This animation was created using the Microsoft Live Map tool. You can reach the tool at http://www.3dMapTour.com. I was impressed with how easy this was to create, and a little impressed at how far I've come to end up where I am.
The introduction to Disasters and Development
...In reality, just as disasters and development cannot be separated, neither can disaster response be divorced from politics. Unfortunately, few governments in the Third World are democratic and many regimes perpetuate underdevelopment because it supports the needs of an oligarchy or other privileged class. Thus many of the ideas presented here are anathema to these groups. For them, control of disaster relief is another way of maintaining the status quo, and a paternalistic dole of relief goods from foreigners is the preferred method of aid, for it is in keeping with the dictatorial system.
I'm reading Disasters and Development
Disasters and Development has one of the clearest explanations of how a hurricane forms that I have ever seen:
Much is known about how a cyclone forms. In order to develop, a cyclone must have a warm sea and calm warm air. The warm air rises -- heavy, humid, and full of water vapour. Its place is taken by air rushing in from the sides and, because of the earth's rotation, this moving air is given a twist, so that the entire system begins to revolve. The warm rising air meets cooler air and releases its water vapour in the form of rain. It takes a tremendous amount of energy for the air to lift the water in the first place, and now this energy is released in the form of heat. This increases the rate of ascent of the air and a continuous cycle begins to develop. More water is released and also more heat : more the water and heat released, faster the cycle moves. This cycle becomes the engine that drives the beast, and gradually it goes faster and faster and the air mass becomes much larger.
Because the wind system is revolving, centrifugal force tends to throw the air outward so that the pressure in the center becomes very low, thus forming the eye of the storm. The pressure on the outside is very high, so the wind moves faster in an attempt to fill that low pressure area. The faster it moves the more the centrifugal force throws it outward. Soon there are very fast circular winds and, when they reach 120 kilometers per hour, the system becomes a cyclone or hurricane.
The system then begins to move forward like a spinning top. This brings it into contact with more warm sea and air, and the process becomes self-sustaining. Once a cyclone is formed, it will continue to move and expand until it passes over land or over an area where the sea is cooler.
In the northern hemisphere, cyclones generally move in a north-westerly direction; in the southern hemisphere, in a south-westerly direction. Little is known about what makes these storms move and change direction, other then that they are affected by the high altitude winds and rotation of the earth. So far, scientists have found it difficult to predict the movement of the cyclone, making this hazard one of the most dangerous.
It's been a long time since I blogged anything technical. In my current job I am quite far from technology, which is a drag, but kind of part of the dues of moving along in my career. However, I still get some opportunities to do geeky stuff.
For example, my neighbor just called me with a problem with his Windows XP machine. He had gotten hit with a virus. Norton took care of it, but his browser no longer worked.
I fired up a command prompt and pinged google. I got this:
Pinging www.l.google.com [ºÿ] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
...
Which was kind of what I expected, except for the weird ºÿ characters in the first line. I started to suspect that my neighbor's TCP/IP stack was messed up. In the past, I seemed to remember fixing this by deinstalling TCP/IP and reinstalling it.
But when I went to deinstall TCP/IP, I saw that the "uninstall" button was grayed out. Hmm.
A little research on the Internet (always have a second computer!) revealed a single command that could be used to "reinstall" TCP/IP. It doesn't really reinstall it, it just resets the configuration of it:
netsh winsock reset
After this, Windows asked me to restart. When I went to the signoff login, the "Shutdown" button had a message that stated that shutting down would install a necessary update. I chose to shutdown.
When the PC rebooted, everything worked! There are more details on this technique here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259
I've actually got four songs written so far (I'm supposed to finish 14 in February; we'll see), but I've only been able to record two more or less successfully. Here is the second one: http://fawm.org/songs.php?id=2436. I'm also putting these up on my MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/timothychenallen.
After finishing National Novel Writing Month, I was looking for something to do and ran across February Album Writing Month (FAWM). The idea is to write 14 songs in 28 days. I've gotten started on my album (ha ha), which I'm tentatively calling "14 things I f&"@#!d up (and one thing I got right)".
You can see and listen to "Naphthalene" at http://fawm.org/songs.php?id=227.
Over 150 hashers from all over the DC area and beyond got together to celebrate the life of our friend Charlie "Wrong Way" Roberts:
