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It's 2003. So where is he? AI has not seemed to improve much despite ambitious software projects and even games that would seem to require neural networks. Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of much improvement in VR, with disappointing progress in input devices and 3D and other monitor technology. Voice synthesis has made some improvements though. Not bad, although it's still not HAL quality. Voice recognition seems to have matured quite a bit as well. IMO, the most significant progress has been in graphics cards with processors nearly as impressive as the main CPU. The impact this has had on games cannot be underestimated.

The bottom line is that BPL's harmful effects ARE NOT limited to ham frequencies. There's a bunch of other services, both commercial and government, using HF from 2-30MHz.

Just as a few examples: Aeronautical HF, NOAA RadioFAX over HF, NOAA storm warnings broadcast by SITOR over HF, Federal and Marine HF frequencies... The list goes on forever.

So, it really isn't just hams that are going to be suffering. It's EVERYONE that uses the HF spectrum, including the U.S. Government!

How long do you think said government is going to let BPL exist in its current form once critical military or Justice Department installations start noticing the very same interference that'll be driving us hams nuts?

The bottom line is that BPL's harmful effects ARE NOT limited to ham frequencies. There's a bunch of other services, both commercial and government, using HF from 2-30MHz.

Just as a few examples: Aeronautical HF, NOAA RadioFAX over HF, NOAA storm warnings broadcast by SITOR over HF, Federal and Marine HF frequencies... The list goes on forever.

So, it really isn't just hams that are going to be suffering. It's EVERYONE that uses the HF spectrum, including the U.S. Government!

How long do you think said government is going to let BPL exist in its current form once critical military or Justice Department installations start noticing the very same interference that'll be driving us hams nuts?

Artificial lighting can cause disorientation and misorientation of both adults and hatchlings. Turtle hatchlings are attracted to light, ignoring or coming out of the ocean to go towards a light source, increasing their chances of death or injury. In addition, as nesting females avoid areas with intense lighting, highly developed areas may cause problems for turtles trying to nest.

Guess they missed the PBS special.

See more here

So how can we prove that it was the meager efforts of us humans that made the change, and not just a natural cycle?

How does a chlorofluorocarbon molecule, which is heavier than air, affect the Earth's upper atmosphere at the poles? Responses with detailed analyses are appreciated. Please limit your responses to 500 words.

OK, how about one URL (to a page whose word count I'm not going to bother computing) for a page entitled How Can Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) Get to the Stratosphere If They're Heavier than Air?.

I don't know about lithothermal science (although it sounds like a cool name, but all stars can have flares and coronal mass ejections. We just our flares solar flares.

See the Nasa Space Weather Page

I don't know enough about what Canada has to offer, so this is limited to the U.S.

When folks around here say they're "going backpacking" they usually mean they'll be hiking in the wildnerness with just what they can carry on their back. Such trips rarely include visits to bookstores, musea, and other geek centers. Such trips are best in mountainous areas -- I can't imagine backpacking in North Dakota, for instance -- and can be done on a pretty low daily budget (but make sure you invest in high quality boots, tents, etc.). Some folks have mentioned the Appalachian Trail, which spans from Vermont to Georgia. On the other side of the country are lots of swell backpacking areas from the Rocky Mountains west. The national parks in Utah and Arizona (Canyonlands, Staircase, Zion, Grand Canyon, etc.) are especially popular for such trips, though if you've spent much time in the outback you may be sick of such a climate (though the terrain here is more impressive). Almost any national park or national forest is a good backpacking experience, and entrance fees (especially if you get a year-long pass) are astonishingly cheap.

Unfortunately, you'll be arriving at the tail end of good backpacking season. Beginning in late September you can't trust in a lack of snow anywhere inland in the northern two thirds of the country, though places like southern Arizona are quite enjoyable. Unless you're staying until late next spring, you should hit any outdoor areas in the north first and work your way south.

Unfortunatey, U.S. public transportaion leaves much to be desired. There's nothing like a Eurail pass, and Amtrak stops mostly in larger cities, which is sad, because trains played such a large part in building America. Greyhound has excellent coverage and fairly reasonable rates, but if you're going to a lot of places, your pocketbook could take a big hit. Finally, hitchhiking across the country is probably no longer a viable plan, but it may be invaluable in a pinch. Hitchhikers are, generally, assumed to be dangerous until proven otherwise. On the plus side, most cities have a bus system decent enough for tourists to enjoy the town.

