Posted by Patrick at 09:24 PM * 127 comments
Because Making Light hasn’t featured enough pointless whining about our name lately.
“Nielson.” Then “Nielsen.” Then “Nielson.” Then “Nielsen.” Obviously this was completely invisible to Slate’s production staff. I’m impressed that we didn’t get “Neilson” into the mix.
(“Nielsen” is, by the way, correct when you’re talking about the TV ratings people and when you’re talking about Nielsen Haydens.)
I give up. We’re moving to Lubbock and changing our last name to Fred.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 09:28 PM * 48 comments
Oh well, Mr. FBI Man, I guess you gotta arrest me…..
See also: What the Email Fairy Brought
Obvious Nigerian Scam is obvious. As discussed here, Study: Obvious Nigerian scam emails appear that way for a reason, they’re obviously, stupidly, crudely, fraudulent so that the scammers won’t have to waste their time with people who aren’t completely gullible.
(Did you know that the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary?)
Anyway, back to cases. Seems the FBI is poised to arrest me. Found in my spam folder (printed in full with complete headers below the fold)….
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 10:03 AM * 21 comments
One of the oldest of the vanity presses, Vantage, has apparently closed up shop.
Founded in 1949, Vantage is/was one of the pay-to-play publishers that only cared about an author’s writing ability as far as it extended to writing a check. Like other vanity presses, Vantage’s primary market was its own authors.
Following an attempt to save money by relocating from New York City to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, this year, Vantage apparently ceased operations in November, without notifying all of its authors. Some are reporting that they suspected something was wrong when their October royalty payments were missing, others that they found out when they were unable to order their books through Ingram’s. In the last two weeks, Vantage has removed its Facebook page, closed its webpage, and abandoned Twitter. Their blog is still up, but hasn’t had a new entry since March of this year, and they’re still on LinkedIn (which still lists their New York address).
My suspicion is that the easy and free availability of electronic self-publishing is what put the final stake through this vampire’s heart.
In other vanity-publishing news, Author Services Inc, the POD-vanity group that has been buying up other vanity presses (e.g. Xlibris and iUniverse), and fulfilling the vanity-publishing arms of some otherwise-respectable publishers (e.g. Westbow for Thomas Nelson and DellArte Press for Harlequin), has reportedly been bought by Pearson.
Posted by Teresa at 08:40 PM * 363 comments
First, a moment of human kindness. If this message can travel back to the kids who made that sign and lit those candles, please tell them we said “thank you” with all our hearts.
Onward.
As I tweeted last night:
We pay too much for certain citizens’ FRPG (fantasy role-playing game) in which they pretend that gun ownership, not civil society and the rule of law, makes them safe.I later tweeted a second version of the sentiment:
Americans love owning guns because it lets them pretend their safety isn’t a function of our shared society. They should grow up.Jurie Horneman replied:
JurieOnGames: Ah, individualism? So easy to forget that as a European.Propositions:tnielsenhayden: I’ve seen photos of real Tea Party signs demanding that the federal govt. keep its hands off their Social Security.
JurieOnGames: I’ve seen those. It’s… beyond satire.
tnielsenhayden: There’s something very strange about their concept of society. It’s like they think trans-suburbia is a natural landscape.
1. Almost all of the actual law enforcement that happens in the United States is handled by police officers.
2. When gun enthusiasts discuss the kind of hypothetical interactions that in their opinion make gun ownership necessary, the interactions are framed in terms of endangered citizens vs. wicked gun-wielding criminals. The police are scarcely mentioned, if they appear at all, and
3. gun enthusiasts, the NRA collectively included, put near-zero energy or resources into lobbying for more and better police departments.
4. This seems odd.
A different set of propositions:
If the world really worked the way it does in gun-enthusiast scenarios, no one would ever lay out mixed public/private space the way it’s done in American suburbs, with limited-access chokepoints for everyone going in and out. All it would take would be a few guys with automatic weapons and lots of ammo to turn a gated community or limited-access corporate office park into a killing field, hostage situation, or poultry to be plucked at leisure.
The reason that doesn’t happen, and those configurations are seen as safe, is because suburbia is actually designed to slow down perps until the police arrive. If someone marketed a portable device that blocked all phone calls within a half-mile radius, trans-suburban American communities would turn into the world’s biggest collection of sitting ducks.
===
Also yesterday evening, Patrick was exchanging tweets with Charlie Stross and Saladin Ahmed:
Saladin Ahmed, @saladinahmed===
People say they want a world w/o guns. What they want’s a world where only cops/FBI/DEA/army have guns. Must be nice to feel safe w/ that…Charles Stross, @cstross
@saladinahmed Hello? That’s the world I live in — the CIVILIZED world. The USA is an exception, and not in a good way. Scary place to visit!P Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@cstross There are over 200,000,000 privately owned guns in the US. I have come to believe that this is a threat to liberty. @saladinahmedCharles Stross, @cstross
@pnh @saladinahmed Those 200M private guns are why policing in the US is heavily militarized. Which itself is corrosive to democracy.P Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@cstross They’re not the only reason for police militarization. It’s a broad-based pathology. @saladinahmedP Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@cstross Worth keeping in mind the roots of white American obsession with owning guns: defense against blacks and Indians. @saladinahmedP Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@cstross In other words, we’ve been hysterical for 300 years about the need for lethal force against those we’ve wronged. @saladinahmedP Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@cstross This mixture of buried guilt and existential terror is a perfect recipe for long-term, multi-generational craziness. @saladinahmedSaladin Ahmed, @saladinahmed
@cstross @pnh You guys, I’m not NRA, ok? Just seeing lot of tweets that ignore complex history of gun law, esp. for people of color in US.P Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@saladinahmed Oh, I know. I also know that the point when white Americans went full cross-eyed crazy about “black power”… (1/2) @cstrossP Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@saladinahmed …was when the Panthers started, not unreasonably, suggesting that black people arm themselves. (2/2) @cstrossbob calhoun, @bob_calhoun
@saladinahmed The most sweeping gun control legislation was signed in 1966 because of fears of urban rioting. Go figure.P Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@bob_calhoun Just so. Because Americans are enthusiastic about guns precisely up to the point when brown people have some. @saladinahmedadamselzer, @adamselzer
Imagine a group called “Arab Americans for Gun Rights.” Exact same positions/rhetoric as NRA, but brown guys. How would they be viewed?P Nielsen Hayden, @pnh
@adamselzer They would be destroyed with as much violence as necessary, their leaders killed or driven insane. As has happened before.Saladin Ahmed, @saladinahmed
If we’re going to talk history of gun law, we have to talk about Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, etc.
