Tag Archives: houston

This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

by ShanelVwzzrgzaa Posted on April 19, 2016

A scene from 2015’s disastrous floods in Houston. REUTERS/Lee Celano

This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

By on Apr 19, 2016commentsShare

Houston is in the throes of a flood that is, according to recent headlines, “historic,” “deadly,” and “unprecedented.”

None of that is hyperbole. As of Tuesday, the floods had killed at least six people, destroyed miles of homes and highways, and displaced hundreds of residents. More than 17 inches of rain had fallen in Texas’ Harris County since the previous morning, according to ABC News. And it wasn’t over yet: The National Weather Service issued flood warnings into late Tuesday night. (Meanwhile, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner helpfully commented that there was “nothing you can do” in the face of “a lot of rain coming in a very short period of time.”)

Flooding has become an annual hazard in the city, which sits at just 43 feet above sea level. Unfortunately, it’s very likely that the situation will only worsen.

For starters, when floodwaters begin to recede, they bring their own set of hazards and dangers. A spokesperson for the American Red Cross noted the extreme toxicity of floodwater, reports ABC News, which constitutes a sludge of debris from cars, houses, and infrastructure — not to mention overflow from contaminated waterways like Texas’ Blanco River. The rising waters also disrupted wildlife — officials warned that aggressive snakes washing up on people’s properties were a risk factor. During cleanup, Houstonians will be exposed to a Pandora’s Box of mold and airborne toxins that could aggravate asthma or respiratory illness.

Plus, Houston is woefully underprepared for natural disasters, as an investigation by ProPublica and Texas Monthly revealed in March. The investigation, which relied on predictive meteorological models, found that the near-miss of Hurricane Ike in 2008 was a relative blessing for the city that no one should bank on occurring again. According to scientists interviewed for the project, the odds of Houston’s “perfect storm” happening in a given year exceed that of being killed in a car crash or by a firearm — both of which are fairly common occurrences in the U.S.

According to ProPublica, Houston is the fourth-largest American city and a major industrial hub that contains the country’s largest refining and petrochemical complex, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the Houston Ship Channel, and multiple rapidly expanding residential areas. If the storm hits at the wrong spot, all of those place would be at risk of being underwater or severely damaged by flooding. That’s a scenario that would halt supply chains all over the country and wreak havoc on the American economy.

But experts told media outlets this week that there was no way that Houston could prepare in time. “Could we have engineered our way out of this?” said Rice University engineer Philip Bedient, quoted in the Guardian. “Only if we started talking about alterations 35 or 40 years ago.”

Bedient went on to say that the best that Houston could hope for for was a good warning system. NASA might want to get on that — if only certain presidential candidates wouldn’t get in its way.

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This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, ProPublica, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

Bill Nye should moderate the next GOP debate

by HYYLes421611432 Posted on February 26, 2016

Bill Nye should moderate the next GOP debate

By on 26 Feb 2016commentsShare

If you’ve been paying attention to the 2016 presidential debates, you may have noticed one topic that has been absent. While the GOP candidates have discussed everything from the price of tractors in China to killing baby Hitler to Carly Fiorina’s face, they have been almost silent on the gravest global threat of our age: climate change.

Now, this isn’t entirely the candidates’ fault (although not accepting climate change science certainly is), since the moderators in charge have barely mentioned the environment during the debates. But even though the presidential hopefuls — and debate moderators — are ignoring climate change, one man is not: Bill Nye, The Science Guy. In an op-ed published on CNN (the network that hosted Thursday’s Republican debate in Houston, Texas), Nye lays out the questions that should have been asked. He writes:

Here’s hoping someone can manage to ask the candidates a question like: “Mr. _______, you’ve stated repeatedly that you feel that climate change and global warming are not things we need to worry about in the short or even long term; why do you disagree with the world’s science community and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?”

Then, I’m hoping that the same person or another citizen asks a follow-up: “Mr. _______, would you say that you believe your intuition and experience with weather are more scientifically correct than the research done by the world’s climate scientists, and do you believe that the world’s scientists are part of a conspiracy?”

Of course, neither question made it into the debate in Houston.

The one brief mention of the environment on Thursday night was in the context of the budget: CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer followed up with Donald Trump about his plan to eliminate the EPA in order to save the country $8 billion, though it still only accounts for roughly 0.2 percent of the federal budget. (Trump, by the way, also says he’s going to eliminate the Department of Education, so if you have plan on having school-aged children during the Trump reign, you may want to consider Cape Breton.)

