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Do I look the same to you?
Jul. 3rd, 2006 11:59 pm
High today in KW: 29. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 19.
High today, here: 31. Dewpoint then: 17. High dewpoint: 21.
Periodically, I wonder: what, exactly, is a front, and how do you decide where, exactly, to put one on a weather map? It's not like they are, in the world, one-dimensional lines. When even a sharp front goes by, the temperature and the dewpoint don't instantly drop ten degrees; there can be a significant change in a few minutes, but more likely it takes a few hours. I've been thinking about this lately as I flip from one weather forecaster to another, noticing their noticeably different weather maps. I've been thinking I should save screen shots of different current-conditions weather maps for the same time from different outlets, to see just how crazily different they can be.
But I was particularly thinking about this today because I was sitting outside this afternoon (reading Prado's book, from which I've at least learned a little about Searle so far, although the whole thing seems to suffer from two basic problems: first, it doesn't distinguish, in relation to Foucault, between the question of what truth is and the question of how "regimes of truth" or whatever are produced; second, it attributes a "realism" to Foucault (for the sake of establishing common ground with Searle) the contrast to which (apparently, that, if not for language, there would be not just no-thing but void) nobody could possibly take seriously) with some half-heartedly threatening cumuli rolling in; when I went out, it was already breezy, but the air was warm and thick; then, after a while, the breeze was suddenly cool and sharp, and then, after a few seconds, not so much again. A bit of convective mixing, maybe, a little bit of downdraft--but then, you get that along a front, too, those big thunderclouds "ahead of the front" pulling cold air way down through the atmosphere, which is going to make your front at least a little ragged, even if nothing else does. The last few days, the dewpoint has been bouncing up and down quite a bit--you can see that from the fact that the high dewpoints have been significantly higher than the dewpoint when the temperature is highest; the Weather Network had a stationary front just to the south of us for today--and the observations seem to indicate that the front is actually porous, that warmer, moister air ebbs and flows across it in a much messier way than is indicated by those front lines on the maps.
So, it's a year, today. This livejournal was originally for the purpose of recording my Incredibly Astute Predictions. So much for that. And then it was for Things Overheard. Well, a little of that. In case you were ever, by chance, wondering: the reason I started up with the high temperature and dewpoint is that I wanted to try to see, firstly, whether it's actually humid when the weather gerbils on the television say it's humid, and secondly, whether I can actually tell the difference between heat and humidity--because I know for a fact that people think it's humid when it's actually, really, very much not. That's why I started it up--but going back and seeing the weather change, reminding myself of what it was like (because one's perceptions of what the weather was like at any point, or over any period, in the past can be really surprisingly wrong), I couldn't have brought myself to give up, after a short while. And that's what made this a more or less daily thing--so here we are--which led to What I Read Today, for the sake of saying something about something other than the weather, which has actually, amazingly enough, made this Professionally Useful (and sometimes even helped me to think about what I've read) on the odd occasion--so here we stay ... for a while.
High today, here: 31. Dewpoint then: 17. High dewpoint: 21.
Periodically, I wonder: what, exactly, is a front, and how do you decide where, exactly, to put one on a weather map? It's not like they are, in the world, one-dimensional lines. When even a sharp front goes by, the temperature and the dewpoint don't instantly drop ten degrees; there can be a significant change in a few minutes, but more likely it takes a few hours. I've been thinking about this lately as I flip from one weather forecaster to another, noticing their noticeably different weather maps. I've been thinking I should save screen shots of different current-conditions weather maps for the same time from different outlets, to see just how crazily different they can be.
But I was particularly thinking about this today because I was sitting outside this afternoon (reading Prado's book, from which I've at least learned a little about Searle so far, although the whole thing seems to suffer from two basic problems: first, it doesn't distinguish, in relation to Foucault, between the question of what truth is and the question of how "regimes of truth" or whatever are produced; second, it attributes a "realism" to Foucault (for the sake of establishing common ground with Searle) the contrast to which (apparently, that, if not for language, there would be not just no-thing but void) nobody could possibly take seriously) with some half-heartedly threatening cumuli rolling in; when I went out, it was already breezy, but the air was warm and thick; then, after a while, the breeze was suddenly cool and sharp, and then, after a few seconds, not so much again. A bit of convective mixing, maybe, a little bit of downdraft--but then, you get that along a front, too, those big thunderclouds "ahead of the front" pulling cold air way down through the atmosphere, which is going to make your front at least a little ragged, even if nothing else does. The last few days, the dewpoint has been bouncing up and down quite a bit--you can see that from the fact that the high dewpoints have been significantly higher than the dewpoint when the temperature is highest; the Weather Network had a stationary front just to the south of us for today--and the observations seem to indicate that the front is actually porous, that warmer, moister air ebbs and flows across it in a much messier way than is indicated by those front lines on the maps.
So, it's a year, today. This livejournal was originally for the purpose of recording my Incredibly Astute Predictions. So much for that. And then it was for Things Overheard. Well, a little of that. In case you were ever, by chance, wondering: the reason I started up with the high temperature and dewpoint is that I wanted to try to see, firstly, whether it's actually humid when the weather gerbils on the television say it's humid, and secondly, whether I can actually tell the difference between heat and humidity--because I know for a fact that people think it's humid when it's actually, really, very much not. That's why I started it up--but going back and seeing the weather change, reminding myself of what it was like (because one's perceptions of what the weather was like at any point, or over any period, in the past can be really surprisingly wrong), I couldn't have brought myself to give up, after a short while. And that's what made this a more or less daily thing--so here we are--which led to What I Read Today, for the sake of saying something about something other than the weather, which has actually, amazingly enough, made this Professionally Useful (and sometimes even helped me to think about what I've read) on the odd occasion--so here we stay ... for a while.