Retweeted by P Nielsen Hayden
Endbits: The New York Times has released the names, ages, and the occupations of the the adults, who were killed in the latest shooting in Sandy Hook, CT. The most obvious pattern is that the shooter preferred female targets. The dead children were hit by 3-11 shots apiece.
Teacher Victoria Soto, age 27, crowded all of her pupils into a closet, then lied to the shooter, telling him they were in the gymnasium. He killed her and moved on.
We have no reason to assume that this will be the last such incident in 2012.
===
Amanda Marcotte, retweeted by Patrick and Heresiarch:
Amanda Marcotte, @AmandaMarcotte===
http://bit.ly/R0hnhS When I claim gun nuttery is about psychosexual weirdness, wingnuts say “Nuh-uh!” Here’s an ad for the gun Lanza used.
On another branch of the conversation:
William Gibson, @GreatDismal===
The elephant in the center of the room: white fantasies of shooting minority home invadersChris Turner, @retrophisch
@GreatDismal That is an utterly despicable, vile assumption with absolutely no proof or basis in reality.Teresa Nielsen Hayden, @tnielsenhayden
@retrophisch @GreatDismal Oh yeah right it doesn’t exist. I’ve been hearing them talk about that all my life.
Michael Moore, @MMFlint
If only the first victim, Adam Lanza’s mother, had been a gun owner, she could have stopped this before it started.
Posted by Patrick at 08:13 PM * 296 comments
I realize that I’m at risk of turning Making Light into the outlet for a series of appalling Andy Rooney-esque rants against the annoyances of the modern world. This is what happens when you get old.
But I can’t resist sharing with the Fluorosphere what happened to me, just now, when I tried to purchase actual home delivery of that famously financially-challenged and yet still essential newspaper, the New York Times.
As many of you know, “Nielsen Hayden” is my legal last name. It’s also what’s on any the credit cards I would be using to pay for this subscription, if I could get past this screen. Yes, it’s true, in 2012, even institutions as stupid as Mastercard, Visa, and American Express have managed to wrap their walnut-sized dinosaur brains around the idea that some people’s surnames have a space in them. A space in them! Good God, man, no one can live at that speed. You’re asking the impossible. (Cue Eddie Izzard: “The Dutch speak four languages and smoke marijuana.”)
So I’m a little dubious about simply entering “Patrick Hayden,” even leaving aside the fact that being told by a farking commerce website that my actual last name is not “a valid last name” is (a) pointlessly offensive and (b) a complete violation of sensible UI design practice.
And before you ask, yes, I got the same error message when I added a spurious hyphen and entered “Nielsen-Hayden.”
Really. Does the New York Times refuse to accept subscriptions from Gordon Van Gelder? Or Greg Van Eekhout? Or Daniel Day-Lewis?
Whoever maintains this site for the New York Times needs to read Patrick McKenzie’s magnificent Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. And whichever New York Times employee is responsible for soliciting print-delivery subscriptions on the Web needs to get out their ass-kicking boots and commence using them for their stated purpose.
“Please enter a valid last name.” Please kiss my double-last-name-with-a-space-in-the-middle ass, The New York Times.
UPDATE, December 12, 7:40 PM: Three tweets from @NYTdigitalsubs, about an hour ago. In essence, they say please send your email address so we can fix this, and then we’ll try to fix the larger issue. Well okay then. Good going, New York Times.
Posted by Patrick at 09:07 PM * 18 comments
From the brilliant Vienna Teng, a rough draft of a song-in-progress called “The Hymn of Axciom”:
leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have.Can’t get it out of my head.
leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.
someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these
(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.
keep them all.
[…]
now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.
now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.
now we will build you an endlessly upward world,
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.is that wrong?
isn’t this what you want?
amen.
Posted by Patrick at 09:52 PM * 73 comments
Reviewing Hyde Park on the Hudson (which sounds dire), Slate refers to the 1939 visit of George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the US and Canada as “the first time a sitting English monarch had ever been to the Western Hemisphere.”
Buckingham Palace is in the Western Hemisphere.
Not knowing basic geography is like not knowing how to add and subtract. Our political, cultural, and journalistic elites are idiots, full stop.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 09:30 AM * 446 comments
I’ve been thinking a lot about bridges, lately.
There’s a new bridge east of Centraal Station, constructed as part of a general renewal of the area around my office. I was walking along it a few weeks ago and noticed a padlock hanging from one of the tensioned cables below the handrail. Biking cities like Amsterdam are usually full of abandoned locking infrastructure, so I thought no more about it. But further along, I came across another, then a third.
I stopped and looked more closely, and realized that each of them had initials scratched or engraved on it. I did a little research and stumbled upon a new custom that’s slowly spreading through Europe from the east: love padlocks. In Serbia, couples have been using locks on bridges as markers of their relationships since before World War 2. In Rome, the weight of padlocks left by readers of Federico Moccia’s 2006 novel Ho voglia di te bent the lampposts of the Ponte Milvio. (The city has now put up chain fences for the locks instead.) Officials in Dublin and Paris have been removing them from local bridges, to predictable outcry. In Amsterdam, by the looks of things, space is being made for the new tradition.
Watching the spread of this custom reminds me that the backs of the Euro banknotes all carry pictures of bridges. That’s ironic: we’re struggling, here, with how far we can build connections across economies and cultures. Will the weight of our common bonds bend and distort the things that connect us beyond repair? Will we find ways to accommodate our differences, or must we cut our locks? This isn’t just between nations; the Dutch election result this last autumn was a comprehensive rejection of divisive politics and a demand by the electorate that the two sides of the spectrum reach across the gap between them.
In the meantime, I read that the Pope now has a Twitter account, @pontifex. He has, at the time of writing, over 475,000 followers, but it is only following seven versions of himself in different languages. This strikes me as poignant and telling.
