Home district

One of the things I miss about moving my legal residence from LA to Boulder is my congressman, Ted Lieu.  The first time I met him, he was in the CA state assembly and had just voted against the law making it illegal to harvest shark fins.  Amazingly enough, I found myself next to him at a meeting at my daughter's school.  Naturally, I asked him why he voted that way.

He proceeded to say that he voted against it because it was discriminatory.  Why does it criminalize only shark fin and not other uses of sharks?  That penalizes Chinese people over other people that kill and harass sharks.  He wrote and submitted another bill that treats all parts of sharks equally.

It takes a special person to convince me in less than 2 minutes that I was wrong and should change my position.

If you are on twitter and don't follow @tedlieu, you are missing out.

Today, I found out that congressional district CA 33 is special for another reason. Take a look at the % of new mortgages that are over $750,000 by CA congressional districts. CA 33, Coastal LA county has larger new mortgages than San Francisco and Silicon Valley (CA 12, 14, 17, 18.) 

In terms of unaffordability, CA 33 edges out Palo Alto (18) and San Francisco (12). 

Well, at least Silicon Beach has nicer weather and more polite people.

Not looking like a white Christmas

Have you seen the Aleutian Low? It appears to be lost. But maybe we can work together to bring it back?

I have a new personal computer at work and setting it up for weather data wrangling has been a slow and sometimes painful process.

We have a new supercomputer at work and setting it up for weather data wrangling has been an excruciatingly painful process.

Anyway, I made a movie for you of the 10-day GFS forecast and it looks really, really dry.

Instead of a low pressure system near the Aleutians, bringing in storms into the Pacific Northwest and sometimes into California, we have a variant of the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (R3).

I plotted the Geopotential heights of the 700 mb isobaric surface (about 70% of normal sea level pressure and about the height of winter moisture.). The red area sitting over the western US is about 200-300 meters higher than surrounding areas.

This is the equivalent of a 200-300 meter high mountain range sitting between you and winter rains.  The rain is going to find a lower energy path.

Around December 20, an offshore Omega Block pattern forms.  Alaska is going to get some dramatically atypical December weather!

I'll be with family in CA and we will probably be dry, cold, and windy.

Mturk and fauxtomation

Did you know that Expensify's “SmartScan” technology is actually people working for Amazon Mechanical Turk? Read more.

SmartScan is presumably a selling point for Expensify, since the receipts it handles can contain sensitive personal information, like names, purchase details, email addresses, and even bank routing numbers. So it was awkward when, last week, the company was caught posting receipts to an online marketplace for freelancers so that their contents could be transcribed not by SmartScan, but by humans.

No, I do not want Alexa or Google listening in on my conversations at home.

New Old Indigo

I want to blog about water, but work, family stuff and sleep is getting priority these days.

I just want to give a quick link to this lovely story about Thao Vu and the artisans she works with in Vietnam--the people behind Kilomet109.

Hand batik.  Living and dead indigo.  Embroidery.  Interesting Shapes.

Detail of reversible tank top. Photo courtesy of NYT

Batik and indigo reversible tank top. Photo courtesy of Kilomet109

This is my favorite dress from the online store.

Photo courtesy of Kilomet109

But I would be happy if Santa brought me this coat.  I've been very, very good.

Jacket photo courtesy of NYT