RDM

Think it's the moles. They do that to people... I feel bitter now too.

Zug, Welcome the continued rant and yes, I'm old enough... will be 60 soon. That's a great video and conveyed the experience trying to help my daughter with long division in elementary school. To this day I still don't understand the logic behind the method they taught her. The whole new math theory is as if some education major working on their thesis thought "I'll do my paper on options to make math as complicated as possible, that will SURELY get me an A, whether it makes sense or not!" And bingo, a trend was born. For those math majors out there, no offense intended. I was only a couple classes from a math minor in engineering school, but couldn't muster the courage to subject myself to more torture at the time. This theme is right up there with participation medals in organized sports; relative to the previous reference to no score T-ball leagues (what nonsense). Whether the parents want to admit it or not, the kids playing whatever sport knows who the best players are and who wins and looses. That core knowledge is motivation to the kids to try harder. Kids need to learn how to loose before they can fully appreciate winning, and do so graciously. Kids these days don't know how to loose, because everyone wins. That's not reality. In the words of WTOP, simplifying things down the most simple terms that are easiest to understand by all is a core value.

A pitchfork and a little patience does wonders for moles. Watch for em in your favorite chair with a bottle of Dinkelacker, upon detection of the little vermin thrust downward with the tines parallel to their tunnel for max penetration potential and withdraw. If the tine is wet with a tint of red, success, with no mess to clean up. Plus the rotting carcass is a deterrent to the rest to of the clan. Used to love watching my grandpa "go" mole hunting. Of course, he was infinitely patient when fishing too...

I loved geometry and trig. Yea, warped, but both are actually practically applied in every day life. Use em all the time in my shop. Now, differential equations, Laplace transforms and the like are for.... well.... I'm not really sure who they are for. (Joking re the applications, I just hated that "higher" level of math. Hard to focus on something you know you'll never use again, ever.)

Ok, I can't help myself... Beyond the battle between "it's" and "its" in this New Age English,... We have "to" and "too" and "has been" instead of the past tense verb. Hear it nearly every morning on WTOP when they talk about someone who "has been arrested for..." instead of saying "was arrested for..." And these are journalism majors? Hearing the utterance of "has been" brings back vivid memories of my 3rd grade English teacher nearly 50 years ago repeatedly scolding everyone in class. I can hear her now, "do you want to be a..., "HAS BEEN?" At the time we thought there was no worse title one could have as an adult. In the 3rd grade we can't wait to be 18 and be an adult. Hell, we would have rather been picked to pay right field in baseball during recess than to be called a "has been" for any reason. Everyone knows only the scrubs are picked to play right field, right? Oops, I forgot. We don't keep score anymore because everyone wins! (no score t-ball is a sore spot too, but I'll refrain) Then we have this new fangled idea of only using a single space after the period at the end of a sentence? Who came up with that stuff? Our brains are programmed to add a pause at the end of a sentence to separate thoughts and give both the narrator and listener a split second to comprehend a concept before moving on to the next. Been a constant point of debate with those charged with educating our daughter for the past 15+ years, to no avail. And next we have the excessive use of "that" mid-sentence for no purpose. In my former profession where concise content, accuracy and efficiency of the written word was paramount I challenged (note the use of past tense?) those more junior to read a draft to themselves without inclusion of the "that" they had needlessly inserted. They'd read it, read it again, and then you'd see the gears of learning start to mesh. More often than not, the use of "that" has no bearing on the overall message and is a waste, time to write and read. Ain't that just great? No doubt, being mere mortal engineer I've probably mucked up the above diatribe in more ways that one can manage to count with todays new way of doing math. Yet, I regress into another area where the USA is falling behind on the global education scale. However, we have our silent soccer leagues where we can vent our frustrations! Darn it, I got side-tracked again onto another tangent. But that takes trigonometry to understand. Do we still teach simple trig?

It is an dynamic mixture of influences... preservation of angular momentum through slow forward motion (just like a top - the faster it spins the more it resists lateral motion), the influence of increasing SST's over the Gulf Stream, and how does that counter the upwelling with the slow forward motion, and the thickness of the high SST's in the Gulf Stream. Compared to other areas outside the GS where SSTs are relatively shallow, the GS has a deep thermal profile that may also offset the normal influence of upwelling. Believe this is what accounted for the incredible explosion of Andrew before landfall, albeit Andrew had a much faster forward motion where the impact of upwelling was not an issue. In the end, how slow can Dorian go and preserve the incredible singular eye wall without the influence of upwelling shutting off the energy spigot? Is there an optimal speed to preserve the angular momentum that capitalizes on the SSTs and minimizes the effect of upwelling?

Thanks for the read - not many of us up at this hour, but Dorian is looking to garner a lot of interest in the next couple of days.