But bridges have been being built in Rome for a long time. A single arch of the oldest Roman stone bridge, the Pons Aemilius, still stands in the Tiber. The piers date back to 179* BC, and the current stone superstructure has lasted since 142 BC. Water has flowed under that old arch, under the feet of emperors, popes, soldiers, politicians, rebels, and lovers, for a very long time. I suspect the lovers have changed the least, and will last the longest.
Of course, the internet is a bridge too, in a way. And I’d like to take a moment to affix a virtual padlock to it today: AS + ML, five years on. (*throws key into the bitstream*)
* Why yes, you do see what I did there.
Continued from Open thread 178
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 04:47 PM * 164 comments
Open Thread 178 has burst into a discussion of holiday music, carols, usw.
In honor of the season, then (and in keeping with our recipe tradition):
The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, merry be
Quot estis in convivio.
CHORUS
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all this land,
Which thus bedeck’d with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.
CHORUS
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which, on this day to be served is
In Reginensi atrio.
Posted by Patrick at 07:20 AM * 316 comments
The Publishers Weekly Twitter account links to a “Book Patrol Infographic” purporting to show “The Bestselling Sci-Fi Books of All Time.” A better title for it would have been “Some Miscellaneous Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels, Decorated With a Bunch of Numbers We Pulled Out of Our Hat.”
It notes that Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is “by far PKD’s bestseller” (which is probably true) and then asserts that it has sold 32,500 copies, which is absurd. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was initially a Doubleday hardcover in 1968, and was reprinted as Signet mass-market paperback in 1969. Based on what we know about the distribution of midlist SF paperbacks then, it almost certainly sold more copies than that in its first year alone, quite possibly by thousands of copies. Thirteen years later, of course, it was the basis for the movie Blade Runner, and was reissued all over the world in a variety of tie-in editions, some with the original title and some retitled with the name of the movie. It has quite possibly sold over a million copies. If it’s sold less than half a million, I will—to quote Princeton Election Consortium poll-aggregator Sam Wang—eat a bug.
It says that Robert A. Heinlein’s Hugo-winning 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has sold “well over 1,500 copies…to date.” In other news, the Empire State Building is “well over” ten feet tall. We’ve sold way more copies than that, and we’re not even its first publisher.
It notes that Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand League Under the Sea has been “translated into 147 languages” and that it has sold “over 10,000 copies”. Ten thousand copies would be about 68 per language. Do you suppose it might actually have sold a few more than that? Did they put this “infographic” together in their sleep?
Book Patrol subtitles itself “a haven for book culture.” Call me pedantic, but it seems to me that people who care about “havens” for any kind of “culture” ought to also care about facts, and getting them right. The most cursory knowledge of the history of book publishing—for instance, knowledge of the quantities in which mass-market paperbacks were distributed in the 1960s—would tell you that some of these figures are absurd. Shame on Book Patrol for polluting the world with ahistorical baloney, and shame on Publishers Weekly for promoting it.
UPDATE: Shame on the New Yorker’s blog for doing the same thing.
Posted by Teresa at 08:05 PM * 71 comments
Via Xeni Jardin, EXCLUSIVE PETRAEUS AFFAIR PHOTOS. Everything you need to know about the CIA Director David Petraeus sex scandal. All photos and headlines are real.
Posted by Patrick at 07:25 PM * 104 comments
Like a lot of people, I find myself impressed by the basic idea of the Rolling Jubilee (linked by Abi from her sidebar a few days ago). Taking advantage of the fact that one really can buy up the “distressed debt” of unfortunate individuals for pennies on the dollar, this Occupy-affiliated group is raising funds to do so—and then forgiving the debt. As they point out, functional societies throughout human history have had some kind of “jubilee”—a moment in which the system gets reset. I mean, it’s in the Bible for cry eye.
Writing on his “Moneybox” blog on Slate, Matthew Yglesias says “it’s a pretty great idea” but then goes on to quibble:
The question you have to ask yourself here is “why is this a better idea than just giving money to poor people”? And I think it’s hard to answer the question. Given two struggling families, one of which is indebted and one of which isn’t, it’s not clear why you’d think that the family that’s borrowed heavily in the past is more worthy of assistance.What I think Yglesias doesn’t understand is that this isn’t just an attempt to render charity to the needy; it’s an attempt to undermine a specific kind of power relationship. As understood and practiced today, debt is a kind of servitude. If you have to take on unsustainable debts—or if you have the misfortune to live in a country that took on unsustainable debts—you’re just supposed to quietly accept that your life is permanently fucked, and that your creditors get to dictate its terms. The odd thing, though, is that people regularly figure out that this is monstrous.
ATHENS — As the head of Greece’s largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.If you believe that the idea that “debts must be paid” is more important than the above, you’re monstrous. I don’t know for sure that Rolling Jubilee will ultimately do a lot of good in the world. I don’t know what gotchas lie in wait. But I know what moves them. It’s more than charity, it’s justice. It moves me too.By that time, her cancer had grown to the size of an orange and broken through the skin, leaving a wound that she was draining with paper napkins. “When we saw her we were speechless,” said Dr. Syrigos, the chief of oncology at Sotiria General Hospital in central Athens. “Everyone was crying. Things like that are described in textbooks, but you never see them because until now, anybody who got sick in this country could always get help.”
Posted by Patrick at 11:51 AM * 75 comments
In a post I find myself wishing everyone would read immediately, actually-numerate scientist-blogger Chad Orzel gets exasperated over how frequently journalists credit finance people—like Mitt Romney, or the speculators who caused the housing collapse—with being “numbers guys.”
