One Reason to Always Be Holding a Camera

Man, I wish I thought as fast as whoever took this.

(OK, I know it was probably Tivo'd, but he still had to make the connection)

TA Job

Sometimes I wish I'd bought the book for the class I'm TA'ing. It's fairly basic material about oceanography that I already know, and I have the answer key, but the students in the class come up with some off-the-wall answers, and I should really know where they're getting them for the purposes of evaluating partial credit. Once in a while the answers are even plausible, just not the same as what I know or what's on the answer key, and I wonder if I might be taking off for something that's actually correct. Eh, but I probably don't wonder enough to shell out the money. The peace of mind that comes with a clear conscience is worth nowhere near 70 bucks.

I would complain about the department expecting me to furnish my own book, but the TA job is pretty sweet. It's amazingly little work, especially given my sister's dire warnings of her experience in graduate school. Of course, biology departments do a huge amount of service teaching for other majors, so they work their graduate students like dogs supervising labs.

Paul Allen is a Crook

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and his cable company, Charter Communications, have stolen nearly 500 dollars from me and seem to have no intention of repaying it.

This should come as no surprise: the company is known to employ criminals, such as former Senior VP David McCall, who in 2003 pled guilty to wire fraud in a scheme to defraud Charter's stockholders. Interestingly, part of this scheme, the purpose of which was to cook the books and inflate subscriber counts, consisted of delaying customer disconnections until after the end of a fiscal quarter.

As far as I know, Charter's plan was to defraud investors by pumping up their stock, not to charge people for service they hadn't ordered. But the criminals at Charter Communications have gotten smarter. If you defraud the stockholders, you might have to deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission and go to jail. If you steal from customers, you're untouchable. The Better Business Bureau doesn't exactly have the same teeth as the SEC.

Judging by my experience, their crooked practices still involve failing to disconnect service, but now they just keep on billing the customers. Then they hide behind an army of incompetent customer service representatives in multiple call centers all over the country. Each time a customer calls to complain about being billed he has to wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold. Call volumes are always "unusual" at Charter, the Lake Wobegon of customer service.

Since there's no way to talk to the same rep twice, the customer has to spend another 20 to 30 minutes getting the new rep up to speed on the situation. At that point the rep gives him a completely different story than the last rep. If the customer asks about the story he got the last time the new rep will have no idea why he was told that, nor feel the slightest obligation to live up to any promises made. There may be the vague suggestion that the customer imagined them.

The service rep is therefore free to say anything. The check's in the mail. Your credit card will be credited. It certainly won't be true and it doesn't even need to be credible. If the customer gets mad that people are lying to his face he can simply be disconnected.

Most importantly, there is no way for the customer to break out of the system. He will never learn the full name of any Charter employee, nor would he have any way of contacting them if he did. No matter how much he pleads, or how extreme his situation, he must never, ever be given anything but the standard 800 number he started out with.

If the customer pays by check, the fraudulent bills are merely a maddening waste of a huge amount of time (at least until they are referred to a collection agency and the customer's credit is destroyed). But if Charter has the customer's credit card number, they're in the money!

Unbelievable

The morons at Charter Communications didn't issue the refund as they stated. And the guy I talked to yesterday did not call me as he said he would.

So again I call them and wait 20 minutes on hold. (I have never once called them and have the recording saying anything other than "we are experiencing ununsual call volumes"). Finally a customer service person answers, not the same one as yesterday, and she is plainly incompetent. She is unable even to recognize the fact that I requested disconnection back in May.

I ask to talk to her supervisor. Her supervisor gives me a completely different story than the one yesterday. Now the local office has to issue the refund, and it can't be done until tomorrow. The guy who promised to call me today apparently didn't promise that at all, according to her. But she promises to have him call me later.

Right.

