Sekiur My Thoughts

Looking for a way to keep track of hurricanes? The National Weather Center website not good enough?

The guys over at Stormpulse.com have put together a great resource on hurricane activity.

1. You can view hurricanes and hurricane season dating back to 1851 by entering in a URL such as: http://www.stormpulse.com/hugo, or http://www.stormpulse.com/1944.
2. Cloud cover (updated every 6 hours) is available back to 2005. Coverage is still a bit spotty and you may notice some to be missing. In time (literally a matter of weeks), we will have cloud cover back to 2002.
3. The map interface is meant to be like that of Google Maps–you can click or drag your mouse to pan, and use the + or – buttons at the top-left to zoom in and out.
4. Clicking a city when a storm is active provides you with wind probabilities for that location over the next 5 days.  On the other hand, clicking on a city doesn’t do anything (yet) when the storm you have selected isn’t an active cyclone. However, it will draw a yellow line and provide the distance from the selected storm (and plotpoint) and the city over which you hover your mouse.
5. You can interact with storm data at the most granular level by clicking on a plotpoint in the storm’s track. This will jump you to that point in the storm’s history.
6. We currently have issues with Internet Explorer and the site. If you want to get the most out of the site, we strongly recommend Firefox.
7. Clicking on a storm in the “2006 Storm Season Summary” should open up a historical description of the storm and pan over to the storm in the map window.
8. Satellite images update every half-hour or so. We are collecting water vapor, infrared, rgb, visible, and more, but only displaying rgb and ir for now. This will change in the near future, hopefully with a better way of organizing them as well.
9. Yahoo! News articles are brought in from around the web relating to ‘hurricanes’.
10. Present weather conditions for land and sea stations are available in a table-format down below the satellite images.
11. Photos are being pulled in from Flickr that relate to the content ‘in focus’. This works on a limited basis, but if you want to give it a try, go to http://www.stormpulse.com/katrina and watch the photos change in the ‘Tropical Weather Photos’ area of the page–they should go from photos for the 2006 hurricane season to images captured during Katrina.

‘If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.’
- Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress…. But then I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
- G. Gordon Liddy

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
- James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
- Douglas Casey

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
- P.J. O’Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
- Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
- Ronald Reagan (1986)

I don’t make jokes… I just watch the government and report the facts.
- Will Rogers

If you think health care is expensive now, WA it until you see what it costs when it’s free!
- P.J. O’Rourke

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
- Voltaire (1764)

Just because you do not take an interest in politics
Doesn’t mean Politics won’t take an interest in you!
- Pericles (430 B.C.)

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
- Mark Twain (1866 )

Talk is cheap…except when Congress does it.
- Unknown

The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal: a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
- Ronald Reagan

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
- Winston Churchill

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
- Mark Twain

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class….save Congress.
- Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
- Edward Langley, Artist (1928 – 1995)

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
- Thomas Jefferson