You would think that the 2008 economic meltdown, in which the financial industry broke the entire world when they were blindsided by the fact that housing prices can go down as well as up, might have cut into the idea of Wall Street bankers as geniuses, but evidently not. […] It’s not hard to see where it originates—Wall Street types can’t go twenty minutes without telling everybody how smart they are—but it’s hard to see why so many people accept such blatant propaganda without question.Yes, there are some genuinely data-driven traders, but as Orzel points out, they’re very much a minority in the actually-existing finance industry. The idea that Finance Guys (and they are, very much, mostly guys) have some kind of super-numerate insight into money and economics is, basically, a big con perpetrated by a privileged class that wants the rest of us to believe it’s far more essential than it actually is.Look, Romney was an investment banker and corporate raider at Bain Capital. This is admittedly vastly more quantitative work than, say, being a journalist, but it doesn’t make him a “numbers guy.” The work that they do relies almost as much on luck and personal connections as it does on math—they’re closer to being professional gamblers than mathematical scientists. This is especially true of Bain and Romney, as was documented earlier this year—Bain made some bad bets before Romney got there, and was deep in the hole, and he got them out in large part by exploiting government connections and a sort of hostage-taking brinksmanship, creating a situation in which their well-deserved bankruptcy would’ve created a nightmare for the people they owed money, which bought them enough time for some other bets to pay off.
Orzel’s ultimate point is to those of us who’ve been boggled over the many reports that Romney and his team weren’t just faking last-minute confidence but, rather, genuinely expected to win—despite the fact that every single credible poll said that they probably wouldn’t. As Orzel says, no, this is precisely the common failure mode of guys like this:
They make “gut” decisions all the time, and slant their projections in a way that justifies what they want to do. When one of their bets come through, they rake in huge amounts of money; when it doesn’t, they chop up the company and sell the pieces to cut their losses. And when a disaster that thousands of other people see coming a mile off blows up in their faces (the housing crash, or last Tuesday’s election), they’re left utterly flabbergasted.I’m not sure how many more disasters it’s going to take before journalists get out of the habit of treating Wall Street types like they’re the super-geniuses they claim to be, but the sooner the better.
Posted by Patrick at 01:42 PM * 463 comments
It didn’t take long for the more excitable corners of Rightwingia to start spitting up internal body parts.
Of course, it’s never a surprise to see neo-Confederate boob Robert Stacy McCain having several cows at once: “Unmitigated political disaster…we are permanently and irretrievably screwed…the disease may well be terminal…America is doomed beyond all hope of redemption.” He takes a couple of halfhearted swipes at Todd Akin and spends a bit more time knocking Chris Christie: “Good luck with the remainder of your political future, governor. It is unlikely Republicans shall soon forget your perfidious betrayal.” But really, the best part is the paragraph that begins “Alas, as always, the duty of the Right is to manfully endure, to survive the defeat and stubbornly oppose the vaunting foe, and so this brutal shock, this electoral catastrophe, must be absorbed and digested.” Manfully endure! Stubbornly oppose! Yes, you are the modern Cicero, there’s a nice whackjob. Time for your meds.
And no Festival of Stupid is truly complete without John Hinderaker of Powerline (Time’s 2004 Blog of the Year, never forget): “Decades ago my father, the least cynical of men, quoted a political scientist who wrote that democracy will survive until people figure out that they can vote themselves money. That appears to be the point at which we have arrived. Put bluntly, the takers outnumber the makers…These are dark days, indeed.” Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips upholds the crazy flag overseas: “With four more years of Obama in the White House, Iran can now be sure that it will be able to complete its infernal construction of a genocide bomb to use against the Jews and the west. World War Three has now come a lot closer…Romney lost because, like Britain’s Conservative Party, the Republicans just don’t understand that America and the west are being consumed by a culture war. In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void. With the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness.” That’s not just piffle, it’s quality upmarket piffle. Nice typography, too.
But none of these tribunes are a patch on Eric Dondero of LibertarianRepublican.net, who’s really unhappy with the election results, which he calls “the end of liberty in America.”
I’m choosing another rather unique path; a personal boycott, if you will. Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.Unfriending on Facebook! Shunning liberal relatives! Heady stuff. But that’s not all:I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted ‘O’. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.
I believe we all need to express disgust with Obama and Democrats in public places. To some extent I already do this. Example:I hope so too. Please, angry right-wingers, do pursue this “shouting at strangers in supermarket lines” plan. Repeatedly, all over America. Let us know how it works out.When I’m at the Wal-mart or grocery story I typically pay with my debit card. On the pad it comes up, “EBT, Debit, Credit, Cash.” I make it a point to say loudly to the check-out clerk, “EBT, what is that for?” She inevitably says, “it’s government assistance.” I respond, “Oh, you mean welfare? Great. I work for a living. I’m paying for my food with my own hard-earned dollars. And other people get their food for free.” And I look around with disgust, making sure others in line have heard me.
I am going to step this up. I am going to do far more of this in my life. It’s going to be my personal crusade. I hope other libertarians and conservatives will eventually join me.
If I meet a Democrat in my life from here on out, I will shun them immediately. I will spit on the ground in front of them, being careful not to spit in their general direction so that they can’t charge me with some stupid little nuisance law. Then I’ll tell them in no un-certain terms: “I do not associate with Democrats. You all are communist pigs, and I have nothing but utter disgust for you. Sir/Madam, you are scum of the earth.” Then I’ll turn and walk the other way.Altogether? It may be the greatest flounce of all time.
Posted by Avram Grumer at 03:41 AM * 104 comments
Important issues still left unresolved by yesterday’s election results:
- The people of Puerto Rico voted (53%) to change their political status to that of statehood (65%). But Congress has to approve the change. In population, Puerto Rico falls between Connecticut and Oklahoma, so figure it’d have five Congressional Representatives. It also trends pretty blue politically, so that’s a few more Democratic seats in the House, two more in the Senate, and a seven more reliable blue votes in the next Presidential election. All of which means the Republican-controlled House isn’t gonna go for it.
- Will the vindication of Nate Silver’s predictive model over the gut instincts of political pundits translate to a more general shift towards knowledge and expertise and away from empty bloviating and bullshit in political reportage?
- Has Nate Silver already figured out how the admission of Puerto Rico would alter the size of the Electoral College, and registered the appropriate domain name?
- Are Hoefler & Frere-Jones going to release that slab-serif version of Gotham they cooked up for the Obama campaign last year?
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:03 AM * 124 comments
It’s time for the national election, and Making Light lifts the curtain with this Live Report from Dixville “First in the Nation” Notch, New Hampshire. Voting this year is at the Balsams Wilderness Ski Area while the main hotel is being refurbished.
