I have been reading about this, but what confuses me is that it was already cold as fuck here, two days ago (hence the various flooded houses I have had the pleasure of dealing with) and is not supposed to be nearly as cold this coming week.
A second cousin of mine is dating a Republican. His comment on her sister's FB post about the cold snap? "Swing and a miss, Al Gore."
It's best just to make a blanket policy not to respond to those people, right?
Don't respond, just wait until next June, when its 102 degrees in the shade, then find the comment and "like" it.
You just need to set up some commenting macros, including one that says "You can't make inferences about global climate from local variation in weather."
It was about 35°F here yesterday, and it is supposed to be the same today, which is about normal. But then tomorrow the NWS has it going down to an astounding -6°F. Just in time for the kids' first day back at school! And we have to commute from the east side because there is work being done on our house and we can't live there for six weeks!
3: Or a couple of weeks ago when some places in the mid-Atlantic region had their warmest temperatures ever.
It'll kill off all the mosquito larvae though, right? Right?
Should I put a space heater in my basement to keep the spiders warm?
Be sure to put it next to your oily rag collection. You don't want those things to freeze.
Shit. My office a broken furnace. I should probably tell my coworkers as they don't know.
(Reading more) Oh hey, it looks like this ARCTIC BLAST is actually not going to reach as far east as us. Good luck, people who aren't us!
I can definitely recommend avoiding having your hot water heater on the 3rd floor.
How else is the arctic blast going to exit to the Atlantic?
1: I have been reading about this, but what confuses me is that it was already cold as fuck here, two days ago (hence the various flooded houses I have had the pleasure of dealing with) and is not supposed to be nearly as cold this coming week.
Yes, the geographically-variable impact of different weather sysstems is not generally captured well in news reports (see also strong opinions as to what were the worst east coast blizaards depending on your location). The track of this particular very cold pool/vortex of polar air is a good bit west of the recent one and wil hit the the north central and Great Lakes areas the hardest (see here, loop or step through min and max temperature in 12 hour increments). Right now it look slike it will be significantly modified (warmed) before it crosses the east coast.
13: Combination of the air getting modified/warmed and the track looping back northward.
You'd be surprised there's a whole 'nother country up there.
Did like this tweet I saw via my daughter: "having your water not work for a few hours is a great way to recognize that municipal water is humanity's greatest engineering achievement." I'd add sewer, so water and sewer systems.
And my mild annoyance at the enshrinement of wind-chill temperature as the go-to lead number let me show you it.
20: yeah. So wear a shell, sheesh.
Stormcrow, you might enjoy weatherspark.com.
22: Yes, looks very nice. Had not seen it before.
It's pretty, but the upcoming whether it shows seems kind of crazy.
Supposedly it will reach 50 here tomorrow, but I don't think the forecasts predicted it would drop below 10 last night, so I don't have a lot of confidence in them. Tuesday is supposed to drop below 10 again.
20: I was just saying something similar to my mom.
What's wrong with windchill? Come to think of it, I don't even know how it's calculated. Off to Wikipedia.
I'd been reading 27 as "your mom" joke and couldn't really figure out the humor, and now at last I see why.
I think I'm going to go be boring and annoying in the Chris Kluwe thread. The third of our three kids is in the Children's ER with Lee right now (two medical, this one psych again) and I am so wiped out and hope it's not going to be time to make the kids-versus-relationship call, but it might be. Argh. So that.
Omg. All three are in hospitals simultaneously?
Fucking arctic fucking vortex.
So! Let me tell you how this weather has affected me!
1. We are moving on Friday, assuming the moving truck can park on streets that are all fucked up from the storm last Thursday.
2. In fact, things are expected to partially melt and re-freeze this week, so the streets may well be worse than they are now (that is, coated with ice).
3. The bad roads/parking also make it really difficult to run stuff over to the new house in our car and/or run to home depot and/or ikea.
3. The drain pipe at our new house froze, causing me to have to spend several hours over there trying to come up with an ad-hoc fix.
