wind

Windy Winter and Artificial Intelligence

A magnifying glass searching
I’ve noticed recently that it seems to be more windy here than in the past. Over the weekend, we had a strong wind storm with 60+ mph wind gusts. Yet I don’t think that the storm is proof. Just as a bitterly cold week doesn’t invalidate the process of climate change, a single wind storm doesn’t make it more windy. But I suspected changes before the weekend.

I mentioned my observation to a friend and he suggested I could use an AI tool to analyze the situation. I’m not convinced that artificial intelligence will help me get a better result.

The research in “Global trends in wind speed and wave height” by I. R. Young, S. Zieger, and A. V. Babanin indicates that it is an interesting topic. That paper in could help me identify the most useful questions. It also indicates that analyzing climate is not easy.

For my own situation, I need to find a source of historical wind speeds. Weather Underground has some data starting about 1940, but it isn’t easy to access. windfinder.com sells hourly data going back to 1999. I didn’t check the pricing of their data.

Another issue is what should I measure? Weather Underground has the maximum speed each day which is a good start, but may not answer my question. Windfinder has hourly data which is a finer granularity and might be more useful.

There would be a few more decisions I would need to make before I get an answer. When do I want to break between a historical base statistic to compare to recent data or should I look for a trend in the wind speeds? The number of data points in both groups can affect the statistical validity of my results.

Before I start looking for tools to confirm my observation, I need to make a lot of decisions. I don’t think an artificial intelligence tool will help me decide these prerequisites.

Artificial Intelligence is a trendy hammer, but not every problem is a nail.

Dreaming

Lightning bolts striking To The Right Right To The Left left. Two images Layered making this 30 sec, 250 ISO – f5.6 – 90mm. (C) 2011 James Bo Insogna


Last night, I had some really realistic dreams. While thinking about dreams from the past, it seems that, depending on a person’s strengths and experiences, a dream might contain different symbols.

For example, an effect of experience: I was really successful at taking tests when I was in school. A consequence of that is that I never have dreams about an unexpected test coming up or the anxiety of getting there late.

An effect of strengths: Often my dreams include text. While I can recognize the words on the page, if I look away and look back again, the words have all changed. I can’t remember the message. Apparently my brain’s system that recognizes words and letters is closer to my core than the semantic part that understands them.

One feature of my sleep is that I often have “hypnogogic hallucinations:” I start dreaming before I’m actually asleep. Past experiences have usually been the face of a single person that appears and then vanishes. Recently, the images include two people instead of one. I wonder what that change signifies?

Last night, my dreams were hyper-realistic. Everything was really detailed and pretty mundane. Nothing was bizarre or mixed up. For example, I saw a rain shower in the distance. I could see the edges of where the rain was falling and the dark clouds that were above them. In the dream, I was picking up some papers because the approaching storm could scatter them. They looked like real pieces of papers and as I piled them together, they didn’t do something strange such as transforming into a bird or a monster.

One aspect of last night’s dream was anxiety about a tornado coming. In the past I’ve had real tornadoes coming near me. Eventually, I had one pass directly over where I was hiding and I never had a tornado dream again. I didn’t see one last night, but I was worried that one might come.

Original image: To The Right Right To The Left left. By Bo Insogna, TheLightningMan.com [Image license]

Flowering trees

It’s really beautiful out in the neighborhood. The fruit trees are covered with beautiful white flowers and the trees are starting to bud.

My sister says that it’s miserable if you have allergies. I’m grateful that I don’t.

One of the coolest websites I’ve found recently is http://hint.fm/wind/ It gives an animated map of wind in the continental U.S. It’s updated every hour and is always interesting. I had always believed that the prevailing wind direction for northeast Indiana was from the west, but the maps don’t seem to agree very often.

Evil Mad Scientist’s link dump for the month http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2016/linkdump-march-2016/ revealed this video showing circuits being deconstructed by a CNC router layer by layer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHqN6CTOdzA

It’s a good day to share the beauty.

The Tree

This week I’ve seen news of a lot of really bad weather. Tornadoes, blizzards, floods…. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the costs. The National Centers for Environmental Information have studied the issue. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Overview introduces some of the issues in performing an analysis. This graph is interesting and it has a cut off of events costing 1 billion or more, so it still ignores many substantial disasters.

Some people scoff that these costs are not serious, that they’re not increasing or that to talk about the cost of climate change as being a threat to the country is ludicrous. I think that is very ostrich-like–if we willfully don’t look at it, it won’t be a problem.

Some countries have higher stakes in the climate. Some of the Pacific island nations can’t survive the sea level going up–they won’t have any land to be a nation over. I remember the glaciers that have shrunken so dramatically in the Rockies. Greenland and the Antarctic are melting too. If you calculate the volume of ice in those two places and divide it by the surface area of the ocean, if even part of them melt, the ocean will flood many places. Eventually, beach front property won’t be a good investment anymore.

A fallen tree crushing the sidewalkBut, more to home, I found some branches on the sidewalk from my tree. I was pretty fortunate. None of them were really big–I could break them into smaller pieces with my knee. My neighbors to the west had more serious problems with their tree last year. The extreme cold killed about 3/4 of the tree and the city cut it down before it hurt someone. The picture isn’t of my tree, but I thought it fit–I’ve been really fortunate and am grateful.