Rita vs Katrina

Some comparisons of Rita vs Katrina courtesy of cnn.com:

	48 hour before landfall		24 hours before landfall		Landfall
	Katrina	Rita	Katrina	Rita	Katrina	Rita
Sustained winds (mph)	115	170	160	140	140	120
Diameter (miles)	300	370	370	410	460	410
Radius hurricane-force winds	85	70	40	85	125	85
Radius tropical-storm winds	150	185	185	205	230	205
Storm surge (feet)					18-22	15-20

Charter Communications Sucks

Never give your cable company your credit card number. Especially if your cable company is Charter.

Last year I decided to have Charter bill my credit card because I was busy and thought it would be easier than dealing with paper bills. I also think there was some sort of incentive offer involved, but I don't remember exactly. Anyhoo, when I moved out of the bunker at the end of May I returned my set-top box and requested my service be cancelled. But it wasn't. In fact, they've now billed more than four months worth of cable and internet service at $116.65 a month to my credit card. They won't stop. They just won't.

I called them again today and asked them nicely to give me back my money. I got the same old run-around: "well for some reason the service isn't physically disconnected yet, but once the service call gets made...blah blah...end of the billing cycle...blah blah...will issue a refund." In other words, the same story I got last month, when the only thing that happened at the end of the billing cycle was I got charged for another month. But this time I started screaming obscenities and demanding my money RIGHT NOW. Apparently this worked, or at least achieved a different type of run-around: supposedly the refund will be posted in the next 24 hours. We'll see.

In hurricane news, Rita wound up weakening to a category 3 (so much for my hurricane forecasting skills) and making landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border. There's concern about more flooding in N.O. obviously. The oil refineries don't seem to have been damaged, at least not as badly as feared. Rita was still a big, bad storm but wasn't as well-aimed as Katrina.

Sea Surface Height

sha1127339705
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

Here is the surface height anomaly in the Gulf of Mexico as of two days ago, generated on the NOAA/AOML site. (This is not quite the same sort of graph as in the previous post, but oh well). I think it's clear why it intensified so much as it moved through the Keys.

Rita is now a category 5, and the fourth-most intense storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. Even so, the weather service says further strengthening is likely over the next 24 hours.

From the looks of this data, it would seem that the worst-case scenario would be if Rita strikes the coast of Texas around Galveston, where it will have warm water the whole way. If it tracks a little further south it may deintensify before striking land.

There are of course a lot of atmospheric factors to consider, but I'm professionally disposed to believe the oceanographic ones are the most important. From what little I understand, however, there is some evidence that this is actually true for category 4 and 5 storms.

Oceanography Not-So-Fun Fact

I suppose most everyone knows that warm ocean temperatures are necessary for the formation and intensification of hurricanes, but the real story is more complicated, and very interesting.

It's necessary for sea surface temperatures to exceed 26 C to sustain a hurricane. The surface temperatures of the entire Gulf of Mexico are well above this value in the late summer and fall. On the other hand, hurricanes stir up the water, mixing warm surface waters with colder waters just below. By the time the eye of the hurricane (which is what matters) "sees" the surface temperature, the mixing may result in temperatures than 26 C. Therefore, in order for hurricane intensification to be favored, the warm waters must extend deep below the surface, and satellite sea-surface temperature maps, which only show the very skin of the ocean, aren't particularly useful to predict hurricane intensification.

Satellite altimetry, which measures sea surface height, is very useful on the other hand. Warmer waters, being less dense, "float higher" than colder waters. In order to show up in the altimetry the warm waters have to be of significant depth, on the order of tens of meters. In the Gulf of Mexico deep warm water can be found primarily in the Loop Current, which enters the Gulf between the Yucatan and Cuba, looping around Cuba to form the Florida Current and ultimately the Gulf Stream.

Along the way the Loop Current usually form a big loop out into the Gulf. Sometimes this loop gets pinched off, forming a ring or eddy that spins off into the middle of the Gulf and beyond. Like the current, the rings are deep, so this can leave large patches of warm deep water in the path of hurricanes headed for the Gulf coast. In the image below you can see something called the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential, computed from altimetry data. The big blob in the middle of the gulf is a warm ring that has pinched off the Loop Current. Superimposed on this is hurricane Katrina's extremely unfortunate trajectory, color-coded so that you can see it intensifying. You can also see why it deintensified slightly before coming ashore.


