Wilma: Highly uncertain, models generally forecasting significant weakening of the storm and a movement towards Southern Florida over the next three days. Might end up not being a big deal for Florida.
The tropical wave over the Lesser Antilles: Could become a tropical cyclone, but again, highly uncertain.
24-Hour News Networks: We have a high confidence [...]
Thomas Schelling, in an analysis of coordination, described a situation in which two people wish to meet in New York City on a given day, but cannot communicate the time or place at which they should meet. At the time, he suggested that beneath the clock at Grand Central Station at noon would be [...]
At 1AM EDT, The National Hurricane Center issued a special advisory:
“THIS SPECIAL ADVISORY IS TO UPDATE THE INITIAL AND THE FORECAST INTENSITY OF WILMA. AN AIR FORCE PLANE JUST MEASURED 162 KNOTS AT 850 MB AND A MINIMUM PRESSURE OF 901 MB IN A PINHOLE EYE. WILMA IS NOW A VERY STRONG CATEGORY FOUR [...]
Last Thursday, Tyler Cowen posed an exam question for his macro class, consisting of a passage from a Michael Mandel column in Business Week, and the inquiry, “True, false, or uncertain?” The passage in question read as follows:
“Let’s do the calculations. Over the past 10 years, the U.S. has run up an accumulated goods [...]
“I don’t trust books. They’re all fact and no heart.” –Stephen Colbert
“The Colbert Report” (pronounced with silent final consonants) debuted last night, and it looks like it will be worth watching, if not quite as much as its parent show, “The Daily Show“. Steven Colbert is hilarious, and some of the digs [...]
I have a few more extensive thoughts in the pipeline, but in the meantime, I present the two ways other than the amazing college football and the White Sox that I have managed to have a less-productive-than-average-weekend:
Pondering when Tropical Depression Twenty-Four will become Hurricane Wilma, and whether it will make landfall on the US Gulf [...]
It’s halftime at the Northwestern-Purdue football game, and the Wildcats are up 28-9. Their record thus far doesn’t look at all special; assuming a win today, they’ll have a 4-2 record, 2-1 in the Big Ten. Their two losses, however, were a cliffhanger defeat by undefeated #10 Penn State and an impressive Arizona [...]
Yesterday’s Washington Post reported that scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies have reported a record high global average temperature during the first nine months of this year. This is a good time to note one of the best resources for discussions of the science behind global climate modeling, RealClimate. It “is [...]
On one of those Monday afternoons where law is strangulation and nagging questions about the nature of the universe become an urgent priority, a gnat was flying around my desk and I realized I didn’t know if insects got tired or if their life span was too short for any kind of exhaustion short of [...]
A couple weeks ago, I said, “Of course, DDT was never banned, and has actually become far less effective due to mosquitos developing resistance to it.” This was in the context of the canard that environmentalists are responsible for malaria deaths due to the “ban” on DDT use.
One of my friends asked me about [...]