Veteran meteorologists called it the storm of a lifetime. Just as well. No one that watched this thing would ever want to see its like again.
Over the course of the day tornadoes raked the state from border-to-border east-to-west, and hit or threatened towns stretching across more than half the state’s north-south axis. Cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, towns like Cullman, suburbs like Pleasant Grove and small communities like Phil Campbell were hit hard.
(Update: A week later the death toll is still fluctuating a bit. There are still some persons unaccounted for. This is now considered the second-worst storm in U.S. history in terms of fatalities. The numbers are staggering, but how they aren’t higher given what we witnessed and what those people endured seems something of a tragic miracle.)
For me the sky turned from blue to gray to green to gray again. Finally, long after dark, the storms passed. The hard work of real heroes was underway. It will take some of those communities years to recover.
In the scope of all of that, this seems a bit silly. But I watched radar and news from across the state and curated it as well as I could through Twitter. For about two minutes late this afternoon my location was under a direct threat. Beyond that my extended family and I are extremely lucky.
Not surprisingly, given the destruction, a few of my colleagues at the University of Alabama lost their homes. All of those people, too, are safe.
video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Briefly brief 20 Apr 11
We used Hannan in a few papers in support of our research. I’m presently re-watching the American version of Life on Mars. (Still waiting to find the BBC original … ) And his recent speech at the European Parliament sounds, sadly, right on.
The comments on that YouTube video, for a change, are largely very interesting. When you’ve captured quality comments on YouTube you’re just doing this Internet thing wrong, I think, but nonetheless, refreshing still.
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville will receive a space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine for display as NASA begins parceling out parts of the shuttles. The shuttle program is ending in June after two more flights.
“It’s fantastic,” Center Director Dr. Deborah Barnhart said shortly after the announcement. “Anything having to do with propulsion, that’s us.” Barnhart was referring to the fact that the shuttle’s propulsion system was developed and managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
After this summer’s last flight the only place you’ll be able to get a sense of size of shuttle plus rockets will be in Huntsville. Apparently they have the only full “stack” around. And in as much as the shuttle program was a detour of sorts, this is still somewhat sad. Given the nature of things the detour isn’t being corrected with newer and better rockets to the moon and Mars. Right now we’ll be lucky to hitch rides to the space station and send robots out beyond a Terran orbit.
If we stay here at home it’ll just be that much easier for the ads to find us. It is about to become a lot more easy:
Far surpassing the powers of print, broadcast and the web, a host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf.
The technologies include not only the increasingly ubiquitous GPS-equipped smart phone but also window stickers that broadcast messages, interactive bar codes that instantly link to a website and increasingly sophisticated databases that track your individual activities so they can precisely target products or deals to you.
This has been discussed for several years now, but this particular future is here. How it is received will be interesting. I bring this up to students and they always gringe. They don’t want advertisers to know where they are. But they’ll grow used to it.
Just imagine what Don Draper would do with that. There are a few ideas.
Jeremy Davis can remember a picture he sketched at the age of 3, a squirrel sitting on a stump his mother always held in high regard.
[…]
It took years for him to get from a small town without a stop light to the University of Alabama in 2007, when he truly began to develop his artistic side.
Davis’ decision to return to school after a brief hiatus to earn more money resulted in the ultimate lesson while working on a unique project. Davis is credited with sketching and sculpting what developed into the Nick Saban statue.
Leaving aside the Alabama part and the inherently creepy statue-of-a-living-person discussion, that is a neat story.
Auburn, in keeping up with the Joneses at Alabama and Florida, is unveiling statues of the Heisman winners. If one must have statues I’d prefer a different group of individuals. We venerate football players enough and they’re in little danger of being forgotten, but that’s neither here nor there. The Auburn statues were designed and created by a Montana sculptor. He’s incredibly talented, his work is on display at the University of Texas and across the country, but it would have been nice for an Auburn artist to get the commission. It isn’t like they don’t have an entire academic department devoted to the discipline.
I go straight to the links today because one of my RSS feeds found this morning to be a good time to cough up 209 posts it had been saving for a while. I was goaded into reading them all. And, completist that I am, I would have. But they were all old posts from a year or two years ago. I’ve already read them. So now I’m giving my RSS reader a hesitant look. What else is it planning? And will it carry me away in the scheme?