For President and Vice-President of the United States
Libertarian:
Gary Johnson/James P. Gray - 0
Constitution:
Virgil Goode/James Clymer - 0
Democratic:
Barack Obama/Joe Biden - 5
Republican:
Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan - 5
[NOTE: This is the first time that Dixville Notch has ever tied.]
For Governor
Libertarian:
John J. Babiarz - 0
Democratic:
Maggie Hassan - 3
Republican:
Ovide Lamontagne - 7
For Representative in Congress
Libertarian:
Hardy Macia - 1
Democratic:
Ann McLane Kuster - 3
Republican:
Charles Bass - 6
For State Senator
Democratic:
Jeff Woodburn - 7
Republican:
Debi Warner - 3
For State Representatives:
(Vote for any two)
Democratic:
Larry S. Enman - 7
Republican:
Laurence M. Rappaport - 6
Duffy Daugherty - 3
For Sheriff:
Democratic & Republican:
Gerald Marcou - 10
For County Attorney:
Democratic:
John G. McCormick - 5
Republican:
Philip J. Beiner - 5
For County Treasurer:
Democratic & Republican:
Frederick W. King - 10
For Register of Probate:
Democratic & Republican
Terri L. Peterson - 10
For County Commissioner:
Democratic & Republican
Rick Samson - 10
2012 Constitutional Amendment Questions
Constitutional Amendments Proposed by the 2012 General Court
1. “Are you in favor of amending the second part of the constitution by inserting after article 5-b a new article to read as follows: [Art.] 5-c. [Income Tax Prohibited.] Notwithstanding any general or special provision of this constitution, the general court shall not have the power or authority to impose and levy any assessment, rate, or tax upon income earned by any natural person; however, nothing in this Article shall be construed to prohibit any tax in effect on January 1, 2012, or adjustment to the rate of such a tax.” (Passed by the N.H. House 256 Yes 110 No; Passed by State Senate 19 Yes 4 No) CACR 13
Yes - 7
No - 1
2. “Are you in favor of amending article 73-a of the second part of the constitution to read as follows: [Art.] 73-a [Supreme Court, Administration.] The chief justice of the supreme court shall be the administrative head of all the courts. The chief justice shall, with the concurrence of a majority of the supreme court justices, make rules governing the administration of all courts in the state and the practice and procedure to be followed in all such courts. The rules so promulgated shall have the force and effect of law. The legislature shall have a concurrent power to regulate the same matters by statute. In the event of a conflict between a statute and a court rule, the statute, if not otherwise contrary to this constitution, shall prevail over the rule.” (Passed by the N.H. House 242 Yes 96 No; Passed by State Senate 19 Yes 5 No) CACR 26
Yes - 6
No - 2
Question Proposed pursuant to Part II, Article 100 of the New Hampshire Constitution:
3. “Shall there be a convention to amend or revise the constitution?”
Yes - 5
No - 3
Remember, you read it here first!
See also:
Making Light: Live from The Balsams, Making Light: Live from The Balsams 2—Electric Boogaloo, and Making Light: Live from Dixville Notch 2012
Posted by Patrick at 07:36 AM * 171 comments
We’re fine. So far, we haven’t lost power, and our basement has stayed dry.
My Tor email address has been completely out since Sunday, because I accidentally let my password expire, and since Macmillan has been closed due to the storm, nobody’s been around to fix it. So if you sent anything urgent to my tor.com address, please resend it to pnh@panix.com.
Manhattan is a mess. But one of the curious sideshows of last night’s devastation was the very effective work of someone billing themselves as @comfortablysmug, who appears to be Twitter pals with lots of political and business reporters. The evening’s ongoing events were bad enough, but for whatever reason, this individual seemed to go out of their way to spread false, even more alarming stories which he or she more or less made up out of whole cloth. BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski has the interesting details.
Posted by Teresa at 02:20 PM * 112 comments
Picture labeled “calm before the storm.”
Weather Channel reporter doing standup.
Dramatic fake. (Both misidentified and photoshopped specimens will be accepted.)
===
Help me with this one. We need waves breaking over a seawall and a political leader at a press conference surrounded by aides. I’m trying to think of the rest. Points will be given for duplicates of categories already tagged.
For a while I was contemplating a drinking game, but using the obvious terms — storm surge, millibars, NOAA, evacuation — would also render it unsurvivable.
Any suggestions on how to classify the shirtless horsehead jogger?
(Added) First point goes to Peter Hentges for spotting the dramatic fake shot.
The List:
Dogs on a rescue boat.
Picture labeled “calm before the storm.”
Deserted business district.
Weather Channel reporter doing standup.
Peter Hentges: Dramatic fake shot.
Lila: Waves breaking over a seawall.
Jacque: President Obama looking concerned as he’s briefed by aides.
mjfgates: NJ Governor Chris Christie gives a press conference (video).
Macallister: Driver in 4WD vehicle fighting wind and weather.
Macallister: Undaunted/imprudent tourists at iconic location.
TNH: Undaunted/imprudent tourists at iconic location.
Jeremy Preacher: Item amusingly relocated to inappropriate place by wind.
Weatherglass: Damaged sailboats.
Caroline: Floodwaters with partly-submerged car to illustrate depth.
Mary Dell: People sitting on rooftops.
Mary Dell: Grocery cart full of bottled water.
GHN: Car squashed by a fallen tree.
Jim Macdonald: Shocking fake PLUS tourists at an unsafe location.
Suggestions:
Michael suggests:
*Spray-painted sign by some wiseacre taunting the hurricane.
*Guy in wetsuit with surfboard crossing beach toward Rocky-Mountain-sized breaking waves.
Carrie S. suggests:
*Person in lawn/deck chair with beer, and dramatic clouds in background
*Someone wading through water carrying something over their head
*Treetops protruding from water
*Canoe/rowboat/kayak on Main Street
*House with masking tape/plywood on windows (More specific?)
Weatherglass suggests:
*Action shot of people sandbagging or installing plywood over windows.
*Store shelves emptied of desirable items.
*Police roadblocks closing dangerous routes.
Hilary Hertzoff suggests:
*Dramatic shots of storm from space
*Flooded downtown area (boats get bonus points)
*Dramatic shots of gathering clouds/rain…through a window.
