August 2010

There were 36 posts published in August 2010 (this is page 4 of 4).

Much Gulf Oil Remains, Deeply Hidden and Under Beaches

Surprise! BP is lying through its teeth again, and the goverment is buying it.

As BP finishes pumping cement into the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead Thursday, some scientists are taking issue with a new U.S. government report that says the "vast majority" of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been taken care of by nature and "robust" cleanup efforts.In addition, experts warn, much of the toxic oil from the worst spill in U.S. history may be trapped under Gulf beaches—where it could linger for years—or still migrating into the ocean depths, where it’s a "3-D catastrophe," one scientist said.

via Much Gulf Oil Remains, Deeply Hidden and Under Beaches.

Facebook’s facial recognition creeps me out

Wouldn't you like to know?

In a process known as tagging, Facebook users have long been identifying the friends that appear in the photographs uploaded to the social networking site. Tagging involves someone selecting the area of a photograph in which a person appears and then associating the person’s name or Facebook profile to that area. It’s all been a manual process, though an easy one.

I noticed today that one of the photos in my collection I purposefully have not tagged showed up on my Facebook page today: a photo of my son on his bike. Facebook had found this untagged photo and was asking me who he was. Apparently Facebook has implemented facial recognition software.
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Record-breaking hailstone

Hailstone from Vivian, SD storm


The largest hailstone ever recorded in the US fell in South Dakota on July 23rd. It weighed almost two pounds! NOAA scientists estimate the updraft required to keep it aloft exceeded 160 MPH!

During the late afternoon and early evening hours of 23 July 2010, thunderstorms developed over portions of central South Dakota. Several storms quickly became severe in an environment favorable for supercell thunderstorms. In particular, one very strong supercell thunderstorm moved southeastward across portions of Stanley, Jones, and Lyman counties. One of the hardest hit locations was the community of Vivian, South Dakota, where extremely large hail, destructive winds to 80 mph, and a brief tornado were reported.

A record setting hailstone was ultimately discovered in Vivian, measuring 8.0 inches in diameter, 18.625 inches in circumference, and weighing in at an amazing 1.9375 pounds!! This hailstone broke the previous United States hail size record for diameter (7.0 inches – 22 June 2003 in Aurora, NE) and weight (1.67 pounds – 3 September 1970 in Coffeyvile, KS).

via July 23rd Extreme Hail Event.

(h/t Mike Moss at WRAL)

The City of Raleigh’s new website

Yesterday, the City of Raleigh unveiled it’s new website: the first update in a dozen or more years. The old website has long been a pet peeve, with it’s cryptic, miles-long URLs and lack of photographs or graphics. To find anything useful, users often had to resort to using the search box.

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem with the new website: to find anything useful the user has to use the search box. In fact, it’s more of an issue now. The old site at least attempted to categorize information in a hierarchical format (for every page, you saw a list of breadcrumbs that showed you where you were in the site). The new one, however, makes no attempt at all at organizing data (at least as far as I can tell).
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