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cincinnatus_c
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 23: High today: 31. Close to the most rain I've ever seen in an hour around 7:30-8:30 tonight, complete with lightning strike across the street that I felt in my left ear for a few minutes.
I think we're ready to name the official Stupid Weather Gerbil Trick of the season: "Lake-breeze fronts". All thunderstorms are now caused by lake-breeze fronts, or else lake-breeze convergence zones if yer exter-fancy. Nothin' like a little learnin'. More of the same old same old: last week a weather gerbil reported it was "muggy" with the dewpoint at 10, and another said it was "humid" with the dewpoint at 14. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a significant correlation between sun intensity and people believing that it's humid: sun makes people hot, which makes them sweat, which makes them believe it's humid. The interesting question is, is there a stronger correlation between sun intensity and people believing it's humid, or humidity and people believing it's humid?
I wonder how long my enthrallment with StatsCan reports will continue. Anyway, last Friday, StatsCan put its monthly petroleum products sales report. Sales of gasoline were in fact down 3.2% between May 2007 and May 2008. That breaks a string of 13 months of year-over-year increases. Clicking through the "previous month" links takes you back to the report for December 2005; early in that 2.5-year period, gas sales were mostly declining.
An oddity from the GDP report from the end of June: GDP for the Canadian "mining and oil and gas extraction" sector was down 4% in April over April of 2007; it's declined in all but one month since November. Fastest-growing sector of the Canadian economy, April 2007 to April 2008: "accommodation and food services", at 6.9%.
Since "stagflation" is now in vogue and annoying me, yesterday I decided to see if the internets would confirm my impression that, when I was a kid, inflation was way the hell higher not only than it is now, but also than the numbers in what are supposed to be scary forecasts now. Inflation in the US, anyway, was indeed running above 10% from about 1979 to 1982 or 1983. What's really fascinating, though, is this: I guess it shouldn't be surprising when you think about it, but it's amazing to see not only the giant spikes of inflation, but also the big spikes of deflation, all the way up to the middle of the 20th century. Kind of makes you think that maybe the people running the economy do actually have some idea what they're doing--or maybe it's just that larger systems produce more consistent results.
There was a headline on the front page of the Star the other day saying "Ontario economy nosedives"--GDP contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Imagine that! We're now as poor as we were IN THE MIDDLE OF LAST YEAR!
I've just seen that Jack Layton, or at least the NDP, following up the smashing success of his campaign to eliminate ATM fees, is now running a petition against Bell's and Telus's announced plans to charge for incoming text messages. (And I gotta say: they sure didn't leave Rogers squirming on the hook over the iphone business very long. Then again, today's story in the Globe was about how lots of Apple lunatics were probably going to sign up for the iphone plan anyway, so maybe that had already run its course. In any event, I'm thinking that maybe expensive iphones with expensive iphone plans are like Rolexes or whatever: being expensive is a feature, not a bug.) I was about to issue my usual complaint about treating corporations like political rulers, when it struck me: the weird thing isn't petitioning corporations; the weird thing is petitioning representative democratic governments. A petition, after all, is something that loyal but unhappy subjects send to the king, to let him know that the people are unhappy, since they don't get to express their unhappiness by electing a new one, and they're not motivated to overthrow him.
Petitioning corporations is a fitting expression of the acquiescence of their loyal but unhappy subjects.
And: I have managed to pick up another course at another school, thereby nearly doubling my projected income for the next year. Assuming no repeat of last year's shenanigans, this is definitely progress.
I think we're ready to name the official Stupid Weather Gerbil Trick of the season: "Lake-breeze fronts". All thunderstorms are now caused by lake-breeze fronts, or else lake-breeze convergence zones if yer exter-fancy. Nothin' like a little learnin'. More of the same old same old: last week a weather gerbil reported it was "muggy" with the dewpoint at 10, and another said it was "humid" with the dewpoint at 14. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a significant correlation between sun intensity and people believing that it's humid: sun makes people hot, which makes them sweat, which makes them believe it's humid. The interesting question is, is there a stronger correlation between sun intensity and people believing it's humid, or humidity and people believing it's humid?
I wonder how long my enthrallment with StatsCan reports will continue. Anyway, last Friday, StatsCan put its monthly petroleum products sales report. Sales of gasoline were in fact down 3.2% between May 2007 and May 2008. That breaks a string of 13 months of year-over-year increases. Clicking through the "previous month" links takes you back to the report for December 2005; early in that 2.5-year period, gas sales were mostly declining.
