TrickJarrett.com

Spoke Too Soon

Remember yesterday when I posted we had survived and things were back to normal? Yeah. About that.

This morning, just as I was settling in to start my workday from home - there was a bang outside and the power went out again. It's been out since then.

I ended up going into the office and charging things while I was there, but now I'm home and we have no clear ETA on when power will be restored. The power company confirms they are aware of it but it's just marked as possibly being fixed tomorrow by 3pm, which is their default time they've been using since before our power originally came back.

So, we'll see.

We survived

We were without power for about 36 hours thanks to the bomb cyclone. It went out around 11:30pm on Monday and we weren't sure when it was coming back. The outage map had all outages marked as Saturday at noon, but I was fairly sure we were on the same grid as the middle school across the street from us. It's why we went to the movies last night, to get out of the house and go somewhere warm.

This morning, Katie excitedly messaged me this morning when the power came back on.

I shared the following few posts during our ordeal.

NOAA's Winter Predictions

Forecasting models look like a colder and wetter than usual winter for me this year.

Today is the Winter Solstice

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere will officially arrive tonight with the rays of the sun shining directly down on the Tropic of Capricorn — latitude 23.43-degrees south — at 10:27 p.m. Eastern Time. At that moment, if you were located in Western Australia at a point near Lake MacKay, the sun will be shining directly overhead and its six-month southward migration will come to an end, marking the beginning of summer for the Southern Hemisphere.

Starting tomorrow, the length of daylight will begin to increase — imperceptibly at first, but a month from now, it will become obvious that the sun is rising earlier and setting later. Yet, there is an old saying: "As the days grow longer, the cold grows stronger." If the insolation — the total energy received from the sun — alone governed the temperature, we should now be experiencing the year's coldest weather.

But the atmosphere in temperate regions falls behind the sun and continues to get colder, a situation that lasts several weeks or more. A reverse process occurs after the summer solstice in late June. Thus, there is a temperature lag of about a month: Our coldest weather usually comes in late January and our hottest in late July.

For those who yearn for milder weather to come more quickly, we end this discussion of the seasons with this little bit of philosophy published years ago in the Farmers' Almanac:

"It is only 100 days from New Year's Day to the bluebirds."

Fascinating Explanation of Theory for 2023 Ocean Warming

ICON weather satellite is out of contact and in deepening orbit

On Nov. 25, 2022, NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) team lost contact with the spacecraft. The ICON spacecraft is equipped with a built-in onboard command loss timer that will power cycle or reset the spacecraft after contact is lost for eight days. On Dec. 5, after the power cycle was complete, the team was still unable to acquire a downlink signal from the spacecraft. The team is currently still working to establish a connection.

As it turns out, it was launched for a two-year mission, which it completed. They were still running and using it, but it was in overtime regardless. It is always notable to me to hear about equipment, especially satellites, suddenly failing. A reminder that engineers of all sorts are fallible.

We don't yet build indestructible machines (despite what the plucky Mars Rover might lead us to believe.)

"Pakistan flooding deaths pass 1,000 in 'climate catastrophe'"

This year's weather extremes feel more global and more extreme than I've ever experienced in my life and Asia is particularly getting hammered

High temperatures, frequent droughts, torrential rains, and other extreme weather events this summer have throttled Asia, forced industries to shut down, slowed global business, disrupted food supplies, and upended the lives of ordinary people living in some of the world’s most populous countries and densely packed cities.

The Seattle Heat wave has arrived. Katie and I spent some time last night prepping for it. We don't (yet) have AC in the house, so we make use of portable AC units. We set one up in the bedroom for sleeping, and the other goes into the office. Since they are right across from each other, we hang a blanket in the hall to create a faux door, and we leave the two rooms connected.

We lose a bit of the air but it allows us to be connected at home, and lets the dogs have a bit more space to roam rather than being locked in the bedroom.

I do hate the portable AC units and every year we swear it's the year we get central AC. Then something else comes up (it was the garage roof this year.) We'll see if next year is the year (spoilers: it will be.)

A good interview with Charles Kenny

Bold in below quotes is the question carried over from the link. My only edit to a quote below was to elide portions.

In a case like climate change, we see sort of a fascinating “stuff” and “nonstuff” problem, where we need to do the engineering and we need to get people to enable the conditions for that engineering work to happen fast enough and then put it in place. Pandemics are another case like that.

So take pandemics. You can see the last three years in sort of two different ways. One is of immense human progress, driven by human cooperation. So when I got my first Pfizer shot, we were talking about a vaccine that was developed more rapidly than any vaccine in history. It was developed in an effort that involved the world. So you had the Hungarian scientists working in the United States who did some of the underlying research. And in Emma Rene, you had the children of Turkish refugees in Germany who actually developed the vaccine. You had the Greek [immigrant] who moved to America and ran the company that produced it. In my case, you had the Vietnamese woman who actually stuck the injection into my arm, now living in the United States: global cooperation at its best. It was a sign of what we can accomplish.

[...]

When you look at the state of the progress movement today or the state of the fight against climate change or the state of the fight against pandemics, where do you see us falling, on that narrow line between too much doom and too much satisfaction?

With climate, I feel that the doom has won out. You mentioned a while ago that you were looking for a book for your child on climate change that wasn’t all doom and you couldn’t find one. And I think that does reflect sort of the general discourse on climate in a really disappointing way.

[...]

What would you say to skepticism of progress that’s coming from people feeling like promises were made about the future that the future didn’t live up to, that progress hasn’t delivered on its promises?

[...]

I’m a bit of a skeptic about happiness literature. I don’t think that we ought to be maximizing subjective well-being on a scale of 1 to 10 as a sole public policy aim. But I do think the subjective well-being literature points you in a bit of a direction. [Subjective well-being] has been flatlining in many countries around the world, many rich countries around the world, over the last 10, in some cases, 20, 30, 40 years — it depends what question you ask, but there’s good reasons to think we’re not seeing a massive increase in happiness.

And so, you know, if people thought that what material progress was going to deliver was sort of human perfection, they’re right to be disappointed, I guess I would say. I think they were naive to expect that to begin with, but that’s easy to say after the fact.

Washington Drought Conditions

Given my daily life of Seattle rains and the lack of coverage I had heard about it, I didn't think Washington was struggling too much with drought this year. I forget that our eastern half is an entirely different climate. We're better off than Oregon and Idaho. Going to be an "interesting" (in the Chinese curse sense) year.

108 degrees

Reddit animation that shows the flow of equal temperature in Europe

As I watched I couldn't help notice that Seattle always remained in the band. I love this city.