Tomorrow is my 24th birthday. It’s also the last Sunday in October, which means that at 2:00 AM, Daylight Saving Time ends, and clocks throughout the country — except in Hawaii, Arizona, and here in (most of) Indiana — “fall back” and essentially repeat the 1-2 AM hour. The result is a “25-hour day.”

Of course, this is a legal construct, not an astronomical one; it won’t take the Earth any longer than usual to rotate once around its axis tomorrow. Still, I must say, I like the idea of having a 25-hour-long birthday!

The last Sunday in October has been the ending date of DST since 1966. (Source.) I was born on Friday, October 30, 1981 — at 9:22 AM Eastern Standard Time in Hartford, Connecticut — and, checking the calendar, I see that I’ve had three Sunday birthdays: my second birthday in 1983, my seventh birthday in 1988, and my 13th birthday in 1994. By ‘94, I was old enough and nerdy enough that you’d think I would have thought of this, and would have revelled in the idea of a 25-hour birthday. But I don’t recall thinking about it at the time. Perhaps I did and forgot, or perhaps I was too distracted with the far more important fact of becoming a teenager — not to mention the REALLY big distraction in my life at the time: earlier that month, I had “asked out” a girl for the first time ever. :) Ah, middle school…

Anyway, because I live in a part of Indiana that doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time (yet), I won’t get to personally experience a 25-hour birthday tomorrow. D’oh! And because Congress is changing the ending date of Daylight Saving Time from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November starting in 2007, this is my last chance for an extended birthday. The next time my birthday falls on a Sunday, in 2011, Daylight Saving Time won’t end until November 6, barring another changing in the law.

So now, if I run for Congress in 2010, you’ll all know the secret reason why. I want a 25-hour birthday, dammit! ;)

Bryan Woods at The Storm Track is sounding the alarm about the potential for Hurricane Beta — currently a Cat. 1 — to veritably explode today into a monster hurricane:

Beta formed a pinhole eye [overnight]. … Remember: as soon as Wilma developed a pinhole eye in this region, she strengthened from a Cat. 1 to a Cat. 5 overnight. The SHIPS model is indicating over a 60% chance that Beta’s winds will strengthen by at least 30 mph in the next 24 hours.

He adds, “There is only one eyewall in place so I do not expect an eyewall replacement before landfall. … The situation in Nicaragua could be very serious tomorrow.”

The pinhole eye is “a little bit hidden in most infrared and visible satellite images,” but you can see it clearly via microwave imagery here.

I don’t plan on liveblogging today’s college-football action as extensively as usual. For one thing, I have a lot of work to do; for another thing, Notre Dame has a bye week and USC’s game isn’t televised here in South Bend, so if I’m ever going to take a weekend “off” from college football, this is the one.

But anyway, here is a look at some of the day’s big games, and other miscellaneous games of interest to me and/or my readers. All listings are South Bend time, which today — for maybe the last time ever (or maybe not) — is the same as Chicago time, not New York time.

Link (where available) goes to the box score, or will once the game is underway.

Undefeated teams in action
* Alabama vs. Utah State, 2:00 PM
* Georgia at #16 Florida, 2:30 PM
* USC vs. Wazzu, 2:30 PM
* UCLA at Stanford, 5:30 PM
* Texas at Oklahoma State, 6:00 PM

Notre Dame opponents in action
* Michigan State vs. Indiana, underway
* Syracuse vs. Cincinnati, underway
* BYU vs. Air Force, 2:00 PM
* Purdue at Penn State, 2:30 PM
* Navy at Rutgers, 2:30 PM
* Washington at Arizona State, 4:30 PM
* Michigan at Northwestern, 6:00 PM
* Tennessee vs. South Carolina, 6:45 PM
* See also USC and Stanford, above

Miscellaneous others
* Illinois vs. Wisconsin, underway
* Baylor vs. Texas Tech, underway
* Buffalo vs. Ohio, 12:30 PM
* Maryland at Florida State, 2:30 PM

Full scoreboard here.

Fight on Trojans, beat the Cougars!!!