But even if Blitzer or the other moderators had brought up climate change, four out of the five candidates onstage deny its very existence. This isn’t just terrifying for those of us who care about the planet; it should also be terrifying for those who care more about the economy than the Earth. The fossil fuel industry is facing intense turmoil: Coal-fired power plants are closing, oil prices are at record lows, natural gas extraction has a huge PR — and earthquake — problem, and the decreasing cost and increasing availability of solar and wind power means the future just isn’t dirty energy anymore: It’s in renewables. Or, at least, it should be.

But even though Texas is the home to a big oil and gas industry and wind industry, none of this came up in Houston. And if past performance is any indication, it won’t in the debates still to come. Until moderators and network hosts force the candidates to explain themselves, they’ll talk about fruit salad and building walls across North America and who would defund Planned Parenthood the fastest — and they’ll certainly bicker over each other like divorcing parents — but as for climate change? On that, they won’t say a word.

Unless, that is, Bill Nye gets to moderate.

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Bill Nye should moderate the next GOP debate

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Hillary Wins a Squeaker in Nevada, But It’s a Rout in the Headlines

by DiannaStreeton Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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In case you’ve ever wondered about the value of a narrow 5-point win in a state you were expected to take easily, just take a look at today’s headlines. The margin of victory doesn’t matter. The headlines in all four of our biggest daily newspapers were clear as a bell: Hillary won and her momentum is back. That’s the story everyone is seeing over their bacon and eggs this morning.

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Hillary Wins a Squeaker in Nevada, But It’s a Rout in the Headlines

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General Relativity: Not So Hard After All!

by BarbaraStaples Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I tackled a vexing problem: Is general relativity really that hard to understand? In one sense, of course it is. But when it receives the treatment that most scientific theories are given, I’d say no. For example, here’s how Newton’s theory of gravitation is usually described for laymen:

All objects with mass (for example, the earth and the moon) are attracted to each other. The bigger the mass, the stronger the attraction.
The attraction decreases as the objects get farther apart. If they’re twice as far apart, the attraction is one-fourth. If they’re three times as far apart, the attraction is one-ninth. Etc.

Easy peasy! Objects are attracted to each other via certain mathematical rules. But hold on. This is only easy because we’ve left out all the hard stuff. Why are massive objects attracted to each other? Newton himself didn’t even try to guess, famously declaring “I frame no hypotheses.” Action-at-a-distance remained a deep and profound mystery for centuries.1 And another thing: why does the gravitational attraction decrease by exactly the square of the distance? That’s suspiciously neat. Why not by the power of 2.1 or the cube root of e? And nothing matters except mass and distance? Why is that? This kind of stuff is almost never mentioned in popular descriptions, and it’s the reason Newton’s theory is so easy to picture: It’s because we don’t usually give you anything to picture in the first place. Apples fall to the earth and planets orbit the sun. End of story.

Well then, let’s describe Einstein’s theory of gravity—general relativity—the same way:

Objects with mass are attracted to each other.
The attraction decreases as the objects get farther apart. Einstein’s equation is different from Newton’s, so the amount of the decrease is slightly different too.
In Einstein’s theory, gravity isn’t a property of mass. It’s caused by the geometry of the universe, so it affects everything, including energy.
Light is a form of energy, so beams of light are slightly bent when they travel near massive objects like stars.
Einstein’s equations predict that time runs slower near objects with high gravitational fields.
Sometimes an object can have such a strong gravitational field that light can’t escape and time stops. These are called black holes.
Plus a few other intriguing but fairly minor deviations from Newton’s theory.

Not so hard! Once again, there’s nothing to picture even though this is a perfectly adequate lay description of general relativity. The trouble starts when we do what we didn’t do for Newton: ask why all this stuff happens. But guess what? In any field of study, things get more complicated and harder to analogize as you dive more deeply. For some reason, though, we insist on doing this for relativity even though we happily ignore it in descriptions of Newton’s theory of gravity. And this is when we start getting accelerating elevators in space and curved spacetime and light cones and time dilation. Then we complain that we don’t understand it.

(By the way: if you study classical Newtonian gravity, it turns out to be really complicated too! Gravitation, the famous Misner/Thorne/Wheeler doorstop on general relativity, is 1200 difficult pages. But guess what? Moulton’s Introduction to Celestial Mechanics pushes 500 pages—and it only covers a fraction of classical gravitation. This stuff is hard!)

Relativity and quantum mechanics are both famously hard to grasp once you go beyond what they say and demand to know what they mean. In truth, they don’t “mean” anything. They do gangbusters at describing what happens when certain actions are taken, and we can thank them for transistors, GPS satellites, atom bombs, PET scans, hard drives, solar cells, and plenty of other things. The mathematics is difficult, but often it looks kinda sorta like the math for easier concepts. So quantum mechanics has waves and probability amplitudes because some of the math looks pretty similar to the math we use to describe ocean swells and flipping coins. Likewise, general relativity has curved spacetime because Einstein’s math looks a lot like the math we use to describe ordinary curved objects.