*Meteorologists looking busy doing research.
*Lolcat of Mitt Romney referencing his desire to dismantle FEMA.
*The dramatic locking-up of some usually busy but now empty venue.
More to come, but I’ll post these now.
Posted by Patrick at 06:30 AM * 109 comments
It’s 6:30 AM on Monday and the wind is audibly kicking up outside our home in Brooklyn. We have water, canned food, and other emergency supplies. Macmillan, including Tor, is officially closed today—unsurprisingly, since New York’s subways, buses, and commuter trains have all been halted for the duration. I doubt very much that our mass transit, or the publishing industry, will be up-and-running before Wednesday at the earliest.
I still plan to be at World Fantasy Con in Toronto this weekend, although I postponed my flight from Wednesday to Thursday.
I mostly post this to note that we could lose power here in Brooklyn pretty much any time, and if that happens, it could be a while before we get it back. We have backup plans for staying connected to the world if that happens, but no guarantee that any of them will work. So no one should be surprised if we’re suddenly even harder to reach than usual.
Until and unless the power goes out, of course, we’ll be obsessively following the news online. We live a block and a half from one of the mandatory-evacuation zones, and three blocks from New York Harbor. We’re really hoping those boundaries are drawn correctly. When the storm surge comes in tonight, we’ll find out.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 06:52 PM * 958 comments
In honor of the current weather, the Beaufort Wind Scale:
| Force | Wind (Knots) |
WMO Classification |
Appearance of Wind Effects | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On the Water | On Land | ||||
| 0 | Less than 1 | Calm | Sea surface smooth and mirror-like | Calm, smoke rises vertically | |
| 1 | 1-3 | Light Air | Scaly ripples, no foam crests | Smoke drift indicates wind direction, still wind vanes | |
| 2 | 4-6 | Light Breeze | Small wavelets, crests glassy, no breaking | Wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move | |
| 3 | 7-10 | Gentle Breeze | Large wavelets, crests begin to break, scattered whitecaps | Leaves and small twigs constantly moving, light flags extended | |
| 4 | 11-16 | Moderate Breeze | Small waves 1-4 ft. becoming longer, numerous whitecaps | Dust, leaves, and loose paper lifted, small tree branches move | |
| 5 | 17-21 | Fresh Breeze | Moderate waves 4-8 ft taking longer form, many whitecaps, some spray | Small trees in leaf begin to sway | |
| 6 | 22-27 | Strong Breeze | Larger waves 8-13 ft, whitecaps common, more spray | Larger tree branches moving, whistling in wires | |
| 7 | 28-33 | Near Gale | Sea heaps up, waves 13-19 ft, white foam streaks off breakers | Whole trees moving, resistance felt walking against wind | |
| 8 | 34-40 | Gale | Moderately high (18-25 ft) waves of greater length, edges of crests begin to break into spindrift, foam blown in streaks | Twigs breaking off trees, generally impedes progress | |
| 9 | 41-47 | Strong Gale | High waves (23-32 ft), sea begins to roll, dense streaks of foam, spray may reduce visibility | Slight structural damage occurs, slate blows off roofs | |
| 10 | 48-55 | Storm | Very high waves (29-41 ft) with overhanging crests, sea white with densely blown foam, heavy rolling, lowered visibility | Seldom experienced on land, trees broken or uprooted, “considerable structural damage” | |
| 11 | 56-63 | Violent Storm | Exceptionally high (37-52 ft) waves, foam patches cover sea, visibility more reduced | ||
| 12 | 64+ | Hurricane | Air filled with foam, waves over 45 ft, sea completely white with driving spray, visibility greatly reduced | ||
Devised by Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort in 1805 to standardize weather observations by ships at sea. Beaufort’s scale was officially adopted in the 1830s when Sir Francis was British Admiralty Hydrographer of the Navy. Beaufort invited Charles Darwin to accompany Captain FitzRoy on a survey voyage; that voyage saw the first official use of the Beaufort Scale.
Originally the scale’s observations depended on the appearance of a ship’s sails (0: All sails hang loose—12: All sails close reefed). With the advent of steam the observations were changed to the appearance of the sea. In the 1850s observations of flags and trees were added for stations ashore.
While the Beaufort Scale has been generally replaced by observations of true wind speed using instruments, today’s storm warnings still follow Beaufort’s nomenclatures.
Continued from Open Thread 177. Continued in Open thread 179
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 11:19 PM * 42 comments
This weekend we’re seeing an awful lot of stories with headlines like, “Hudson County municipalities batten down the hatches in preparation for Sandy’s arrival.” So it occurs to me: How many people actually know how to batten down a hatch?
Actually “battening down” a hatch isn’t something that’s been much practiced since the days of wooden ships. Therefore, not too many photos exist of hatches, battened or not. But this won’t deter me: Illustrations here are mostly taken from sites specializing in model ships, where the model-makers are rightfully proud of their craft.
Right then. To batten a hatch, you need: A hatch. A tarpaulin. Battens. Nails. (Optionally: batten boards, wedges, line.)
A hatch is an opening in the deck of a ship, usually rectangular in shape. The hatch has raised sides around the opening, called the hatch coaming. Inside of the hatch coaming you have a lip. Hatches are used for gaining access below decks, either for people or for cargo. After you’ve done stowing cargo below, through your cargo hatch or your main hatch, you’ll want to place a wooden grating on top of the hatch, inside the coaming, on the lip, to allow air and light to get below, but keep sailors from falling down the hatch.
Air and light are all well-and-good, but when you have heavy weather you could get water below too. When you’re shipping white water over the bow you don’t want openings in your deck. So, to prepare for high winds and heavy seas, you would batten down your hatches.
To do this you need is a big piece of canvas tarpaulin, larger than your hatch. Put the tarpaulin over the hatch, as tight as you can make it. Fold the corners, much like your basic hospital corners on a bed, with the openings of the folds leading aft (so that seas breaking over the bow don’t catch in them). Wet canvas, as you know, is watertight.
Things you need after this are battens. These are long strips of wood, the length of the hatch coamings. Nail these over the canvas, into the sides of the hatch coamings, and there you have it: A battened hatch. Yes, you’ll still ship some water, but the pumps should stay ahead of it.