Thanks to NOAA/AML

I've been looking at some altimetry data for hurricane Rita (now a category 4) and trying to interpret it. So far it looks pretty bad, but I'll post something later.

Rita

The previously-mentioned tropical depression 18 is now category 2 hurricane Rita, which blew through the Keys today on the way into the Gulf of Mexico, where it is expected to grow into a category 4 as early as tomorrow afternoon. At least it seems to be headed to the Texas coast instead of hitting Louisiana again, which was initially feared.



Here we've been having a drought. This evening it's raining for only the second time since I've been in Chapel Hill. Earlier it was a fairly intense thunderstorm.

Keys Under Hurricane Watch

The Florida Keys and the Bahamas have been put under a watch for a hurricane that doesn't even exist yet. In fact, it's not even a tropical storm, but rather "tropical depression 18." It's the blob in the Turks and Caicos Islands (just north of the Dominican Republic/Haiti) in this photo. Further down the pipeline is tropical storm Phillippe, currently in the Leeward Islands.

The Hypocrisy of "Taking Responsibility"

In his speech from New Orleans about the Katrina clusterfuck last night (which I did not see) Bush apparently said that as president, he is responsible for the problems that occured in the federal response. Needless to say, I am not impressed.

First of all, it's clear that the statement wasn't made out of genuine remorse for doing a lousy job. Just a couple of days before he had been very hostile to reporters when the subject of the failures came up, accusing them of playing the "blame game." That's not a man being contrite. It was done for public relations purposes, because his advisors told him he needed to. Because leaders "take responsibility."

But how is pointing out the fact that the president is ultimately responsible for what goes on in the executive branch taking responsibility? The statement contains no information because it is true by definition. It's just a rhetorical ploy to deflect criticism.

Saying "I'm responsible" is not taking responsibility, because if you are responsible, according to the dictionary, you are "liable to give account, as of one's actions or of the discharge of a duty or trust." To take responsibility, Bush must give an account of his specific failings. All he has done with his statement so far is to point out that an accounting is due; he has not given one.

Taking responsibility would involve going on television and announcing "I screwed up when I allowed an incompetent political hack to run FEMA. I did it because (he contributed money/I'm a political hack myself/I was too fixated on Iraq/whatever). Many people likely died because of my actions." Similarly for his other failings.

You can read his intention in his weasily choice of words: he is responsible "as president," not "as the guy who screwed up." If you listen closely you can almost hear the "technically" preceding the "responsible." People will think "You know, the government is huge and the president can't really run everything. But he's a great leader to take responsibility anyway." And it seems to be working, as the media run the "taking responsibility" headline and talk about how he's turning things around.

Of course none of this is any different from what all politicians do, but Bush should not get credit for something he's not doing.

I'm #1!!!

Here is a list of words and phrases you can enter into google's blog search that bring up my blog as the #1 (and in most cases, only) result:

SEACOOS
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
"moron who's running FEMA"
"crazy puerto rican housemate"
"bill greene" (yikes, I may get a call)
"oceanography fun fact"

Google Blog

I guess the point of having a blog is that people will read it. But it's weird when people you actually know are reading it and you don't know it!

Chris, one of our lab techs, just walked up to me and asked if could use my SEACOOS photos on the SEACOOS web site, which of course he can. Apparently Google has launched blogsearch.google.com, just today. Chris looked for SEACOOS and there were only three entries. Two were from my blog, one of them the entry I posted half an hour ago!

I guess I need to go through my posts and remove anything nasty I've said about the faculty!

Maybe I Spoke Too Soon

I guess I'd assumed when I wrote the previous post that Ophelia had moved at least a little inland and deintensified. In fact it's still churning away off the coast, as this photo from 8:15 this morning shows. At least it's moved a little bit away from the buoy, for now.

