avoid getting arrested for solicitation of prostitution during Super Bowl week.

You can listen in this window, on our podcast page, on our Facebook page, or in iTunes.  Or all of the above.  You can also download the mp3 file here.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Are you a tiger parent? Results

Well, the voting on the "are you a tiger parent?" poll seems to have petered out. A couple added other ideas to the mix. Here are the results. It is pretty clear that there aren't many tiger parents reading this blog. Indeed, most of you go for mild reasoning rather than any form of coercion, incentives or punishment. That said, just giving up isn't an option that was favoured either. So most are in the middle rather than the extremes which is, of course, true by definition.

Happenings

Did I ever mention that game shows are cheap? So networks often can't resist plugging in an episode or four whenever a sinkhole opens in the schedule. And NBC has a really sinky hole called Chase, a scripted loser about chasing people, I think.

Nobody watches Chase, so NBC is again pulling it from the schedule on February 2 for another two-part Minute To Win It extravaganza. The Beat the Clock descendant costs peanuts and pulls respectable numbers, so NBC execs can't resist filling time with the stunts and silliness. As long as NBC's scripted shows keep crashing - which has been known to happen now and then - Guy Fieri and friends will keep riding to the rescue.

Money Drop is adding an online play-along game for its season finale next week. Hey, maybe they can play it on GSN Live! The EW.com story cautions: "Should the online play-along format prove popular (and the show get another season), don’t be surprised if the online component becomes a regular part of the show." Right now Money Drop may be bubble-sitting. Ratings have perked up recently, and the show is - did I mention this before? - dirt-cheap. We might see another go-round.

The Hasbro, er, Hub network will run a Valentine's Day marathon of Family Game Night, which seems to be their highest-rated game show. Kiddie games have never been my speed, but if you like six hours of children running around madly...well, tune in.

Polish Battle Chaplain

This is the Warlord Games "Major Turntadust" (or Major Popiol as in "dust" in Polish), I converted it to look even more like a priest by adding a stole and a beard. And make him look more Polish to blend him into my Polish platoon by chopping off his hat and greenstuffing a Rogatywka cap with a Polish eagle badge.

I have tried to greenstuff the Rogatywka cap before, but it is really hard. It has to be square and peaked, not too hard on the edges but not too soft either. It also needs to be slightly asymmetric with one side being more dominant, and it can't be too thick or else it looks funny. The eagle badge is also damn hard to do on this scale. I made the eagle out of a dot of greenstuff, flattened and shaped by poking at it with a sharp pin.

Rules for Battle Chaplains can be found in the "Doomsday" expansion for Secrets of the Third Reich, he functions just like the command squad medic (and takes his place) but has additional rules for fighting Weird/Occult enemies, armed with a holy relic and raising the "Cool" (leadership value) of the unit he joins by one notch which is really good.