But is it really probability? Is it really a four-dimensional curve? Those are good ways to interpret the math. But you know what? No matter how much you dive in, you’ll never know for sure if these interpretations of the math into human-readable form are really correct. You can be confident the math is correct,2 but the interpretations will always be a bit iffy. And sadly, they won’t really help you understand the actual operation of these theories anyway. Objects with mass attract each other, and if you know the math you can figure out exactly how much they attract each other. Calling the path of the objects a geodesic on a 4-dimensional curved spacetime manifold doesn’t really make things any clearer. In all likelihood, a picture of a bowling ball on a trampoline doesn’t either.

But we keep trying. We just can’t help thinking that everything has to be understandable to the h. sapiens brain. This makes interpreting difficult math an excellent way to pass the time for a certain kind of person. It’s a lot like trying to interpret the actions of the Kardashian family. Lots of fun, but ultimately sort of futile if you’re just an ordinary schmoe.

1General relativity and quantum mechanics finally put everyone’s minds at ease by showing that the action wasn’t actually at a distance after all. Unfortunately, they explained one mystery only at the cost of hatching a whole bunch of others.

2We hope so, anyway. But then, Newton’s math looked pretty damn good for a couple of centuries before it turned out to be slightly wrong. That may yet happen to general relativity and quantum mechanics too.

UPDATE: I’ve modified the third bullet of the relativity list to make it more accurate.

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General Relativity: Not So Hard After All!

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Hillary Clinton Wins Nevada

by JeannineXqf Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Well, it looks like Hillary Clinton won Nevada after all. Only by about five points, probably, but that’s enough. It means she avoids a crippling week of headlines declaring her a loser and anointing Bernie Sanders with all the momentum.

That’s why even a few points can make all the difference. Clinton is 25 points ahead in South Carolina, and now she’ll probably be able to keep most of that lead, which will produce yet more good press heading into Super Tuesday. If she runs the table there or even comes close—which she has a good chance of doing—it’s pretty much over for Sanders.

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Hillary Clinton Wins Nevada

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Why Is General Relativity So Damn Hard to Understand?

by GastonCasanova Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby is reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, which he calls “a pleasure to read.” Except for one thing: Isaacson’s description of the theory of relativity is incomprehensible. For example:

The passage shown below comes from Isaacson’s Chapter One.

The general theory of relativity…can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time.

We’d have to call that passage bafflegab. No one has the slightest idea what Isaacson means when he refers to “the four-dimensional fabric of space and time.” We all can picture that trampoline—but none of us knows how to imagine that “four-dimensional fabric!” Nor does Isaacson give us the tools to do so, or notice that he has failed.

Somerby is complaining about a big problem here. But it’s not Isaacson’s fault. Or even the fault of science writers in general. It’s a defect in the universe itself.

As it turns out, explaining the “fabric” of spacetime isn’t hard. Yes, it’s four-dimensional. But all this means is that you define it using four numbers. If you described me via my age, weight, height, and IQ, that would be a “four-dimensional” representation of Kevin Drum. It’s not a big deal.

Now suppose you want to describe an event. You need to specify where it happened and when it happened. Take, for example, the airplane crashing into World Trade Center 1. It happened at 40.71º latitude, -74.01º longitude, and 6,371 kilometers (relative to the center of the earth) at 13:46:30 GMT on 11 September 2001 (relative to the common era calendar). As an event in spacetime it’s represented by an ordered 4-tuple:

There are other events that happened at the same time in other places (me saying “oh shit” in California); at the same place in other times (breaking ground on WTC 1 in 1966); and entirely different times and places (the Battle of Gettysburg). If you collect every possible location of an event ever—that is, every combination of four numbers specifying times and places in the universe—that’s all of spacetime. Physicists are likely to call it a manifold or a Minkowski space. For laymen, fabric is fine.

This is all pretty simple. You might not know the mathematics for dealing with arrays of four numbers at a time, but it’s well developed. And if you combine that with a few other concepts—like the idea that the speed of light is always constant—you’ll eventually end up with the theory of gravitational attraction that’s called general relativity.

Unfortunately, “eventually” is a long way away. I can teach you to add and subtract, and “eventually” that will lead you to the theories of financial derivatives that we lovingly called rocket science when they were helping the economy implode in 2008. I can teach you the color wheel and eventually you might become the next Rembrandt. I can teach you to read and eventually you might tackle Kant or Wittgenstein.

So what’s a science writer to do? General relativity is a set of mathematical equations. Plug in the numbers and it turns out to predict the way gravity works with astonishing precision. But can someone who doesn’t understand the math picture in their head what those equations “mean”? Well, what does a Rembrandt mean to a blind person? What do derivatives mean to someone who doesn’t understand the Black-Scholes model? What does Kant mean to someone who’s never studied philosophy? You can do your best to find some kind of analogy that kinda sorta gets these ideas across, but none of them will ever be simultaneously comprehensible and truly accurate to a layman.

