View of the house from the (abandoned) street during Snowpocalypse V.2. Look at how the branches curve toward the earth, white gravity pressing from above. Gusts of wind peel lumps of icy snow from upper branches which cascade down, becoming a crunching avalanche. I went outside and took a bunch of photos, even a little video. It's so quiet, muffled, the only sounds are birds chirping, falling snow, and distant chainsaws.



Oh, and what appears to be a bush beside the tree? Branches. Also, the little "tree" on the left of the photo is actually a giant branch that landed thick-side down. I fear for the trees in the area.

It's lovely outside and all that, but if this means Cory Doctorow isn't able to get here for his talk on Thursday....

Stay safe and warm out there!

Chris

That Weather.com forecast I posted last night? Well, they got the windchill forecast right at -18°F but were way off on pre-windchill temps: Between 2am and 6am, actual temperatures hovered at -12°F here in Lawrence, KS.

How in the frozen hells did the native tribes and especially early pioneers survive the winters here, thousands of miles from stores where they might purchase Duraflame™ logs to warm their sod huts?

Oh, yeah, they often didn't.

BRRR,
Chris

If you've been listening to the news, you know that meteorologists are barely able to contain themselves over the glory of the storm currently pummeling most of the US. Here's what it looks like from space:


Click the image to see the WIRED story.

Meteorologists predict that the storm will bury snowfall records across the Midwest. In the East, it’s expected to deliver ice storms that could cause $1 billion in damage. It’s the latest in a string of storms fitting a pattern predicted by climate scientists. As the world warms up, the air can hold more moisture, loading storm systems with more water that’s ultimately dumped back onto the Earth.

Yes, global warming = more dramatic winter weather! It's a wild, wild world. And exciting! SNOWPOCALYPSE FOR ALL!

Chris

Wow, this is amazing. The massive storm that caused the huge storms all across the country earlier this week set a new record for low pressure in a non-tropical storm in the continental U.S. with a minimum central pressure of 28.24" or 956 mb, the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. Extratropical storms like this one occur in the spring and fall when the temperature differential between the north of the country and the south of the country is greater. This week's storm produced 24 tornado reports, severe thunderstorms, blizzard conditions, hundreds of thousands of power outages, and winds that reached 77 mph.



Shades of Day After Tomorrow.

Thanks, Bamm!

Chris

Perhaps you heard that a 62-foot-tall and 40-foot-wide statue of "Touchdown Jesus" was struck by lightning and burned to the ground on Tuesday, leaving only a blackened steel skeleton and chunks of smoldering foam.

Before Wrathful Lightning Strike:


After Wrathful Lightning Strike:

Click the images to see the story.

The church has announced plans to rebuild a bigger, better, fireproof Jesus statue by year's end. Um, folks, weren't you listening the first time? Now you're really asking for it.

Let me point you to a related story:

In 2003, actor Jim "Torture-Porn Jesus" Caviezel was struck by lightning - TWICE - during the filming of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. My favorite quote, from producer Steve McEveety: "I'm about 100 feet away from them when I glance over and see smoke coming out of Caviezel's ears."

Let this be a lesson, idolaters! The Big Guy is watching!


Click the image to see the UWEC lightning project.

In other news, early this morning I sent off the finished, edited, outta-my-hands copy of my novel, Transcendence, to my publisher, ericreynolds of Hadley Rille Books.

*Happy Dance of Done-Ness*

Chris

The Eyjafjallajökull Volcano in southern Iceland has stranded thousands of air travelers across Europe (and prevented thousands of others from returning) because of the massive cloud of volcanic ash spreading across Northern Europe. From a safe distance to someone who isn't flying to Europe, it's gorgeous. Here's what that blooming mountain looks like:


Click the image to see the APOD story.

Perhaps the most amazing volcanic eruption ever. What do you think?

[Poll #1553212]
Chris

When it rains, it pours... er....

The plows passed through this morning, but because they don't appear to know how to deal with snow in Kansas, they didn't actually remove any snow... or even push it onto the verges on the sides of the road. On the hill leading up to campus today, we have a single lane. What makes it even better? A year or so ago, neighborhood nannies decided to have the city to install little barriers in the middle of all the intersections. You guessed it: There's almost no way to get around them right now.

But here's the kicker: It appears that a water main broke near campus. On the plus side, the massive river of water running down the hill is melting the snow-drifts caused by the crappy plowing. On the down side, tomorrow's high will remain around zero, and tonight we should reach -12°F before windchill factors. Add teen-aged Kansas drivers and hilarity ensues.

I had a real blast trying to get up the hill (on an alternate route) in my Saab - a car designed for winters. In fact, at some point I simply gave up and turned around, which was fun on a one-lane-wide road buried in snow. I learned how to drive in Minnesota, and you couldn't pick a better car for this stuff, and yet. Imagine 18-year-olds in rear-drive SUVs. Good times.

At least it's Friday, so we have a couple of days before the work week resumes. Perhaps by Monday, when students and teachers will be on campus, the hill will be ice-free. It'll require heroic measures, but it could happen!

Chris

News at 10.

Today on NPR, a scientist working in Antarctica shared with us that it's warmer in Antarctica than it is in Kansas today. Seriously. The ANTARCTIC is warmer than the middle of the US. And not just by a little amount: On the Fahrenheit scale, Antarctica was 30 degrees warmer than Kansas this afternoon. Ant-freakin'-arctica.