The mysterious sweet smell that perplexed New Yorkers on Thursday evening has vanished without a trace, and still, nobody knows what the hell it was. Has someone invented a maple syrup-smelling form of aerosolized anthrax, or something along those lines? I certainly hope not, and officials say no. The New York Times reports:

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs - so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan. …

With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.

I don’t understand how they can be so confident that it’s “not dangerous” when they still don’t know what it was, but oh well. Hopefully they’re right. Seriously, though, what “sort of food substance” has a sufficiently powerful odor to spread throughout an entire city??

As Brian already posted, Tropical Storm Beta was upgraded to hurricane status at 2:00 AM EDT. In addition to being the first Greek-alphabet hurricane in history, Hurricane Beta is the 13th hurricane of 2005, which breaks the all-time record for a single season in the Atlantic basin.

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season now holds the record for most tropical cyclones (23, breaking 1933’s record of 21), most hurricanes (13, breaking 1969’s record of 12), and most Category Five hurricanes (3, breaking 1960 and 1961’s record of 2). The only significant record along these lines that we haven’t broken yet is the number of major hurricanes (i.e., Category Three and above). That mark is eight, set in 1950. So far this year, we’ve had six (Dennis, Emily, Maria, Katrina, Rita and Wilma).

Beta could soon be the seventh. The latest advisory upgrades the maximum sustained winds to 85 mph, and although the official forecast only brings Beta to a Cat. 2 at landfall, the discussion says “there is a good chance that Beta will get stronger than forecast and make landfall as a major hurricane.” It notes that the SHIPS model’s “rapid intensification index…is showing a 62 percent chance of 25 kt or more strengthening during the next 24 hr.” Dr. Jeff Masters writes:

By the time Beta makes its expected landfall near the Nicaragua-Honduras border Sunday morning, the shear will drop to five knots, which could allow rapid strengthening. There is not much time, though, for Beta to make it to Category 3 status, and the most likely strength at landfall is as a Category 2 hurricane. However, the latest microwave satellite data from NASA’s TRMM satellite shows a pinhole eye–a very small 5-mile diameter eye like Wilma developed just before her rapid deepening phase. This may portend a rapid intensification cycle to Category 3 strength or higher may occur this afternoon.

But where will Beta go? Will it hit northern Nicaragua, as the official track predicts, or will it continue drifting unexpectedly north rather than turning sharply left as predicted? Dr. Masters looks at this issue in his post:

The computer models are sorely missing the presence of the NOAA jet to provide detailed data on Beta’s surrounding environment. Only one of the four main models–the UKMET–has correctly forecast the slow north and then northwest drift of Beta. The other three models have incorrectly been assuming the ridge to Beta’s north is much stronger than it really is. The resulting forecasts of a westerly or southwesterly track across Nicaragua and into the Pacific Ocean have been incorrect for three days in a row. Is it possible Beta will miss or just brush Honduras and head towards the Yucatan, as the UKMET is suggesting? This is quite possible, as we don’t know the true strength of the ridge to Beta’s north. All indications are, though, that this ridge is unusually strong for this time of year, and Beta is not likely to turn north and threaten Cuba or Florida, at least for the next three to five days. The official NHC forecast seems reasonable.

Masters also notes that the Colombian island of Providencia “received a direct hit from Beta last night and experienced sustained hurricane force winds for many hours that caused serious damage. Communications with the island were cut off at the height of the storm and have not been re-established.” And he looks ahead to the likely effects of Beta on Honduras and Nicaragua, if indeed it hits there:

If Beta does make landfall near the Honduras/Nicaragua border as a Category 2 storm as expected, a large storm surge of up to 15 feet is expected, since a long shallow area of Continental Shelf waters exists close to shore that will allow the storm surge waters to pile up. One would expect such a large storm surge, plus Beta’s 100-mph sustained winds, to cause tremendous damage–but this is a large and very sparsely populated rainforest region. The storm surge and winds are unlikely to do significant damage. Far more dangerous will be Beta’s rains, which may push inland into the mountainous regions of central Honduras where Hurricane Fifi in 1974 killed 8000, and where Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed over 9000. Rains of up to 0.8 inches/hour are alreay affecting northeast Honduras, and Beta’s slow motion will allow it to dump up to 15 inches of rain in some regions of Honduras. However, Beta is a very small storm, and its rains will affect a smaller portion of Honduras than either Fifi or Mitch did. Plus, Mitch dumped at least 30 inches of rain over much of Honduras during its rampage. These factors, along with the improved evacuation procedures that have been adopted in Honduras since 1998, give hope that Beta will not trigger a major flooding disaster in Honduras.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, I came up with the title of this post by myself, and didn’t see Masters’s almost-identical title until after I’d already typed mine out. :)

It’s gained hurricane status, although only minimally. It’s a category 1 off the coast of Nicaragua. Vital stats from the NHC’s site:

THE 8 AM EDT POSITION…13.8 N… 81.6 W. MOVEMENT
TOWARD…NORTHWEST NEAR 3 MPH. MAXIMUM SUSTAINED
WINDS… 80 MPH. MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE… 984 MB.

Next update will be at 11 AM, but there probably won’t be too much change by then.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

Happy (early) birthday to me! Pay no attention to the unique design of the chocolate pieces. :)

Mars’s closest approach to Earth since 2003, and closest until 2018, is tomorrow night. (The 2003 close encounter was the closest in 60,000 years, as you may recall.)

P.S. The moment when the two planets are closest together is 10:25 PM local time, which is 3:25 AM Sunday morning Greenwich Mean Time. So, according to the official timekeepers across the pond, this Mars-Earth encounter takes place on my birthday!

Speaking of my birthday… Daylight Saving Time ends at 2:00 AM Sunday morning, which means that, if I were living anywhere except Indiana (or Arizona or Hawaii), my birthday would be 25 hours long! But because we don’t observe DST here (yet), we don’t have to set our clocks back for the “return” to Standard Time, so my birthday is only the standard 24 hours long. Poo.

Heh. (Hat tip: like a half-dozen people.)

New York City smells a little too good.

A school in Massachusetts has cancelled Halloween because of “the complaints of a handful of parents who said … the school’s traditional Halloween celebrations offended their religious beliefs.”

The parents threatened that “they would not send their children to school [on Monday] if the revelry continued this year.” It seems to me, the proper course of action would be for the school district to say, “Fine, go right ahead.” They could have given those kids an excused absence for missing school that day; that would be fine, indeed probably right and proper. But to cancel the whole celebration just because a few parents complained? LAME!

If someone wants to try and argue that wearing Halloween costumes qualifies as an “establishment of religion,” go ahead, I’m all ears. I’m highly skeptical, but I’m willing to listen. Otherwise, though, this is pure bull. Nothing in our constitution or laws guarantees people the right not to be “offended,” and schools should not bend over backwards to meet the idiosyncratic demands of small groups of tyrannical parents. I don’t care if the parents are very conservative or very liberal, extremely religious or extremely irreligious — either way, unless their constitutional or other fundamental rights are being violated, a small minority should not be able to overrule the majority just because they’re vocal and persistent.

What’s next? Can someone whose religious beliefs dictate that all glory should go to God — not to individual people — demand that a school cancel its student-awards ceremony? How about a member of a white-supremacist religious sect objecting to Black History Month? Or a believer in puritanical fundamentalist Christianity declaring that dancing is evil and thus persuading school officials to cancel the prom? Or a fanatical pacifist arguing that football is violent and thus the school’s football program should be dismantled?

Utterly ridiculous, I say.

Dick Cheney’s top aide, G. Gordon Liddy, errr, that is to say, I. Lewis Libby, a.k.a. “Scooter,” has been indicted and has resigned.

UPDATE: Here is the indictment.

ABC News reports:

Bush said in an afternoon statement that Libby “worked tirelessly on behalf of the American people and sacrificed much in the service to this country.”

He said Fitzgerald’s investigation is “serious” but stressed that Libby is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial.