I said earlier that this was a defect in the universe. Here’s the defect: the universe is hard! Humans have a hard time understanding it if they aren’t willing to study diligently. (And sometimes even if they are.) There’s really no way around this. In the case of science, there’s no law that says the universe has to work in ways that the overclocked ape h. sapiens can make intuitive or visual sense of. You can read an article in Discover and get a glimpse. A really talented writer can give you a slightly better glimpse. If you get a PhD in physics you’ll get an even better glimpse. You’ll start to grasp simultaneity, light cones, stress-energy tensors, geodesics, world lines, Riemannian geometries, and frame dragging. But will you ever truly understand? Will you ever truly be able to picture it? Probably not. You might eventually be able to manipulate the algebra deftly, but at a visceral level our brains evolved to understand spear throwing and baby raising, not differential equations or tensor analysis. Welcome to the universe, you allegedly sentient being, you.

Tomorrow: In part 2, I explain general relativity so you can understand it. No joke. It’s not that hard at all! Though I admit that I’m going to cheat.

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Why Is General Relativity So Damn Hard to Understand?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 February 2016

by GitaOov11667597 Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today we have bunk bed kitties. Among felines, I’m not sure whether the alpha gets the top bunk or the bottom bunk. Since they usually like hiding in nooks and crannies, I’m guessing bottom bunk. Other evidence corroborates this. Hopper used to let Hilbert bully her, but lately she barely even opens an eyelid when he tries to push her around. And sure enough, he just sadly backs away. Poor thing. He used to think he was the toughest mammal in the house, but time has taught him otherwise.

Also, Hopper bit his ear a few days ago. If that doesn’t get the message across, I don’t know what will.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 February 2016

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Ted Cruz Wins the Family Values Endorsement

by EfrenGDFDgoxeo Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Exciting news! Former South Carolina governor Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford has endorsed….

Ted Cruz! This is quite a coup. As you no doubt remember, Sanford demonstrated his commitment to traditional Republican values by starting up an extramarital affair; disappearing to Buenos Aires for a six-day vacation with his beloved; telling his spokesman to claim that he was gone because he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail”; and then tearfully admitting his affair and claiming that he had found his “soul mate.” He subsequently got divorced, and later on broke up with his soul mate.

In fairness, the generous folks of South Carolina decided to elect him to Congress in 2013. So I guess all is forgiven. Certainly Ted Cruz has forgiven him.

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Ted Cruz Wins the Family Values Endorsement

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Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Was Against the Iraq War No Matter What He Actually Said at the Time

by LatashaGoldsmith Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Donald Trump, asked on September 11, 2002, if he was in favor of invading Iraq:

Yeah…I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.

That’s Donald being “loud and strong” against the Iraq War. For the record, his explanation is, yeah, he said it, but it was probably the first time anyone had asked him. But for sure he was against it a little later. Seriously. He was.

As you might expect, being confronted with this didn’t even cause him to break stride. He immediately segued into a lengthy rant about how he was totally opposed to the war and everyone knew it, there were all sorts of headlines, and it destabilized the whole Middle East, it was responsible for ISIS and Libya and, um, Syria, the biggest mistake ever in American history, and it was Obama’s fault too, just a disaster, and Saddam didn’t bring down the towers, it was probably the Saudis, and did I mention that it was a complete and total disaster? And I was against it. Totally.

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Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Was Against the Iraq War No Matter What He Actually Said at the Time

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Sadly, Rubio-Obama Left-Handed Handshake Is Just Design Laziness, Not Latest Terrorist Fist Jab

by LieseloManson Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today’s idiotic campaign tiff involves Marco Rubio pretending to be outraged about an image from the Ted Cruz campaign that illustrates their supposed outrage over the fact that “Rubio cast the deciding vote to fast-track three highly secretive trade deals negotiated by Obama and encouraging corrupt, backroom deals.” It shows a photoshopped Rubio shaking hands with a photoshopped Obama.

Yawn. What I want to know is why this illustration shows Rubio and Obama shaking hands left-handed. Weird, no? But it turns out the answer is simple: the campaign used a stock photo for the bodies, but the black guy in the photo was on the left and they wanted Obama to be on the right. So they inverted the image, which made it look like a left-handed handshake.

I’m disappointed. I thought maybe conservatives were under the impression that a left-handed shake was the latest black thing, like a terrorist fist jab or something. Oh well.

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Sadly, Rubio-Obama Left-Handed Handshake Is Just Design Laziness, Not Latest Terrorist Fist Jab

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