tornado

Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

A Thanksgiving Message

November 24, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Thanksgiving: an annual holiday meant to serve as a day of gratitude, a reminder to count blessings and show our appreciation for them. I only need to look as far as the faces of my wife and grown children to see how blessed I am. I hope you can find similar solace in someone(s) you love, and in something about your daily situation, while recognizing it’s not necessarily easy.

Many of our friends and family members have had hard times this year—seemingly more than usual. I think of those who have endured natural, criminal and suicidal deaths of loved ones, chronic physical or mental illness of self or a family member, severe acute sickness or injury, shattered relationships, financial hardship, job loss, homelessness or a looming threat thereof, or simply trying to raise kids and get by in a world that seems to be getting more insane by the year.

Right off the top of my head, I can sit here for just half a minute and think of 20, 30 or more people I know who have been dealing with just those kinds of problems, and others too. Their (your) faces flash before me like a newsreel of tough times. If this speaks to you, know you’re not alone, and that you are the subject of prayers for overcoming, that your story can invert from troubled to triumphant. It won’t be easy, and it could take awhile…but with the Lord, all good is possible.

In times like these, it can be hard to find things for which to be grateful. Life itself, something we too often take for granted, and something for which we should be thankful, may seem fruitless or pointless at times. Know you’ve got other people and a Lord who care, even if you don’t hear that enough.

Thanksgiving is about far more than turkeys, messy kitchens, gatherings around big tables, football, and that loudmouthed activist in the family ranting about politics at dinner. Cutting through all that, it’s about thankfulness. Whether your day will be full of relatives or a party of one, think of those people, pets, memories, and comforting items for which you’re grateful. Hold to those, cherish them, and offer thanks for the true friends and loved ones in your life, whether bountiful or few. There are some, I promise.

Moreover, take a minute to tell and show them your gratitude. Doing so only costs that little bit of time, and it pays off a hundredfold in good will and appreciation.

If you’re reading this, know that regardless of your profession, avocations, politics, or worldview, I appreciate you in some way or another, whether or not I have said so individually. You are a child of God, loved and valued despite all your flaws, just as I am, despite all mine. It’s difficult to keep that in mind sometimes, especially as hard as we can be on ourselves. But it’s true.

Thank you for reading, for understanding, and for being here. Happy Thanksgiving!

Human Weather Forecasting in an Automation Era, Part 3: Garbage In, Garbage Out

August 28, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

This short series (go to Part 1 or Part 2) arises from the recently published paper, “The Evolving Role of Humans in Weather Prediction and Communication“. Please read the paper first.

Objective verification of forecasts will remain hugely important, and the authors duly note that. But one factor not discussed (perhaps due to space limitations?) is the quality of the verification data. That matters…perhaps not to bureaucrats, who tend to overlook components of the verification sausage that provide context. But flawed verification datasets give you flawed verification numbers, even if the calculations are completely mathematically correct!

As someone who has analyzed and examined U.S. tornado, wind and hail data for most of my career, and published some research rooted in it, I can say two things with confidence:
1. It’s the most complete, precise and detailed data in the world, but
2. Precision is not necessarily accuracy. The data remain suffused with blobs of rottenness and grossly estimated or even completely fudged magnitudes, potentially giving misleading impressions on how “good” a forecast is.

How? Take the convective wind data, for example. More details can be found in my formally published paper on the subject, but suffice to say, it’s actually rather deeply contaminated, questionably accurate and surprisingly imprecise, and I’m amazed that it has generated as much useful research as it has. For example: trees and limbs can fall down in severe (50 kt, 58 mph by NWS definition) wind, subsevere wind, light wind, or no wind at all. Yet reports of downed trees and tree damage, when used to verify warnings, are bogused to severe numeric wind values by policy (as noted and cited in the paper). A patently unscientific and intellectually dishonest policy!

For another example, estimated winds tend to be overestimates, by a factor of about 1.25 in bulk, based on human wind-tunnel exposure (same paper). Yet four years after that research published, estimated gusts continue to be treated exactly like measured ones for verification (and now ML-informing) purposes. Why? Either estimated winds should be thrown out, or a pre-verification reduction factor applied to account for human overestimation. The secular increase in wind reports over the last few decades since the WSR-88D came online also should be normalized. That’s the far more scientifically justifiable approach than using the reports as-is, with no quality control nor temporal detrending.

For one more example, which we discussed just a little in the paper, all measured winds are treated the same, even though an increasing proportion come from non-AWOS, non-ASOS, non-mesonet instruments such as school and home weather stations. These are of questionable scientific validity in terms of proper exposure and calibration. The same can be said for storm-chaser and -spotter instrumentation, which may not be well-calibrated at a base level, and which may be either handheld at unknown height and exposure, or recording the slipstream if mounted on a vehicle.

Yet all those collectively populate the “severe” gust verification datasets also are used for training machine-learning algorithms — to the extent that actual, measured winds with scientific-grade, calibrated, verifiably properly sited instruments are a tiny minority of reports. With regard to wind reports, national outlooks, local warnings, and machine-learning training data use excess, non-severe wind data for verification, but because they all do, comparisons between them still may be useful, even if misleading.

Several of us severe-storms forecasters have noticed operationally that some ML-informed algorithms for generating calibrated wind probabilities put bull’s-eyes over CWAs and small parts of the country (mainly east) known to heavily use “trees down” to verify warnings, and that have much less actual severe thunderstorm wind (based on peer-reviewed studies of measured gusts, such as mine and this one by Bryan Smith) than the central and west. This has little to do with meteorology, and much to do with inconsistent and unscientific verification practices.

To improve the training data, the report-gathering and verification practices that inform it must improve, and/or the employers of the training data must apply objective filters. Will they?

This concludes the three-part series stimulated by Neil’s excellent paper. Great gratitude goes to Neil and his coauthors, and the handful who ever will read this far.