Not surprisingly, today I had to help a friend with her disabled car. Apparently, −270°C (-455°F) interferes with an automobile battery's ability to hold a charge. Helped another friend replace a headlight. And the Saab - a car designed and built in the icy northern wastes, no less! - barely started. Needless to say, after performing said errands, I picked up more weather-proofing and insulating goodness from Ace Hardware. Despite new garage-door insulation, guess who feels no strong desire to work in the garage this evening? Or to pull out the telescope and try to catch some Mars action?

Oh, and I also picked up some new fire-and-CO detectors to replace the useless devices that came with the house. Just in case the furnace burns out from running all the time.

Keep warm out there!
Chris

For other weather-porn lovers, I share this image from WIRED magazine. A typical spring day in Kansas:


Click the image to see the story.

You really need to click the image to see it full size with info about each type of lightning.

Best,
Chris

Hi folks -

Wine
This is cool, had to share: per-capita red-wine consumption around the world:

Click the image to see the story; Click here to see a bigger image.

If I'm reading this correctly, the average Brazilian drinks 0.17 liters/day, while a Luxembourgian drinks nearly 6 liters/day (seriously? Whoah.). Something's wrong in our country, as I've examined this map in detail and can't even find the US. I'm doing my part lately, what with Cork 'n' Barrel having their 20% off wine-case sale this month (only a few days left, Larryville-ites!).

Healing
Sorry I've been such a crappy blogger lately. In large part, this is due to having seriously pulled my right-hand ring finger about a month ago (don't ask), rendering typing a huge PITA. On standard keyboards, we commonly use that finger for O, 0, L, ), and the period - way more than you'd think. I'm typing with 9 fingers now (rather, 7 fingers and a couple of thumbs; why is it called "10-finger typing"?), which is slow - and painful when I forget and use that finger.

Job
The other main reason for the lack of communication is that I've been dealing with possible job-loss next year. Budgets being what they are, I'm an easy way for the University to save a few bucks in the short term, because I'm not tenured. Even so, I have to act as if the job will go on past next year, so I've written a new proposal for the KU Certificate in Technical Communication, proposals for online versions of the courses, reports about which KU schools or colleges my students belong to and the fiscal percentage each school costs the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, a job description for the KU Technical Communication Liaison position (mine), reports on our peer institutions and how their TC programs compare to ours (embarrassing to KU), and much more. I also wrote my yearly review just before all this craziness, which happened at an auspicious time, as doing that made my contributions more present in my mind. Oh, and teach two regular classes and two directed-study classes, plus read a million novels for the Campbell Award, request nominations from the publishers, gather nominations for the Sturgeon Award and put together a list of finalists (which I'll publish soon!), read submissions and select winners for several English Department awards and scholarships, plan for the summer SF program, do some consulting with other KU academic units, and so on.

So I've not only been busy with work - nothing unusual there - but stressed like something fierce.

Storms
I recently bought a 40-gallon rain barrel that collects the runoff from one-half of my garage roof. This is necessary because the new sidewalk I laid earlier this spring gets in the way of downspout drainage. Here's an indication of how much rain we've been getting this Kansas spring: Except for the few sunny days, I've been emptying the thing 3-4 times/day lately, and it's almost always overflowing in the morning. Yesterday, it filled just minutes after each time I emptied it (this is not an exaggeration - we got 6 inches of rain yesterday). This morning, I had nowhere to dump the water, because the alley is flooded and the yard is several inches deep in water, so I just poured it all down my kitchen drain.

Six inches of rain in just a few hours; that would be 54 inches of snow. Holy moly! Most of the grass seed I've put down has washed away *sigh*

Hot-Rod Newport
I've been neglecting my fun project due to the above stresses and time-devourers, plus I had made some uncomfortable discoveries that led me to suspect it hadn't been rebuilt as advertised. So, unsure how to proceed (overhaul the short-block? If I do that, why not stroke it to a 500-inch monster? But that'll eat an extra 30% more gas. So maybe just buy an already-overhauled short-block and sell the current block, saving bucks while getting more cubes, but if I do that I don't want to pull the heads and ruin the head gaskets, but... Yeah, like that), I didn't make any progress. Well, yesterday I finally just said heck with it and removed the last bolts holding down one of the heads to see for myself if the engine was overhauled. Viola! It has been! The cylinders are clean and even still show a bit of cross-hatching, and the piston crowns are imprinted with "0.030" (they're oversized), both of which verify that the engine has been rebuilt - and recently - as advertised. Woohoo! So now I can comfortably leave the short-block as-is and add the performance parts I've been collecting since I bought the car last spring, saving money, time, and fuel.

Writing
Fiction-writing has been on the back-burner as I strive to keep the job and further the KUTC program. Luckily, my editor hasn't yet gotten back to me with novel revisions, though I look forward to those soon. However, we've started talking about the cover and some other cool ideas.

Two of my stories will be coming out in new anthologies this year: Global Warming Aftermaths, edited by Eric T. Reynolds; and Sentinels In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski.

Finally, I hope to finish my technical-writing textbook before the end of the year - and post it free to the internet for all to use. Though my department's Chair and the school's Dean both think that's crazy and I should sell it to a textbook publisher. I dunno; I kind of hate how much they charge students for textbooks.

Editing
Sounds like I'll be working on an SF anthology soon - with full art inside, too! And the long-awaited Sturgeon Award winners anthology is on the front burner again.

Of course, with all this, I've also been awful about reading LJ, too. How have you been?

Best,
Chris