Now, some variations. You can remove the grating and, in its place, put solid boards. These are called “hatch boards” or “batten boards.” Put the canvas over top of the hatch as before, and batten it down.
Nailing the batten boards to the coaming isn’t the only (or even necessarily the best) situation. If you have a metal coaming, or you don’t want to destroy your nice shellaced wood, provided you have cleats installed on the deck alongside the coaming, put the battens in place, then drive wedges between the cleats and the battens to hold the battens in place. Have the broad end of the wedge face forward, so the seas will tend to drive the wedge more securely home.
If you don’t want to or can’t nail into the hatch coaming, and you have no cleats alongside the coaming, you will tie the tarpaulin across the hatch. The hatch coaming should angle slightly in as it approaches the deck, so the line won’t slip up and off. Put your tarpaulin over the hatch, as before, and tie it on in this manner: Take a piece of line and tie a bowline in one end. Lead the line around the hatch, then put the bitter end through the bowline. A ways back, in the working part, tie a single bowline-on-a-bight, lead the bitter end through that, then haul away. Take the end back again to a fixed attachment point somewhere nearby and fashion a Spanish windlass to tighten it down as far as ever you can. Make fast.
The resulting knot is not dissimilar to this Trucker’s Hitch.
Model ships linked above for use as illustrations:
Posted by Teresa at 02:02 AM * 33 comments
(We’re discussing the storm down in After Irene.)
===
The commentator to watch: Dr. Jeff Masters, sometimes known as “the Nate Silver of meteorology.” He’s definitely worried about Sandy the Frankenstorm, but he’s worried in very knowledgeable ways.
===
This first batch of links is heavy on Twitter feeds because they’re so useful in a general emergency. Websites give you news when you remember to ask for it. Twitter gives you news as soon as there’s news.
Weather Underground’s Twitter interface page. Local weather reports, severe weather alerts, and the individual Twitter feeds of eight meteorologists.
The NOAA StormCentral 2012 site, and the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center site. If it’s storm information, those guys have it.
NHC_Surge, the experimental Twitter account of the Storm Surge Unit of the National Weather Service.
NHC_Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center’s Atlantic Twitter account.
FEMA’s hurricane preparedness page
The FEMAregion2 Twitter account: New York, New Jersey, the Virgin Islands, and “Peurto Rico.” FEMAregion3: Philadelphia. FEMAregion1: Boston. FEMAregion4: points South.
The FCC’s and FEMA’s Tips for Communicating During an Emergency.
The American Red Cross’s Power Outage page. (See the left-hand menu for info on other emergencies: heart stops, house floods, leg falls off, children attacked by whale, etc.)
The White House Blog: Monitoring Hurricane Sandy.
New Jersey: Governor Christie’s storm preparedness site.
The NYC Office of Emergency Management is practical, effective, and informative.
Sign up with NotifyNYC to get email or text emergency alerts.
NYC Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.
NYC MTA status info, and hurricane announcement.
Isobars, millibars, and nearly-nude data in motion: the NOAA animated weather forecast model.
Google Crisis Response map for Hurricane Sandy. Very well executed: just click on the features you want to see.
Stormwatcher webcams.
WaPo recommends Seven apps to get you through Hurricane Sandy.
Weather.com’s rather nifty interactive weather map.
Weather.com’s Hurricane Tracker site. Lots of current videos of the storm. If the Weather Channel is running true to form, many videos will feature reporters in rain ponchos standing in ill-lit locations, shouting to be heard over the storm.
The original interactive sea level flooding map.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 06:47 AM * 54 comments
What is this weight in my mind?
And what is this new sense of time?
It’s the open fields and the friends that are gone,
And I’ve been in the lowlands too long.
—Gillian Welsh, “Lowlands”, who didn’t mean it the way I’m hearing it now.
The sun is sinking behind the clouds on the horizon. The official sunset time on the internet is still about ten minutes away, but the air temperature isn’t going to take account of that nicety. I stop and put my jacket on over my cardigan. It’s not quite enough, but I’m keeping the gloves and hat in my front basket. Sometimes the promise of more warmth later is better than the warmth itself.
This is a good spot. The bike path runs between two strips of water, both bright with reflected sky. To my right is a narrow patch of reeds, its leaves beginning to turn purple-brown with autumn. The last light of the day gives them a bit of its orange, a parting gift of warmth and richness. To my left, the fields stretch out for kilometers, flat and treeless. Only the livestock and the woodwork—bridges and little stretches of fence—break the landscape between me and the outlines of the distant trees and towns. Above it all, the sky is full of light.
Then the sun disappears and the land goes grey. Time to mount up and ride on. I’m still about forty-five minutes away from my village, and I’m getting hungry.
Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been out here without a good reason. Six months ago, I was indifferent to this vast, flat, wet landscape. My heart has always been in the mountains and the desert. When I moved to Scotland, I learned to love the terrain by analogy. The rolling hills of the Borders have a lot in common with those near San Francisco1. And the way that the bones of the land show beneath the heather in the Highlands echoes the California desert and its sagebrush. The places aren’t the same, really, but the similarity is enough to make a bridge. It’s enough to find a way to love the landscape.
But there’s no bridge from anyplace I’ve lived to the Dutch polder. This is nothing like anything I have ever known. If my love of California came through the front door and my love of Scotland through the side, this sudden, inarticulate love of the Netherlands is the unexpected guest who appears one day in the living room, ringing no bell and answering no invitation. And yet here it is, and it draws me out of the house and away from the cities every bright day. I go out for half-hour rides and come back three hours later, windblown and bright-eyed.
And the Noord-Hollands polder through which I’ve been riding is the real deal: the unfiltered, unadulterated Dutch landscape, served neat. It’s undiluted by tulips and uncut by the tourist trail. It stretches out northward from the urbanized shore of the IJ to the Afsluitdijk, making up the land between the North Sea and the IJsselmeer. The fields are punctuated by towns and villages: Purmerend, Volendam, Alkmaar, Heerhugowaard, Den Helder, Edam, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Schagen, Heiloo. Straight, elevated canals and swift roads cross them, taking the people and the freight to and fro. But the land between is filled only with a kind of vastness: long, straight lines of pasture under the endless, endless sky.