4. My mom's pipes feeding her hot water heater burst. Since her hot water heater is on the 3rd floor of her townhouse, this means a large portion of her home was flooded and possibly destroyed.
5. This flooding means that my cousin, who was living with my mom, has no place to stay, and has to either stay with us in our apartment we are trying to pack up whilst attending to our baby.
6. Our baby has been with us pretty much constantly since before Christmas, as the storm coincided with day care's planned reopening.
7. Since having my cousin, Zardoz, and many dozens of boxes all trying to cohabit didn't seem tenable, we were forced to go set up an ad-hoc bedroom at the new house for him.
8. Except it turns out he just got fired and doesn't have any money. Ordinarily my mom would probably loan him some, but:
9. My mom is stuck in Florida, all flights to or from the eastern seaboard having been cancelled until freakin' Wednesday.
10. Which also means she isn't here to deal with the various disaster recovery firms and contractors and insurance adjusters and so on converging on her house. In fact, nobody is here to deal with them except you guessed it.
Fuck this fucking winter. Once we're moved I'm never leaving the house again.
Except to procure more duct tape for various home repairs.
30: No, and what the hell I'll use real fake names. Thursday night was Mara for sticking a rubber band in her ear, but they couldn't get it out and made an appointment for us to try again Friday. (Spoiler alert: THEY couldn't get it out either and she has to come back next Thursday to do it under fucking sedation.) As soon as I got back home with her, Selah's breathing was really labored and so I rocked her by the humidifier for two hours and when her breathing went up to 50 breaths/minute, I took her to the ER too. She was admitted briefly but because it's worse at night, they sent us home for the day and told us to come back if she needed it. (That caused the first big fight that night, because Lee thought we should bring her back because she didn't like the sound of S's cough, but I said it wasn't on the list of things to be worried about and explained why it was happening, which made Lee decide she's a worthless parent because she doesn't even know when to take a baby to the hospital. Anyway, shower steam resolved that problem, and the baby and I got a few hours of sleep and Lee decided not to be involved with nighttime baby care anymore.)
The hospital Nia's been to twice is totally worthless. I mean, maybe it's not, but it certainly seems that way and she's learned some bad ideas from kids there and hasn't made any progress because of it, just is falling behind in school after two weeks away. Her in-home therapist is making progress with her too but has no actual advice about what to do about her tantrums. We're not allowed to restrain her, so if she decides she's going to jump out a window, say, all we can do is call 911. Or in this case talk her into getting dressed and going to the ER. But Lee has decided a zero-tolerance violence policy is the way to go, so when Nia can't be left alone because of her tantrum and I shut myself in the room with her to keep her contained and she starts to beat me up again, that means an ER trip and I think that's stupid if she's not hurting me badly, but on the other hand, yeah, that's kind of a bad precedent to set for the family and all. But she's getting so much better, and the medicine is definitely helping her keep herself under control.
This ER is already asking better questions than the usual one because Lee is texting me for answers. I hope she won't be admitted and thus won't trigger Lee's stupid "no more admits" rule and that she and Lee will bond during their forced time together, which usually happens. But we'll see. Nia's been very clear that she wants to be part of our family and doesn't want to go to the hospital, but she knew what she was doing today would trigger the hospital and did it anyway. I am so sad for her.
31.8: wait, Zardoz got fired? Poor wee thing.
Fuck this fucking winter. Once we're moved I'm never leaving the house again.
Ugh. That sounds like a very reasonable reaction.
Now is my first opportunity to see how I feel when everyone else is having a winter and we're not. The truth is I do get something out of it, not any kind of schadenfreude; just...some substantial part of my happiness is based on the knowledge of suffering avoided. And I really hated northeastern snow/cold cataclysms. I do miss my 1000-degree radiator heat, though.
Ok, time to go shovel fallen palm leaves or something. (Was that mean?)
We're not allowed to restrain her
Wait, what? Whose order was that? How on earth are you supposed a protect a little kid without being able to restrain them?
