Weather Whiplash

We've experienced a huge weather swing. Today's high temperature of 62F is the equal to the low six days ago!

Not only that, but the wind is whipping.

As I did in Do you know where that's been?, I visited NOAA's HYSPLIT Trajectory Model and found the source of our extremely cold air mass, SE Alaska.

Five days ago? Our air mass came from north of Hawaii and was further warmed by adiabatic compression over mountain ranges.

The website caters to scientists, and we want to see the temperatures in Kelvin. A 17 Kelvin difference is 30 Fahrenheit.  Perhaps this is not as serious as hunkering down in New York without heat, but, this is brrr by our standards.

Quantum Mechanics and the Electoral College

Eric, Bad Dad and I have been discussing election statistics off-line.  Eric sends this:

"I can rant all I want about the misinterpretation of p-values and how it leads scientists who are (perhaps) otherwise competent to say stupid things.  But, as always, Randall Munroe at XKCD cuts through the fog and says it so much better (and more hilariously)."

Please click through and hover your mouse over the cartoon to read the joke he embeds in the image metadata!  It will show up in a popup box.

Bad Dad also pointed out the relationship between the electoral college and quantum mechanical expectation values.  And thanks to Eric, I understand how Nate Silver apportions out the votes.  Both explanations sounded like Bayesian statistics.   Randall Munroe explains it all.

@ LHC, I'll remember that when my daughter starts her own band.  I did a really tiger mom thing and got her vocal coaching because her drama teacher confided that the only thing that held her back from a larger role last year was her singing.  She got a big part this year.  ;-)

So grateful to be an American

There are times I make jokes at the expense of Americans*.  But, I am so glad to be an American.

Take today, when I was rushing to finish Problem Set 3 of EdX's Public Health 207x.  I got one problem wrong initially, so I checked the online discussion forum for the problem set.  One student posted that the professor walked us through a very similar problem in lecture and gave the lecture number.

Another student posted that would be great, except that the lectures are posted on YouTube (PH207x) and YouTube is blocked in his country.

BTW, the class is picking up and becoming much more interesting now that we are moving out of the mathematical preliminaries and into epidemiology.  You can still sign up and join the learning.

Consider this a Public Service Announcement (PSA): 

• Democracy is a fragile living thing.  
• Remember to go out and vote tomorrow, if you are eligible.  
• We all have a responsibility to tell the truth and call liars on their lies.  
• Don't let bullies get away with bullshit.

* The joke:

Q: What do you call someone who can speak two languages?
A: Bilingual
Q: What do you call someone who can speak three languages?
A: Trilingual
Q: What do you call someone who can speak one language?
A: American

We get away with this joke because English was a second language for both Bad Dad and myself.  However, it has become our primary one and our poor child is a true American.  We are shipping her off to sister city, Lareto, Mexico to help rectify that.