Unless you have access to a car, my advice is to pick a handfull of (relatively small) areas you want to visit and then figure out what all the great things to do there are.

Some geeky things in my neck of the woods (Boulder, Colorado): National Institute of Standards and Technology (home of the most accurate clock in this hemisphere) is right next to a branch of National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association and a beautiful two-hour mountain hike away from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They've all got free tours and such, though I haven't taken one since security got tightened after 9/11/01. About 10 miles south of town is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and more beautiful mountain hike areas. 30 miles or so to the north west is Rocky Mountain National Park, which gets pretty cold in September and later. Denver, CO has Forney Museum of Tranportation and also the nation's only major airport built in the last 20 years, so it's full of neat engineering bits.

Your post sounds quite ambitious, and there's no way you can really experience all of what's neat in America in even a year, so find some of it and enjoy the hell out of that! Cheerio!

The sun gives off not only light, but also spits off extremely fast moving plasma, called the solar wind. The wind, though not very dense, typically moves as a speed of several hundred miles per second. That's around a million miles an hour. (You can check current contitions here). The idea is to use the momentum from the solar wind, which is mostly ionized hydrogen, not the light from the sun, to propel the spacecraft. (There are some very good images on the website.)

The most interesting approach was suggested by Robert Winglee of the University of Washington. He suggest using a giant magnetosphere (essentially a magnetic field stretched out by a plasma) as a sail. The magnetophere deflects the solar wind, transferring momentum into the spacecraft. There is also another advantage - the magnetosphere works as a shield to keep the wind from damaging the spacecraft itself.

The "sail" is made from an ionized gas trapped in a magnetic field. It's easy to let the sail out and take it in, and if the sail ever "breaks," you can just make a new one using more plasma.

So, despite what the paper has to say, solar sail research is alive and well. It's just that the most promising designs work a little differently than the author thought.

Solar wind speed 1,944,000 km/hr
Temperature 200,000 degrees K

Fortunately for us, it is nothing like earth weather forecasting.

Magnetic storms can be very damaging to AC electric systems, and power companies go into conservative operations when storms are predicted by NOAA. The change in the earth's magnetic field (as it interacts with the solar storm) induces slight currents in the metal in the earth's crust, which can have a negative impact on high voltage transformer equipment.

Fortunately for us, it is nothing like earth weather forecasting.

Magnetic storms can be very damaging to AC electric systems, and power companies go into conservative operations when storms are predicted by NOAA. The change in the earth's magnetic field (as it interacts with the solar storm) induces slight currents in the metal in the earth's crust, which can have a negative impact on high voltage transformer equipment.

What the fuck is Clamato? Anyway, it is people like you who would rather do something and worry about the consequences later that cause problems like this.

Most geological surveyers can use gps equipment with post processing of data allowing you to find your location within a millimeter or two. Its pretty common within the US as well. Look at http://cors.ngs.noaa.gov to find other projects going on in the US. They are also using GPS to watch the Gulf coast sink. Your little hand held GPS receivers are limited to wide error because of processing power and the type of GPS signal they use.

His statement is completely and totally incorrect.

FGCS-Selective Availability Removal

President Turns Off GPS Selective Availability

The biggest problem with high-altitude tethered aerostats is that the tether is invisible to aircraft. Typically, they aren't even lit. And, of course, the balloons move with the wind somewhat, so you can't even be sure what location to avoid. Therefore, you'd have to have a pretty wide area to avoid.

That said, the US has several tethered aerostats along its southern border, used to monitor weather, to check for low-flying smugglers and to broadcast propaganda to Cuba. The internation border is, of course, an area with strict flying restrictions already, so it isn't too much of a burden.

Unfortunately, these balloons in England are planned (perhaps that's too strong a word. Shilled?) to be in the middle of fairly populated and high-traffic areas. Cordoning off all of these areas would be a problem, and unlikely to be 100% successful. Right now, people violate airspace accidentally all the time -- but it's usually not that big a deal -- it's just air. Running into one of these tethers would likely be a big deal -- you'd probably lose both the plane and the balloon.