38: some of us are able to handle tough situations without resorting to brute force, copper.
As for the polar vortex of doom and woe, it is causing me to seriously rethink our plan to (maybe) move back east. Yes, this is silly, but there it is.
And now my carbon monoxide alarm is going off. I should ignore it and take a nap, right?
38: I understand the reason for the rule, that "restraint" gets to be code for abuse sometimes, but I'm technically out of compliance and "restraining" when I give her a hug and rub her back and get her to breathe slowly with me. It's such a recipe for disaster. We had to get a ruling that physically dressing her against her will if she didn't want to go to school was not restraint. It's really unhelpful.
And I'm mad at myself for being snippy and not using gentle humorous techniques that usually help her calm down, but on the other hand I was changing the baby at the time and it's not clear how much keeping her out of crisis should be my job rather than hers.
My mom's pipes feeding her hot water heater burst.
I know everybody knows this, but everybody knows about the keeping the various faucets in the house at a slow drip or tiny drizzle, right? Not that that would help for pipes leading to the hot water heater, I guess. Frozen pipes are just my worst nightmare.
My last house was stupidly designed to have the pipe going up to the kitchen sink *along an outer wall*. Oh, geez. We had to knock a hole in the drywall in the basement in order to blow-dry the pipe. Sorry, landlords, but it was your stupid.
39: We get issued these and my kids think demonstrations involving them are hilarious. IME kids also enjoy borrowing handcuffs and attempting to cuff a sibling to various household objects.
Okay, good, they're releasing her with a number we can call for immediate admission if things get worse, and then we'll try to get her team tomorrow to brainstorm yet again. This is exactly what I wanted, so I'm happy.
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Some vindication for (what I perceive as) the Unfogged consensus:
This was a huge misunderstanding by the Obama folks about power and political dynamics, just a fundamental miscalculation and blindness that was really destructive. The president's personality is to be conciliatory. Until the summer of 2011 and the grand bargain collapsed, he always wanted to be conciliatory. He also had people like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina in the White House who wanted to totally control everything and did not want any on the left pushing them. But power works differently. They would have been in a much stronger position if they could say, "We're being pushed really, really, really hard from the left, and so this is the best we can do." And then cut final deals when they had to.
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46: Along related lines, David Atkins on the poverty of current mainstream political rhetoric about income inequality:
The difference between the neoliberal and the conservative, beyond social issues, is that the neoliberal wants those worst off taken care of enough to prevent bloody revolution, while conservatives count on fear of police and religion to keep the sick and starving poor in line.
The treatment of the poor and unemployed isn't where the economic progressive line is drawn. Ensuring that the most vulnerable are well taken care of in society is a bare minimum standard.
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it shows seems kind of crazy
It's great for comparisons, like so.
There are also forecast accuracy tools and such, which I haven't really played with.
Some vindication for (what I perceive as) the Unfogged consensus:
That is a great interview, and everyone should click through the link.
I don't know how much vindication that offers, however, because the criticism while sincere is in the context of calling the ACA an enormous political success -- starting from the (accurate) headline, "The group that got health reform passed is declaring victory and going home"
[I]f we could wave a magic wand and design a rational health-care system that would control costs while providing much better access, we wouldn't design our current one. The ACA was the best that we could get through the American political system. The fact that we failed in every previous instance in the past 100 years reflects the reality that there hadn't been a reform designed to deal with the realities of American politics, and there hadn't been a broad-based movement built effectively for the country to pass this reform. That was the contribution that HCAN made.
The two things came together in passing the ACA. The legislation was carefully constructed to engage, instead of alienating, the biggest interest groups, which have huge amounts of money that could effectively be used to kill health reform. Both because of their lobbying clout and their ability to use paid media to scare the public. These interest groups were neutralized enough, in some cases even mildly supportive. Then we built a whole grass-roots movement to overcome the opposition.