Definitely a nice day to be doing anything outside. With you on the 80's and music, 70's were't bad too. Yuengling is a decent brew. However PBR and MHL.... well... They are right down at the bottom with Hudepohl, who used to sponsor the Cincinnati Reds (I grew up in Ohio). Having lived in Germany for 6+ years, I'm sort of partial to Dinkelaker. Even a "normal" Romer pils is worth the trip to the largest brewery in the world outside the US.

Agree - currently at 95F with 60% rh and dp of 80 - gives a HI of around 107/108. How can there not be an advisory out?

Hey gang - pretty toasty out there today, no doubt. Now just imagine another 15 or more degrees and even more humidity. That's New Delhi around this time of year. HI is off the right end of most the HI charts here in the US.

A little late, but.... Our tally was 3.39" in a little over an hour NW of Vienna. Lawyers Road was closed in both directions from our house (our driveway is on Lawyers), leaving only one route out via a nearby sub-division. This happens a couple times a year or so on average on tributaries of Difficult Run. The high water mark left by the mud on Lawyers was a new max.

Good point - maybe not knowing it could be better was to their benefit in forcing adaptation.

Moved this to banter with the hope it will generate some discussion, and other war stories about extreme Heat Index. No doubt the 108/95 is up there. If that's the recognized record - ok. I don't have empirical data to outright challenge whatever the official record is. However, from personal experience living overseas in several areas with extreme conditions believe there's some environments that routinely push the 108/95 combination, if not exceed it. The main challenge IMO is finding reliable equipment that can measure the far end of the environmental spectrum that takes place in some of these areas. Just up the coast from Dhahran is good ole Kuwait. Being at the NW corner of the gulf when the wind blows just right from the SE the humidity comes in with a vengeance. Spent a lot of time there and it can be "pleasant" - as in relatively dry - in the morning and when the land heats up and draws in a fetch off the gulf the humidity rolls in and in a couple of hours can turn into an intolerable sauna. (Been to Dhahran and UAE too - was not as bad as Kuwait - typically) It was so humid in Kuwait that when you come out of an air conditioning building and put your cell phone in your pocket, the cool phone immediately condenses the moisture and soaks your pants. Looks like everyone outside pissed themselves, at least the newbies. Cell phone belt carriers rule the roost to help the condensate drip off outside of clothing. You can tell the newbies because they have the wet spot on their pants. The repeated cycles and exposure to moisture raises havoc with electronics/phones. Then there is India, where I lived for 3 years. During the "dry" months of March/April/May the heat was hot, and sometimes really hot (we had a max of 52.5C in Delhi when I was there, was hotter to the SW in the Rajistan Desert). in the months of March/April/May and early June it can be in the 113-118 range for weeks on end, with the heat building in anticipation of monsoon. That's a walk in the park compared to how it feels when the monsoon approaches and then unleashes it's torrent. We would have 105-112 and ungodly high humidity for the next few weeks until the rains started and "cooled" things down to only the upper 100's. You swear you could cut the air with a knife. In Delhi, 3 showers a day is the norm for those who can afford it. We had 3 water trucks and 32 water wells on the Embassy grounds that supplied water to those living on the economy (like me). Had a cistern in the back yard at my house and would go for weeks without a drop from the city. Was a godsend to call Embassy GSO and get the cistern filled, which would last me a week or so, depending.... All water pressure in the house was provided by the head pressure provided by having the holding tanks everyone has on their roof. Keeping in mind the ambient air temp is much hotter than you can stand to take a shower in, when I got up every morning the first thing I had to do was turn on the "cold" water in the shower, which was fed by the holding tank on the roof - full of hot water. With the water in the holding tank too hot to shower with, I had to drain the tank enough to force the pump in the cistern on to pump cool water from the cistern into the holding tank on the roof. This took about 20-30 mins depending on temps, time of day, sun angle, cloud coverage etc. Once the water in the holding take was tolerable you take the shower and go on about your business. Hated wasting all that water, but it was the only way. In India we had a weather station at the Embassy. Was crude by today's standards, but was considered rather reliable at the time. Starting in April, throughout much of May and June, the heat index was nominally at the upper end of the Heat Index (HI) spectrum, which in the USA ends around 150F on many charts. (yes, some HI charts go up to around 175F now). This went on week after week every year. With these various extremes in the HI, we used to make this observation that begs a question... The hunter/gatherer M/O that ruled the evolution of Homo Sapiens for millions of years drove mankind to seek comfortable environments in which to thrive. When Homo Erectus encountered the heat and stark environment of the middle east and the sub-continent, why did they stop? Why didn't they say, let's get the heck out of here and go someplace nicer? Yea, the climate was perhaps different in some of these areas a few thousand years ago or more. But still, why the heck stay there when it is so inhospitable?

Picked up .47" in 15 mins here NW of Vienna. Short but intense burst. Cooled things down from 86 to 74....

Tornado Warning up for just west of Winston-Salem. Early in the day for the wrt heating thermals and mixing.