Perhaps the balloons could be flown far higher somewhat offshore? The US flies its aerostats at 50,000 ft (about 16 km). From that altitude, the amount of ground area seen by the balloon would be almost 100x as great. Private planes typically don't fly very far offshore, so the risk of hitting the tether would be lower -- and in the case that there is a collision the wreakage would fall into the sea instead of a city.

Perhaps GPS will solve this problem. If all private planes had perfect GPS systems with all airspaces clearly marked and rigged to alarms, then this might work smoothly with the current plan. You'd probably have to legislate that all planes have certificated (or whatever the term is in England) GPS's -- but they would be broadly useful devices in any case.

Anyway, in the end, the idea of flying relays has been promoted innumerable times -- and it never happens. Cable is, in the end, cheaper, faster, more reliable, and safer. It's not as sexy as this system (although sexiness is in the eye of the beholder -- or should I say stockholder) but it gets the job done.

thad

You must not have been paying attention back in May of 2000, when GPS's 'Selective Availability' was permanently turned off. As of midnight on May 1, 2000, all GPS units, civilian or military, became accurate to within 15 meters.

On the subject of GPS accuracy, the development to be watching at the moment is the FAA's WAAS project. Typical GPS accuracy using WAAS correction data will be less than 3 meters. The kicker is that your receiver must be WAAS-enabled in order to use the system. WAAS will eventually replace the Coast Guard's current system of DGPS beacon stations.

FWIW: The WAAS network must already be at least partly functional, at least in the Puget Sound region. I just upgraded our mobile receiver to a WAAS-enabled engine (the Garmin GPS-15), and I noticed an immediate improvement.

WEATHER ALERT - Go to the National Weather Service to make sure you're not under a tornado warning, as much of the country is!!!

Sorry to break it to you, but we only had one Andrew in 1992, and it was an exception to the rule. Old Florida houses seemed to survive intact (single story, concrete tile roofs, cement block construction) while the newer developments turned to match sticks (more or less wood houses on cement pads).

The older houses have survived many hurricanes, and that is the only threat we face other than a few tornados.

Andrew was a catagory 4-5 hurricane with official measured windspeeds of 145-175 mph, they speculated the wind was actually faster as the windspeed device was ripped from turkey point nuclear power plant, but keep in mind this is a once in a lifetime type deal (knock knock), the once in a lifetime deal for Cali will likely kill tens of thousands and cost billions more, we lost 15 people, 25 billion in damage.

NOAA

Between the forecasting of National Weather Service and real time spotting by trained SKYWARN spotters, there's a lot of information available to help the public know when to head to a sheltered location. The trick is in getting the information. TV and Radio are great if you're watching or listening, but by far the best solution is a quality weather radio.

Another option is to have severe weather warnings and watches sent to your pager or mobile phone so it can catch you when you're notin front of the TV. A lot of news and weather web sites offer these services. Another option is an open source program called StormSiren which scans the text data from the National Weather Service's Interactive Weather Information Network. The important thing is to be aware of severe weather so you'll know when to head to shelter.

Just a note: Although references are made to damage to non-engineered structures you will note later on in the page and here that engineered structures are definitely considered when doing damage estimation. I don't believe non-engineered vs engineered structures was you main point but I figured I would mention it.

I understand that the Fujita scales intent is to estimate wind speed and thanks for pointing that out. My intent of siting and example of a relatively uninhabited areas was to point out that tornados can and have been 'mis-rated' because of anomolies (such as lack of damage in an open area; devoid of trees, etc.; example: large area of cultivated plains). In fact this type of case is mentioned later on in the first link I provided.

Your point does make me question my statement of the F scale being redefined though. That was off the top of my head thinking and in reality the F scale will probably eventually either be obsoleted due to better wind spead measuring technology or at least be re-defined in terms not mapping damage to wind speed.

Merlin.

Having a NOAA Weather Radio in the house should be just like having a smoke detector!