They certainly think Obama could have done better, but if you believe that there's great credit to be taken from having passed the ACA at all, presumably Obama shares some of that credit.
Yes, certainly no consensus on the wonderfulness of the ACA.
I give Nancy Pelosi the great majority of the credit. Obviously, having a cooperative president was indispensable when it came down to the crunch. I think particularly of Sen. Ben Nelson's refusal to vote in favor without (face-saving) abortion restrictions.
No consensus within the Unfogged community? Really? Myself, I need only to look at the 4 million additional people signed on to Medicaid to say that we're better off as a society than we had been.
31- I can offer you, um, use of a minivan and a cargo bike? (The latter just got fixed after taking 2 weeks to get the custom replacement hanger.) And I live closer to home depot so I can pick up lots of rolls of duct tape?
54: thanks. I think it'll all be fine (well, my mom's house isn't fine, and my cousin's stuff is pretty much all ruined, but I'm talking in terms of our move), it's just stressful.
53 - Do you actually read the comments?
Maybe the great ACA Unfogged Commentariat Flame Wars of 2012 and 2013 have receeded into mythopoetic status, like Orlando Furioso.
57: Oh, I decided that 50 and 52 might have been in jest. I'm kind of on a hair-trigger on the topic; sorry about that.
I don't count as part of the community.
47 could be read both before and after 46, and thought about which should at least raise a slight doubt about "to say that we're better off as a society than we had been."
The ACA was only, and in the minor sense, about who would and would not get health insurance/health care. Most people, the vast majority, even the indigent were getting something.
The more important point of the ACA was who would pay for and who would profit from healthcare.
And the ACA passed our neo-liberal millionaire's Congress because:
a) It creates a multi-tier heath care network system, in which the rich will no longer have much competition for the best providers
b) the middle-class will pay for their own and the healthcare of the poor
c) the payments and profits for healthcare drugs etc will be largely directed toward the rich, both as providers and those who buy stock in such
It's like the slaveowner sees his slaves dying from disease and the cotton isn't getting picked, brings in a doctor, but says the slaves must work evenings to pay the cost. Actually it's worse, cause the slaver gets a cut from the doctor.
parsimon says "thank you, good massa"
Thorn: glad to hear Nia's home and the other two are healthy-ish.
Tweety and Blume: jesus.
Parsi: there is no consensus.
Is there an consensus on comparing middle class people paying taxes to slavery?
I laugh at the cold - HA!
Actually, I am spending a lot of time prepping for my 2 block walk to the bus stop. I am also going to stop at Target on the way home from work and drop off some stuff for my friend with the 2 year old, who is in crisis as usual.
Also, how bad is it to totally shut someone down on FB comments, even if you do it nicely, when you know they are fairly sincere & good-hearted, but perhaps not the brightest bulb in the marquee? I mean, it was a great comment, really nailed the point I wanted to make, but now I feel bad.
Is there an Unfogged consensus on ACA Joe? I always thought of it as the poor man's Aéropostale.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine Unfogged achieving consensus on the ACA - forever.
Today there were some rain drops blowing on to my balcony and I almost had to get out of the hammock.
I haven't heard a child whine in three days. It's a Christmas miracle.
Make sure it isn't the kind of miracle that is caused by Q-tip that got pushed back too far.
I thought Minivet was referring not to a consensus on the ACA, but to an Unfogged-consensus view of Obama as (at least for his crucial first term and much of the second) excessively timid and neoliberal and overcommitted to basically futile attempts at bridge-building with Republicans and 90s-style triangulation. A President who blew a tough but real chance to be truly transformative by being excessively Washington-consensus cautious. For me, that's basically my current view of Obama and feels obviously right, though I resisted it for a long time.*
On the other hand, I still think the ACA (while extremely extremely imperfect) is, given realistic possibilities in the US, an extremely good and really extremely important piece of legislation. The biggest progressive federal legislative victory I'm aware of in my lifetime, and I'm not that young.