The problem of the information age, really, is that no one moment will be the SkyNet moment. But any number of them could be the cumulative steps to getting there. By the time you, you pesky human, figure it out, the thing will be over. It will be too late. And then you’ll just try to remember what you learned from Noah Wylie in his gripping summer television series on how to fight back.
You are going to watch, aren’t you? Because this is the sort of information that could be useful at some point.
Class today. More Dreamweaver. That will be the operating condition between now and the end of the semester, as we work our way through the perplexities of fairly powerful software which is useful when it wants to be, and mysterious whenever a student comes up with an outside-the-box idea.
I come back from each class with a small list of things I’ve promised to investigate and resolve because “Why isn’t that working as it should?” is not a fun question for anyone.
Critiqued the paper today, where we were a bit late in getting the dormitory bathroom explosion prank story. We’ve only two issues left on the year. I hope they solve the mystery so we can put it in the paper.
Else we might have to do follow ups on snake sightings. They are prolific on our wooded campus.
Also had the first talk with next year’s editor today. He’s a sharp young man. I believe he’ll have a fine year.
Went to the movie trailers tonight. I watched a movie after sitting through 28 minutes of previews. I go to the dollar theater, so I’m always a little behind, but there are some woofers in these promos. As for the best commercial:
True Grit, though, was pretty good. At least Jeff Bridges is playing the part of Rooster Cogburn, rather than John Wayne saying Rooster’s lines and wishing he were Ted Williams. On IMDB the original film lists Wayne, and then Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf (also considered for the role: Elvis) and then Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In the modern film the listing is Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and then Matt Damon as LaBoeuf. That’s about right.
Darby, meanwhile, has played in 82 movies and last worked in 2007. Hopefully Steinfeld will still be working in 2051.
Did you see the LOMO blog today? Tree new entries for you there. That’s it for here. More fun will be had tomorrow.
“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks ‘Go.'” — John Mistletoe
Busy day, so you’re only getting this photographic meditation on spring. We’ve reached that point where sticks in the trees are no longer the standard view, but where the finery decorations of nature are still a bit surprising after a few months without. You can’t beat the South in the springtime.
I took this picture in a parking lot the other night. The more I think of it the more troubled by the implications of the language. The video may be recorded? It may be recorded 24 hours? Which 24 hours? Are they in sequence? Are just the first 24 hours recorded? Are they pressing record at whim?
Is this a deterrent? Would the bad guys take a chance?
Turns out if you stand there in the parking lot considering this message the staff begins to eye you suspiciously.
Auburn friends will enjoy the best Twitter meme ever. Everyone else will probably find it stupid, even if they can relate to some of the experiences there. Even still, just the names and the shared parts of the culture made for some hysterical reading today.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Gov. Robert Bentley said today he would cut the state’s General Fund budget by 15 percent once the Legislature passes pending supplemental appropriations to several key agencies.
And Bentley said the condition of the $1.6 billion fund is so bad that he expects to have to prorate the 2012 budget that begins on Oct. 1 anywhere from 15 percent to 45 percent.
[…]
Bentley compared the state’s General Fund to a person who is addicted to OxyContin and is going through a withdrawal period.
“Some times you get DTs like an alcoholic and that’s what we’re going through in the state of Alabama now,” he said. “We going through DTs, but you know what? You’ve got a doctor in charge.”
That’s our new governor. He was a dermatologist in his previous career. These little jokes are going to get old, fast.
The House was founded. It was good, then bad and then ominous. Then it was good again. Then there was Newt Gingrich, Clinton, 9-11. The End.
This evening I started reading Eugen Sledge’s With The Old Breed. Sledge was an Auburn man, from Mobile. He fought in two of the most brutal battles of the Pacific before he turned 21, enrolled at Auburn after the war and had a long and successful career as a professor at the University of Montevallo. The HBO miniseries, The Pacific, was based in part on his book. Just a few pages in, but it is a universally well-received book. I’ll let you know.
Best video of the day? Glad you asked.
Finally, where were you 30 years ago today? I don’t remember that as it happened, but you might. Watching the contemporary television coverage is fascinating.