This thing has been out there for so long that it's threatening to become a stable feature of the South Atlantic Bight, sort of like Jupiter's red spot.

Atta Buoy

Deploying
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

Rumor is that this SEACOOS buoy I helped launch this summer has weathered the hurricane OK. It's 20 miles off Cape Lookout, which puts it in the eye in the photo below. Of course it's difficult to know what condition it's in, but if it were off its GPS location we could tell.

We previously lost the first of these buoys put out as a test without instruments in a lesser storm in January. Haven't seen hide nor hair of it since. Consequently the design of the mooring was changed. Looks like it worked.


Update: actually, it turn out that all the instruments and the solar panels were pretty much destroyed. They had to haul it back to the institute and work on another moooring redesign.

Ophelia

Another hurricane, Ophelia, is currently striking the North Carolina coast. Based on this recent photo, it's hitting right at Cape Lookout, which is very close to Morehead City, where UNC has its Institute of Marine Sciences, where I spent the summer. (Cape Lookout is the little point on the coast sitting just inside the eye at about the 1 o'clock position).

I just looked at video of a pier on nearby Atlantic Beach being demolished by the waves.

Ophelia is only a category 1, with 85 mph sustained winds. However, it's extremely slow-moving, having meandered around the South Atlantic Bight for several days now. That means a great deal of flooding.

Doings

Yesterday I took a 4.5-hour canoe trip on the Haw river with 13 other people from the marine sciences department. The most interesting this that happened was while we were stopped on the bank for lunch: a great big water snake crawled up the bank with a catfish in its mouth. Unfortunately, fearing water damage, I didn't bring a camera, though somebody else did and got a couple of shots.

Like the N.O. floodwaters, gas prices have receded only slightly. I finally gassed up for the first time since the hurricane yesterday and paid $3.04.9. Just over $50 for a tank.

Today I'm attempting to install Mathematica and get it activated, transferring my license from the old desktop machine I no longer have. What Wolfram Research makes you do to accomplish this seems to be modeled on the bureaucratic procedures Jews had to go through to emmigrate from the old Soviet Union.

Computers Suck

After my last post the situation with my laptop continued to deteriorate. After a while the "last known good" configuration (which apparently should really be called the "we have no fucking idea if this is any good" configuration) no longer worked and I had to boot in "safe mode." The black screen of death with the oxymoronic PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA message seemed to imply I should boot in safe mode and uninstall malfunctioning software, but in fact you can't run uninstall in safe mode. I'd already uninstalled AFS, but VPN was still on the machine.

I took the machine down to UNC's IT support, which is supposed to be quite good. However, the automatic power-down functionality was no longer working, so I unwittingly used up the batteries sitting there in their lobby, and didn't have my AC adaptor with me.

Finally after I got home I spent an hour doing a reinstall of Windows XP (as an upgrade, so I didn't lose anything). Now the machine seems to be working OK, but I'm scared to try reinstalling AFS, which I sort of need.

This is all really great because I was worried I'd have nothing to do yesterday afternoon and evening.

Yep

As I was writing the last entry, AFS was installing. Right as I finished it up it prompted me to reboot my system. On the reboot my system froze up with a "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" error. Tried to reboot again and it happened again. I had to resort to selecting the "last known good configuration" boot option. I have no idea what the practical effect of that is. (Apparently it at least screwed up my IE security settings, because when I tried to log into blogger to post this my cookies were turned off).

Serenity now. Serenity now.

Software

My laptop has been running flawlessly, so naturally it's time to load it up with a bunch of new software until it gets flaky.

Wednesday night I installed Visual Studio on it. All I needed was a C++ compiler so I could complete a class assignment, but this vast collection of bloatware took nearly two hours to install. I think my writable DVD drive is much slower reading CD-ROMS than a regular CD/DVD drive would be. Only 8x or something. I wonder if I could get an external one that would be faster.

Today I'm installing AFS, so I can get to my campus file system directories, and VPN, so I can do it from home. I have little doubt that this will screw me up good in some subtle way that I'll never quite be able to fix.