This land was reclaimed from the water in the sixteenth century, and its first crop was Dutch democracy. The hoogheemraadschappen, the water boards that manage drainage and flood control here, are among the oldest democratic institutions in Europe. 2 They have endured in the face of centuries of authoritarianism, a living assertion that the best way to get a thing done is to empower the people who do it. The landscape here is their mute, stubborn, enduring proof, an irrefutable argument in mud and grass. The water boards are the reason that Dutch political culture, which demands cooperation between fundamentally different points of view, is known as the polder-model. This land was built by people who did not agree with their neighbors, but who worked with them anyway, and the people who live here do not forget it.
But that’s history, and this is working farmland. The old wooden pumping mills have been moved to the tourist attractions and nature reserves. What remains are long, narrow fields, divided by sloten (canals used primarily as drainage ditches3). Just as the Scots make fences from the stones they clear from their land, so the Dutch make them of the water they drain away from theirs.4 Because the sloten are sunken, the only visible fences are the short, gated stretches that prevent the livestock straying along the roads the tractors take from field to field. So the land has an odd, ragged look from a distance, as if some force had destroyed all but three meters of every fenceline.
Apart from the fences, all that stand above the fields are strips of reeds beside the water, wooden bridges carrying bike paths and roads over the canals, and the occasional bench where one can sit and look out over the landscape. I don’t think there’s anything to see, sitting on those benches, but I’m always half-afraid to stop and find out, lest a further undiscovered passion take me and I never get up again.
I’m only half-afraid, mind, because it’s not just the polder that draws me, but the act of cycling through it. Noord-Holland is interlaced with networks of bike paths, all well-marked and well-paved, used almost exclusively by Dutch people. My experience of the landscape is inextricably linked with the little thrums and whirrs of my bike as I ride, the steady progression the of ground beneath my front wheel, and the occasional nods and terse greetings shared with my fellow-travelers. I treasure this feeling of going somewhere, past these indifferent cattle and disinterested sheep, over bridges and beside bright stretches of smooth water, moving always toward the intricate silhouette of civilization that marks the boundary between earth and sky all around.
It’s not a landscape for secrets. You see whom you’re going to meet well in advance, and the prosperity or ruin of the next farm over is apparent at a glance. Even the rain comes well-heralded, sweeping across the open pastureland. I’ve read many theories that the Dutch bluntness and honesty comes from the openness of their land, that it grew alongside the polder-model in these fields. I don’t know if it’s true, or provable, but cycling here, I find it entirely plausible. This clarity and openness gets into a person’s head and won’t leave it. I can’t even imagine growing up immersed in it from birth. This is an area where many of the older generation still do not have living-room curtains, but choose to spend their leisure time in full view of their neighbors.5
And yet, despite that ceaseless visibility, it is a place of surprises: the tiny clover blossoms still showing beside the cycle track; the ruined propeller of a World War 2 plane that came down in the fields, a monument to the crew that bailed out over the North Sea and died; the cable ferries that take me across the broad canal, pulling themselves along on a metal rope suspended above the water6; the honesty-box stand where I buy six new-laid eggs, still grassy, for €1.50. And underneath those lies the constant rediscovery that this land is the work of human hands, and that it is pleasant because the people who built it valued the people who would live there enough to make it so. It is a perpetual gift from the past to the future, and I am perpetually humbled to receive it, like a stranger invited to dinner and fed the best food in the house.
I’m conscious that I’m finding it hard to disentangle my sudden passion for this open land from my steady, growing understanding of and affection for the people who live in it. Indeed, I get the sense that the two are deeply linked, that I journey into this culture the way I cross these open fields, and that the destination of the two is a single thing: home.
- Though something in my subconscious insisted that their greenness meant it was always spring, even in the snow.
- Regular readers know that I’ve voted in their elections.
- Unsurprisingly, Dutch has a lot of complex technical vocabulary for waterworks.
- In the Netherlands, by the way, Robert Frost’s neighbor is right. Good fences make good neighbors here; an un-dredged sloot can endanger all of the fields around it at flood time.
- The younger generation do have curtains, albeit usually left open, and self-adhesive plastic that looks like etched glass to blur the view in.
- I asked the operator how ships got up and down the canal. She explained that they can loosen the cable so that it lies on the water bottom; they do it twenty or thirty times a day in the off-season, and a good hundred or so during the summer.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 10:44 PM * 95 comments
A year and two months ago (see: Hurricane Lantern) Hurricane Irene was heading up the east coast of the US, looking to make landfall in the New York City area.
Today we have another Hurricane, Sandy, following much the same track. This time around, however, we’re looking at higher high tides (full moon; spring tides), and the possibility that Sandy will join with a nor’easter to bring snow and even more wind and rain to the region. Expect high winds, heavy seas, flooding, power outages, downed trees, and impassible roads. I can tell you that folks in Vermont are not happy tonight.
At Gowanus Bay, New York, on Monday, 29 October, Higher High Water (+5.5 feet above Mean Lower Low Water) is at 0814. Lower High Water (+4.88 feet) is at 2035. On Tuesday, 30 October, Higher High Water (+5.49 feet) is at 0849. Lower High Water (+4.74 feet) is at 2115. On Wednesday, 31 October, Higher High Water (+5.37 feet) is at 0922. Lower High Water (+4.55 feet) is at 2155.
The New York Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has a handy ready-for-hurricane guide.
We know the drill. Gather supplies, stand by to shelter in place, but know your evacuation zone and, if an evacuation order comes, get out. Have a plan in place on where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. Make sure you have communications set up so your nearest-and-dearest will know where you’ll be and how to get in touch with you.
The day may come when you’ll be tempted to drive through flowing water. Resist that urge. Your body may never be found. Do not drive through still water either, unless you have no other alternative. Half of all flood fatalities in the USA are vehicle-related. Flood-preparedness pamphlet from NOAA.
Be careful with heating, cooking, and light sources powered by flame. Cold coffee won’t kill you. Carbon monoxide (or a house fire) will.
List of useful Making Light posts here.
Post full of external links about hurricanes in general and Sandy in particular here.