Bush also said he was “saddened” by the charges, but added that he would focus on the work of the presidency. “I’ve got a job to do,” he said.

Cheney said he regretted Libby’s decision to resign and urged others not to prejudge his now-former adviser.

“Mr. Libby has informed me that he is resigning to fight the charges brought against him. I have accepted his decision with deep regret,” Cheney said in a statement. “Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known. He has given many years of his life to public service and has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction. In our system of government an accused person is presumed innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury after an opportunity to answer the charges and a full airing of the facts. Mr. Libby is entitled to that opportunity. Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.”

Dr. Jeff Masters has an update on Hurricane Wilma’s impact in Mexico:

Officials analyzing the damage to Mexico now agree that Hurricane Wilma is the most destructive hurricane ever to hit Mexico, surpassing the $1.2 billion in insured property damage done by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. Most tourist facilities in Cancun, Cozumel, and surrounding areas are expected to be closed through mid-December, and economic losses from this closure alone will approach $1 billion. Officials estimate that 98 percent of the tourist infrastructure and 75 percent of the population of the state of Quintana Roo, which includes the resorts of Cancun, Cozumel, Playa del Carmen and Isla Mujeres, have been damaged. Over 90 percent of the 17.4 miles of sand in Cancun has been washed away, and a multi-million dollar beach replenishment project will begin in December. Cruise ships scheduled to dock at Cozumel are finding alternate ports of call, as one of that island’s three piers for cruise ships was completely destroyed, and another heavily damaged.
Cozumel also suffered “significant damage” to its famous coral reefs, the Environment Department said in a report. Over a million acres of forests were also damaged by Wilma, according to the report.

On a hopeful note, Mexico has shown a remarkable ability to bounce back quickly from severe hurricanes, as we saw after Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 and Hurricane Emily earlier this year. The bulldozers are already out on the beaches of Cancun, clearing away debris. President Fox’s goal of having 80% of Cancun’s hotels open for business by December 15 is ambitious, but doable. A full recovery by Easter seems probable.

I can’t help but think about the person from my online chat who is supposed to get married at the Moon Palace on December 17. I wonder if that will happen?

Tropical Storm Beta is proving once again that it’s very difficult to forecast tropical-cyclone intensity. About 12-18 hours ago, it appeared likely that Beta would rapidly intensify and would certainly be a hurricane by now, maybe a Cat. 2. Instead, she’s barely strengthened at all. Her winds are at 65 mph. Dr. Jeff Masters explains:

Beta remains a tropical storm this morning, drifting slowly north off of the coast of Nicaragua. Its rise to hurricane strength has been thwarted by a large tropical disturbance that has developed about 300 miles to the northeast. This disturbance has created a layer of easterly winds on its south side at mid and upper levels. These winds are now generating about 10 knots of wind shear on Beta’s east side. The shear disrupted the small eyewall that was forming early this morning, and Beta decreased in strength for a time. Deep convection has made a bit of a comeback this morning, but Beta continues to struggle with the shear, and has a long way to go before making hurricane status. The shear over Beta is expected to increase to 15 knots by tomorrow morning, then decrease back down to the favorable 5 knots we saw yesterday. Since Beta is a very small system, this relatively high shear may keep the storm from attaining hurricane status until Saturday afternoon or evening. We’ll know better this afternoon at about 4 pm EDT, when the first hurricane hunter flight is scheduled to arrive.

The NHC discussion is still calling for Beta to reach Category 2 status by landfall, but admits that could change depending on how bad the shear is.

According to the AP:

The special counsel investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative’s identity will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT on Friday to discuss the status of the probe, his office said in a statement.

The statement said information on the case will be available at noon.

In South Bend time, that’s 11am for the paperwork and 1pm for the press conference.

According to a CNN Breaking News alert: “Source: CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to ask grand jurors to indict Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.”

According to the AP: “sources said Fitzgerald had informed President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, that he will not be indicted on Friday, although he will remain under investigation and in legal jeopardy.”

We’ll know for sure soon enough.