This tornado is the 5th that I've helped clean up after. I grew up 2.5 hours west of here, south of Wichita. I cleaned up from 4 different tornado incidents back home, including my grandfathers farm/ranch. Back home those families that weren't hit help those that were. That very night or early the following morning the community decends on the destruction in mass to help clean up. I was surprised by what happened in Franklin. I went up there expecting to help people dig out like I'd done before. I couldn't get into the town. The police were guarding all the entrances to the town and only permitting entrance to those people with photo ID that proved they lived in the affected area. As it turns out, within 30 minutes of the tornado city folks swamped the city streets looking for damage. They were rubbernecking. They couldn't stay home and watch it on TV. They had to get in their cars and drive through the affected areas looking for death and destruction. This prevented emergency vehicles from being able to gain access to those areas. Hence, the city was shut down. Damned city folk. In the end I donated some clothing and rode an Red Cross IRV and served food all day. I would have felt more useful doing something else but someone had to feed the people and workers.

Back on topic. There is no such thing as a tornado proof building. NOAA has done hundreds of studies into building material. They have yet to find anything that can withstand the winds of even a strong F3 tornado. A F3 tornado damaged reinforced concrete. A F4 ripped reinforced concrete apart. A F5 crumbles it into little bits. What needs to be focused on is tornado shelters and getting people into them. Homes and possessions can be replaced. People can not.

Real blizzards can cause massive disruptions to the power and transportation grids for days on end. If you're living in the Midwest, the power goes out, and you can't even get your car out of the garage, you can be in serious trouble when the weather gets cold. (My wife's family lived in North Dakota when she was young, and there were times when they would -burn furniture- for heat because of power outages from winter storms. In a blizzard, no heat=no life.)

Even normal snowstorms can be deadly. The first snowfall of the year invariably brings droves of automobile accidents, even if it's little more than a dusting. Interesting statistic: in 1997, winter storms killed more people than tornadoes did. (source)

You can see some pictures and read about the new radar here.

The current radar technology used for all weather forcasting (NEXRAD) is really pretty old. By using a phased array, the scan times are much quicker than the old spinning dish style.

We hope to get this thing operational really soon. Off the above site, there's a webcam where you can see the progress of its construction.

I've noticed even more invasive ads, more so than pop-unders or pop-ups (see this google article for their take on it). Coming to the mainstream it seems that flash ads that popup over the page itself and make some noise are becoming quite popular, and I've decided to completely stop visiting these sites, weather.com being one of them. (I think they're running an ad right now where a rhino busts through your page...wahoo.) Thankfully, the National Weather Service is ad-free! These ads are not only annoying, but make it difficult to close and take too much time when all you want is real content.

This article on Low-End Media for User Empowerment explains why simple adverstising works, and why complex doesn't.

ok firstly you posted a link the "the other site."...I thought that wasn't allowed...=)

any way ....

I think it would be very cool and very usefull, if it could be done without scaling problems, I am not an Expert on RE's but I've always been told that they are slower than indexed lookups, and don't scale to masive quantities of info.
and if it can't be done without scaling problems...it could be done for a subset of the net. like find all matching entries of Regex1 within all Url's matching Regex2.

I find they tend to be usefull when looking for something you kinda remember what it is but not quite...
URL's - addresses - a parameter or function name you can't quite remember ....
one application I might use it for would be to find examples of code....or of files the match a paticular structure. ...
the web is all about files having almost no structure. an advantage of a RE is that I might be able to build a filter for a paticular file foremat first and work with it from there

if I had a RE wb engine I could find all files in say the SHEF file format with mesurments from a specific station, or group of stations.

but to be honest, if it works and in scales...People will find applications for it, even if they arn't obvious now....

[Aside]
does anybody know why the standard [ctrl]+F function in most web browsers sucks so much. why can't I search for regex in my open web page...
that as of right now is my biggest Gripe about Pheonix, is its shitty find box. anybody have a better plugin?
[/Aside]

... to secure a win box is to put it in concrete and throw it deep in the ocean.

--

That's assuming they choose to land in the USA off course. Considering that the USA covers only a minor piece of the worlds landmass, it's statisticly more likely they will land somewhere else entirely.. like Red China or India. Not sure if it would be any better thought, politicans are generaly crocks no matter where they are from.

Spooky !

If the link doesn't work try viewing an image from 2003-04-11 at +/- 03 hours.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already tracks "space weather". Check out this Primer for a good introdcution about what we already know.