An oddity from the GDP report from the end of June: GDP for the Canadian "mining and oil and gas extraction" sector was down 4% in April over April of 2007; it's declined in all but one month since November. Fastest-growing sector of the Canadian economy, April 2007 to April 2008: "accommodation and food services", at 6.9%.
Since "stagflation" is now in vogue and annoying me, yesterday I decided to see if the internets would confirm my impression that, when I was a kid, inflation was way the hell higher not only than it is now, but also than the numbers in what are supposed to be scary forecasts now. Inflation in the US, anyway, was indeed running above 10% from about 1979 to 1982 or 1983. What's really fascinating, though, is this: I guess it shouldn't be surprising when you think about it, but it's amazing to see not only the giant spikes of inflation, but also the big spikes of deflation, all the way up to the middle of the 20th century. Kind of makes you think that maybe the people running the economy do actually have some idea what they're doing--or maybe it's just that larger systems produce more consistent results.
There was a headline on the front page of the Star the other day saying "Ontario economy nosedives"--GDP contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Imagine that! We're now as poor as we were IN THE MIDDLE OF LAST YEAR!
I've just seen that Jack Layton, or at least the NDP, following up the smashing success of his campaign to eliminate ATM fees, is now running a petition against Bell's and Telus's announced plans to charge for incoming text messages. (And I gotta say: they sure didn't leave Rogers squirming on the hook over the iphone business very long. Then again, today's story in the Globe was about how lots of Apple lunatics were probably going to sign up for the iphone plan anyway, so maybe that had already run its course. In any event, I'm thinking that maybe expensive iphones with expensive iphone plans are like Rolexes or whatever: being expensive is a feature, not a bug.) I was about to issue my usual complaint about treating corporations like political rulers, when it struck me: the weird thing isn't petitioning corporations; the weird thing is petitioning representative democratic governments. A petition, after all, is something that loyal but unhappy subjects send to the king, to let him know that the people are unhappy, since they don't get to express their unhappiness by electing a new one, and they're not motivated to overthrow him.
Petitioning corporations is a fitting expression of the acquiescence of their loyal but unhappy subjects.
And: I have managed to pick up another course at another school, thereby nearly doubling my projected income for the next year. Assuming no repeat of last year's shenanigans, this is definitely progress.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-09 10:56 am (UTC)Humidity - the capacity of air to hold water increases with temperature (see graph under "Dew point and frost point").
The higher the relative humidity, the harder it is to sweat so the more apparent the humidity is.
OTOH, if the sun intensity is very high & you are in, let's say, the Painted Desert, AZ you likely won't consider it very humid.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-09 07:03 pm (UTC)My basic thoughts about dewpoint vs. relative humidity as measures of humidity are echoed here (http://weather.uwaterloo.ca/info.html#Dew_point). Relative humidity has some uses--that I can think of, mostly to do with the likelihood of fog and other condensation--but as far as I can tell, the main reason it, and not dewpoint, is cited in weather reports is that it's much easier to measure directly. Nowadays it's very easy to calculate the dewpoint given the RH and the temperature, but we're stuck with RH being reported since that's the precedent that was set in the days when they had to just read the number off the hygrometer.
Bottom line is, it's just as humid, for most intents and purposes, when the dewpoint is 22 and the temperature is 26 as it is when the dewpoint is 22 and the temperature is 34. (This is partly because, for most intents and purposes, people are most interested in humidity when it's very hot, and the relative humidity is never very high when it's very hot, because the dewpoint never gets higher than about 26.) And people (in general, which includes a lot of if not most people whose job is to talk about the weather on television) are far more likely to think it's humid when the temperature is 34. In fact, they're far more likely to think it's humid when the temperature is 34 and the dewpoint is 18 than when the temperature is 26 and the dewpoint is 22.
I suspect that the reason most southern Ontarians wouldn't consider it humid in the Painted Desert is that they know it's dry in the desert. I'm not so confident that if the temperature was 40 and the dewpoint was 5 here that they could pick out that it isn't humid. (The fact is that things, including your skin, do dry out much more quickly when the temperature is high and the humidity is low, so you can figure out quite easily whether it's actually humid or not. But most people seem to think they can just "feel" humidity, which is why I think the correlation between sun intensity and thinking it's humid might be as high as or higher than the correlation between humidity and thinking it's humid.) But that's beyond the range of my experience and that of most southern Ontarians, so I don't really know. I'd love to run the experiment.