Now Roby finally has a place to drop his walked-to-school-on-his-hands-uphill-both-ways-in-a-blizzard stories. Tsunami warning in Japan after 7.6 earthquake https://www.nbcnews.com/world/japan...ami-hokkaido-meteorological-agency-rcna248007
Insert overweight FIL/MIL joke here Black hole spotted blasting winds at 130 million mph: "A scale almost too big to imagine" A black hole inside a distant spiral galaxy is devouring material from the universe around it and creating winds at speeds never before seen by astronomers. The European Space Agency said that the black hole inside NGC 3783 has the mass of 30 million suns. The black hole consumes nearby material to power an active galactic nucleus at the center of the galaxy, the ESA said in a news release. The nucleus is "an extremely bright and active region" that sends out powerful jets and winds, the agency said. One powerful wind was measured at 60,000 kilometers per second, or 130 million piles per hour, about 20% of the speed of light. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/black-hole-winds-spiral-galaxy-space/
It's actually not too bad for a dirty city that size. It used to suck when I was a kid, but it improved after they banned icinerators. Having no hills, plenty of rainfall year-round, and wind coming in from the Rio de la Plata helps, otherwise it would be much worse.
When a current starts meandering A river in the ocean The deep, warm Kuroshio transports more than 200 times as much water as the Amazon River, traveling north from the equator and normally banking east around Japan’s Boso peninsula, near Tokyo. Here, it becomes known as the Kuroshio Extension as it heads into the open Pacific. But in recent years, the current has been behaving in anything but the usual way, and the Extension, in particular, made a major divergence along Japan’s coast. Its northern edge shifted as much as 300 miles farther poleward, leading to unprecedented warm waters in the surrounding region. “I was so surprised I don’t even know if ‘surprised’ is the right word,” said Shusaku Sugimoto, an associate professor at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, a northern coastal city. So what's all this mean? But the questions remain: what do these extreme ocean events mean, how they are linked to climate change? For at least one researcher, they’re an early sign of things to come. “It’s a great opportunity to learn what the oceans will be like 100 years from now,” said Sugimoto, of Tohoku University in the northeastern region of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. “An unprecedented ocean phenomenon is now occurring by chance in Tohoku,” he continued. “Understanding how this has altered the seas of Tohoku offers a chance to understand how the world’s oceans will change in the future. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/climate/japan-sea-level-fishing-impact
Due to massive rains & flooding, Seattle-King County Public Health gives residents some pointers on how to handle toilet rats
Dayum! This is colder than the stare Roby got when he tried to pass off Prego as the Sunday gravy to his MIL
I will report that rock salt is all gone. But Home Depot threw out pool salt with a sign "do not use on driveways. Can damage them" Proshoot & muzz likely long gone by now
Grazie for the reminder as I'll be heading for the Mona Lisa Deli in San Diego for my Morty, Hot Capicol and Rare Roast Beef. The mission must be completed before 3 PM otherwise the 15 mile return trip takes a couple hours.
The WH FB post just sent this out : "Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" - PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP Confusing weather with climate is how problems get handwaved away and quietly get worse. Global warming doesn't mean every day is getting hotter. It does however mean more extreme swings. A lot of arguments against global warming (shifting away from renewables, lowering CO2 emissions, etc) are based on 1 - not wanting to change for convenience and 2 - most people don't understand what is being presented to them. Also, just because it will snow in the continental US this weekend means it will snow everywhere else. It's the equivalent of me entering grocery store and saying "well, the entire world has enough food since this grocery store is full." EDIT: I like how he wrote "Rarely seen anything like it before" with no sense of irony or thought to what he was writing.
I swear, if I see one more Senator bring a snowball onto the floor, I'm likely to go shoot him myself. But you can't explain the difference between descended from apes from sharing a common ancestor to these people. There's no way they are going to understand the difference between climate and temperature.
Bawdy winter joke on morning radio: Why did the snowman drop his pants? Because the snowblower was coming
You can do it fairly easily. They might not accept that it happened, but they can easily understand the difference in concept. The analogy I used was "do you descend from your cousin or do you share a common grandparent with your cousin"? We say that chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans are your cousins; we do not say that we descended from them but that we share a common "grandparent" with them.