*really, it's the getting so worked up over Obama v Hillary in the 2008 primary, and the fighting about that here, that looks ridiculous in retrospect. O turned out to be a fine but basically boring and cautious mainstream Democrat, just like almost any plausible Dem candidate.
(Thorn, Jesus. Hang in there.)
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Does anyone know how to cite a google Ngram in APA style?
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I endorse 62.1, 62.2, 70.1. I also thought the consensus being referred to had to do with Obama as compromiser. I have no original thoughts of my own.
Obama cited a Google Ngram Chicago style.
68- So you've also discovered the miracle of duct tape?
It's really painful for birth control, if that's what you're getting at.
78: could be totally painless--make some duct-tape clothing and you're rather unlikely to be closing.
One of us, I'm not sure which, has a lot of learn about women.
Looking at that map, I think I see why we're not going to get as stupid cold as Minnesota and why Boston isn't getting very cold.
40: Great weather is a good reason to stay where you are, honestly. Sure, the northeast is rarely this bad, but winter always sucks. Why put up with it if you don't have to?
Topically, my office is without central heat. With space heaters, it's about 63F. The deep chill has barely started and I wonder if space heaters can hold the line once it gets to zero outside.
re: 84
In most UK offices, you'd be going home by now, or close to it [16 c is the standard minimum workplace temperature].
None of the people who report to me have shown up but all the people who report to other people have. I need to move the needle on the loved-feared scale. Or tolerated-fear scale. Whatever the other endpoint is.
[16 c is the standard minimum workplace temperature]
What if you work in a meat packing plant?
What if you work in a meat packing plant?
Why do you think the British boil their meat into insensibility?
To be honest I prefer eating insensible meat. The cows get so mad when you just run up and bite 'em.
Was offline for twelve hours. I think my router was too close to the window and froze. And it wasn't even cold here in Dallas, 14 with a 2 degree wind chill.
My router is supposed to be liquid?
My parka says it's good to -30 but I wonder if goose down is as effective after 20 years.
Routers don't get faster the colder they are, like superconductors?
They should make a flying datacenter that follows the polar vortex around to save on cooling costs, although I guess that's offset by the whole bit about energy to fly it around.
What I'll be wearing today:
Duofold heavy-weight long underwear
Very thick wool socks
Jeans
Heavy flannel shirt
Carhartt heavyweight thermal hooded sweatshirt
Carhartt parka
Cabela's pac boots (rated to -30F or so)
Fleece neck gaiter
Fleece-lined ragwool balaclava
Wool watch cap
Keffiyeh
Leather gloves with wool liner gloves
This is for a 2 block walk to the bus. Waiting for the bus last night, I took my messenger bag off for about 2 minutes to rearrange the contents. When I put it back on, the cold went right to my back through the same number of layers as above. And it is a bit colder today.
94.last: Not if it was on a Zeppelin! You could leave the engines off most of the time and just drift around in circles.
What if you work in a meat packing plant?
To answer this unnecessarily seriously, the law itself only requires a "reasonable" temperature. Under the code of practice, a minimum reasonable temperature for an office is 16 degrees, explicitly excluding workplaces involving food or where it would be "impractical".
Routers don't get faster the colder they are, like superconductors?
Processors do. Or rather, they can be pushed harder (higher clock speeds/voltages).
95: I do not remember it getting that cold when I lived there, but Mr. Robot tells me my memory is faulty. Given how preoccupied I was with my dissertation, family, drama, and being miserable (but I repeat myself!), I guess it's possible I've forgotten the weather.
The colder the cloud, the faster the web service.
My parka is so old it's from Eddie Bauer.
51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing'. If the 'cloud' were on a zeppelin it might!
85: Unless you work in retail. Until our boiler got replaced, our workplace all last autumn/winter/faux spring and part of this autumn hovered around 9 C. (Colder inside than out, some of the time -- we had condensation on the *outside* of our windows.)
In other news, pollsters who ask dumb questions get dumb answers.
Supposedly it is -41 out there right now (with windchill!), but it didn't feel that bad when I went out to scoop the snow on the stoop and front sidewalk here for the mail lady. (It helped that I could half-ass the sidewalk since it had already been tamped down by pedestrians, though.) I sometimes wonder why the USPS makes it carriers go out on days like this, but I guess giving up the extreme weather delivery ethos would involve admitting that they mostly distribute junk mail anymore.
Anyhoo, I'm popping in on my glorious snow day to pimp my buddy Jen's new show, "Twerks on Paper," opening at the Parker-Schopf Gallery in Chicago on Jan. 10th, details here: http://www.jenniferyorkeartist.com/pages/news.html. I think some of y'all had some deep thoughts on the topic, so here ya go, have some art about it too.
51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing'. If the 'cloud' were on a zeppelin it might!
Those people are correct.
Yes, that's the joke, on the rare occasions when the weather says it's -40 I like to ask which scale.
If you double it and add 30, like they do in Canada, -41 F converts to -52 C. It sounds colder that way.
-41 F. Though it's up to a balmy -31 F (with windchill) now.
105: That link isn't working for me.
Also, it appears the name of the gallery is Packer-Schopf.
Hmm, the link doesn't work for me either when I click on it, yet that is the URL of the correct page on her site (which is wonky for me because of Java issues, I think). You're right about the spelling of the gallery, there's more about Jen's show on their page, here: http://www.packergallery.com/press/jan6.html
"Twerks on Paper" is a clever, catchy name for an exhibit. The art doesn't really have anything to do with twerking though -- right?
The Peruvian problem with the link is just that the final period is included as part of it, which breaks it. (This is a general problem with trying to insert proper URLs into typographically standard sentences.)
Err, "Peruvian" was an autocrorrected "problem". Sigh.
Your autocorrect for "autocorrect" may be off.
Clearly Trapnel's autocorrect is racist.
x.trapnel is Tiny Tim's evil twin.
99: Allegedly, this is the coldest it's been in a couple of decades at least. I remember multiple occasions in my youth where I had to go wait for the school bus in -25F windchills, though that was usually only a -5F objective temperature.
Lots of people who would usually go out in any weather seem to be staying in today, but quite a lot of businesses are staying open. Rides at Camp Snoopy Nickelodeon Universe at MOA are free all day.
It only took about a block and a half for my legs to start feeling chilly on the way to the bus this morning.
123: Now MPLS is off my list of potential places to live. That sounds awful. They didn't close schools for below-zero temps? Glad you're managing OK with the wicked cold.
The edge of the cold weather reaches DC tonight. Our predicted high tomorrow is 15, which isn't that cold, really. I was so disoriented this morning because there are all these COLD!! SNOW!! posts in my FB feed, and I had to be sure to bring warm stuff for my walk home later, but when I walked outside, it was mid-40s, and I didn't need hat or gloves.
124: yes, this morning. But it was 28 and quite windy at 5:30pm in my neck of the woods.
Personally, I bundle up to the same extent for anything from 15 above down to 10 below. And at that point, unless you get wet, or are outside for a longish time (greater than 90 minutes) it's all pretty much the same. Remember that a lot of people here happily wear shorts, T-shirts and sandals when it is near freezing, if they aren't going to be outside very long. Schools are closed today and tomorrow, although people in northern Minnesota scoffed at the Governor's order to close them today, as they do regularly experience windchills this low up there. Once you're down in that -20 range, you're either fairly warm or fairly dead.
My impression that electronics works worse in storm or cold is based on
1) Experience, cable here gets weaker during after rainstorms; and the router did work when I moved it away from the window.
2) Intuition? If solid-state electronics didn't need lots of resistances to run well, cpus wouldn't get hot.
115: Well, I haven't seen this collection yet, but I gather that we, the viewers, and meant to do the twerking, in the general direction of her art (which, if it's much like her last show, is guaranteed at the very least to have a lot of vaginas.)