By Brendan Loy
As I mentioned last week, the Perseid Meteor Shower is due to peak tonight and tomorrow morning, with a possible hour-long burst of ~200 meteors per hour between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM Mountain Time (1-2am PDT, 4-5am EDT). Otherwise, “dozens of meteors per hour” are likely throughout the night, though the gibbous Moon will overwhelm the dimmer ones.
Aside from the expected wee-hours peak, the best time for meteor-watching may be between roughly 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM local time (wherever you are), when, according to the above-linked NASA article, “both Perseus and the Moon will be hanging low in the north. This low profile reduces lunar glare while positioning the shower’s radiant for a nice display of Earthgrazers.”
[Bumped. -ed.]
By Brendan Loy
Drudge strikes again with an intriguing headline sequence:
Heh.
By Brendan Loy
A quick baby story from this morning that I just have to share. I was sitting on the couch with Loyette in my lap, reading her a story, while Becky was holding a hungry Loyacita. (For the uninitiated, “Loyette” and “Loyacita” are the “blog nicknames” of my 19-month-old daughter and my 4-week-old daughter, respectively.) Becky wanted to grab breakfast before feeding Loyacita, so she briefly put her down in her bouncer seat. Loyacita promptly started to cry.
Loyette immediately became distracted from our story, and glanced over at the baby’s seat, clearly concerned about why her sister was upset. But I regained her attention and we finished the story, after which I put Loyette down on the floor. She walked toward Loyacita, looked at her for a few moments, then started walking briskly toward Becky in the kitchen and said, quite clearly: “Mommy? Baby. Wah wah wah.”
I think this qualifies as Loyette’s most complex verbally-expressed thought ever. You could almost say that it’s a sentence, with “Mommy” as an interjection, “Baby” as the subject, and “Wah wah wah” as the verb. In any case, it contains three distinct concepts: first, “Mommy,” to get her audience’s attention; second, “Baby,” to indicate who she’s talking about; and third, “Wah wah wah,” to communicate her concern: Mommy, the baby is crying! Awww.
By Brendan Loy
After nearly 2 1/2 months of El Niño-induced calm in the Atlantic tropics, things are finally heating up. Tropical Depression Two has formed off the Cape Verde islands, and is likely to become Tropical Storm Ana over the next couple of days. This would be the latest formation date for the Atlantic basin’s “A” storm since… well, since 1992, when Andrew formed on August 17, not far from where proto-Ana is now. Not to suggest that Ana is likely to be another Andrew, but it just goes to show that a slow-starting or below-average hurricane season is no guarantee we won’t see devastating storms.
Apropos of which, yesterday’s computer model runs were showing some interesting long-term solutions for the storm’s potential track:
GFS continues to spin this system into a hurricane. It is more aggressive with the strength of the future cyclone, and it has taken a new tack: Hatteras landfall, followed by a curving course right up the coast, then into New England via NYC, still at hurricane force. This is a worst-case scenario for that region.
Of course, such long-range, single-model forecasts are subject to massive errors (I mean, like, many thousands of miles’ worth of errors). As the above-quoted Alan Sullivan added, “Tomorrow GFS might aim the storm at Nova Scotia, or Yucatan. It is still very early.” And indeed, already this morning, there are signs of a different trend: “Five day forecast hints at turn to the WNW which would increase the odds of this storm remaining over open ocean throughout its life span.”
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