Here's the Sort of Moron Who's Running FEMA

It turns out that the guy the Bush administration placed in charge of FEMA was Mike Brown. His last job was 11 years at an organization that oversees horse shows. Arabian horses. I shit you not. He was fired from it.

In personal matters, I'm regretting taking this scientific computing class. It's really ugly, nasty applied math that's already over my head in the second week.

My physical oceanography class looks like it's going to be way too easy, on the other hand, owing to the fact that it's a core course for all marine sciences students, so most of the other people in it are biologists or chemists, not physicists.

Issues

I really have some issues I need to deal with.

For one, I'm in terrible physical shape. I feel blue and lethargic all the time and am even getting a bit aggro, as I'm wont to do when I'm not getting exercise. I got in a shouting match with a bus driver Friday afternoon.

In part I blame Morehead City, where I spent the summer. I wasn't exactly in Olympic condition in May, either, but it got worse. It was so hot there that I was in no mood to exercise. Early on I did take long walks on the beach, but that got boring. And since I was only going to be there for 10 weeks I didn't bother to set up a full kitchen, so I ate a lot of unhealthy retaurant food.

The other issue I need to deal with is money. Living like a college student sucks, even when you are one. I have some retirement savings, but now is not the time of life to be spending that down, so I need to live within my current means, which are drastically reduced from the days when I had a real job.

I've thought of getting some programming work on the side, which would be possible but problematic. My skills are now pretty outdated. I could probably deal with that by working toward certifications in some new tools, but every time I think about it I just want to put my head in an oven instead.

Is there anything else I could do to make a significant amount of money in the limited free time I have as a grad student? Probably not.

What Sort of Moron is Running Homeland Security?

Three days after Jackass took heat for his moronic statement that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," his apparently even more idiotic Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is saying the same thing.

Referring to the breach he said that "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight." Except, he did not add, for anybody who didn't have their head completely up their ass.

It's greatly comforting to know that the security of the country is in the hands of a complete fucking idiot.

One thing I have enjoyed seeing is that the press seems to be fed up with all the bullshit from the politicians, and is cutting them very little slack. Several reporters have launched into tirades on the air, and the article on cnn.com about Chertoff's bullshit makes it pretty clear exactly what it is with lines like "But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture" and "But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings." As much as I complain about the press, they are doing a surprisingly good job in this case.

Jackass

The federal government's response to the hurricane has so far been pathetic; after four years that should have been spent preparing plans for dealing with a disaster in a major city, it is obvious that no such plans exist.

Other bloggers have pointed out that the Bush administration cut funding for hurricane preparedness and, specifically, levee construction in New Orleans. (According to the Chicago Tribune, the Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain this year; they got $5.7 million, and even that was more than the $3.9 million the administration wanted to allocate).

It's also been pointed out that the administration forced Michael Parker, a former GOP representative, to resign as head of the Corps for criticizing earler cuts.

Jackass went on TV today and actually said that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Yes, he actually opened his actual mouth and said those actual words. This despite the fact that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE anticipated it. (I'd direct him to the quote that closes my entry from Sunday entitled "Lazy Weekend/Perfect Storm" for one.) The levees weren't even designed to hold up to anything more than a category 2, or at best 3.

Somehow "Jackass" doesn't even do it as a moniker for this guy anymore.

Correction of the Correction

Apparently there's a pretty bad gas problem after all, if not in Atlanta then here. Today the cheapest gas I saw was $3.29.9. I got a mail from the University saying that the governor has ordered non-essential state vehicles grounded, and that no fuel will be issued by the campus fuel station except for law enforcement and emergency vehicles.

I guess the gas prices mean no Labor Day weekend getaway for me, not that I was planning one anyway because:

1. I'm too much of a loser.

2. WE'RE HAVING CLASS ON LABOR DAY!

Yes, that's right. We're having class on Labor Day. Staff gets the day off, but students and faculty have to report. I don't have a class on Monday but that doesn't matter because I do TA a class on Monday.