Why is this important? Whenever the Earth's magnetosphere is hit by a solar storm, the change in magnetic field induces a DC ground current in the metal in the earth. For most applications, this has no effect. For the bulk power grid, this is significant -- this DC current seeps into the grid through ground taps, and can damage AC systems. Because the (very) high voltage equipment depends on (very) low currents, these fluctuations can be enough to damage transformers and cause problems on a state-wide scale.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already tracks "space weather". Check out this Primer for a good introdcution about what we already know.

Why is this important? Whenever the Earth's magnetosphere is hit by a solar storm, the change in magnetic field induces a DC ground current in the metal in the earth. For most applications, this has no effect. For the bulk power grid, this is significant -- this DC current seeps into the grid through ground taps, and can damage AC systems. Because the (very) high voltage equipment depends on (very) low currents, these fluctuations can be enough to damage transformers and cause problems on a state-wide scale.

The SXI data has been available for weeks. It replaces x-ray images which were on the Internet for years from the Yohkoh satellite until it saw one too many eclipses and spun out of control in Dec. 2001. Other near-real-time (or at least daily) images of the sun can be found in numerous places: SOHO and SXI are not the only sources. And there already are predictions of solar events.

Science advances slowly through peer-reviewed journals. Major scientific papers are reviewed by leaders in the field, and eventually accepted into the top line journals if the research is of sufficiently high quality. If a paper is rejected from a top journal, it is usually submitted to a lesser journal, and so on until it is eventually accepted.

Science and Nature are among the most prestigious journals for general science publications (but rarely computer science), and any major breakthrough in climate research would likely be published there. This Energy and the Environment journal is one I've never heard of (but I'm not a climate researcher), and doesn't seem to be a commonly cited source. I'd put very little stock in the claims made in the paper, since it hasn't been accepted by the scientific community.

Print media (like this daily telegraph article) do this sort of thing all the time - claiming that an article in some obscure journal reflects the current state of science, rather than one group's opinion. In Canada, the National Post often presents global warming as a "contentious issue" in the scientific community, treating the handful of dissenting scientists as equal to the majority who believe global warming is occurring. Read between the lines, people.

A few quick references on the subject (I'm not endorsing anything else on this site, I just found this while searching for "peer review" with Google.

• wikipedia
• wikipedia: peer review, with an interesting comparison to "given many eyes, all bugs are shallow"
• Peer review

The problem, of course, is that thermometers weren't even invented for most of the time period of interest, and that nobody set out to take a systematic measurement of the entire surface of the planet until very recently.

It's generally believed that the data looks something like this. The data series can be found here, in case you want to exercise your finite difference script on it.

Apparently this consensus is being called into question. It's the validity of the data, not the competence of the community to analyze it, that is apparently in question here. We are a long way from a serious challenge to the consensus opinion, though. First we need to know whether the journalist mangled the story, and if not, who were the unnamed scientists involved, what evidence they have come up with, and whether their ideas have been peer reviewed by other paleoclimatologists.

It's important for the interested lay reader to understand that the public debate is being colored by advocacy posing as science, often funded by fossil fuel interests. One study doesn't reverse the consensus, no matter how a breathless reporter phrases it. It's worth noting that the unnamed "scientists" are supposed to be associated with the UK Climate Impacts Programme, whose site prominently states, as of today:

The average global temperature is warmer than any other century in the last 1,000 years. About 0.6C of warming has occurred over the last century, with land warming more than the oceans. The 1990s were the warmest decade in the last 100 years.

The problem, of course, is that thermometers weren't even invented for most of the time period of interest, and that nobody set out to take a systematic measurement of the entire surface of the planet until very recently.

It's generally believed that the data looks something like this. The data series can be found here, in case you want to exercise your finite difference script on it.

Apparently this consensus is being called into question. It's the validity of the data, not the competence of the community to analyze it, that is apparently in question here. We are a long way from a serious challenge to the consensus opinion, though. First we need to know whether the journalist mangled the story, and if not, who were the unnamed scientists involved, what evidence they have come up with, and whether their ideas have been peer reviewed by other paleoclimatologists.

It's important for the interested lay reader to understand that the public debate is being colored by advocacy posing as science, often funded by fossil fuel interests. One study doesn't reverse the consensus, no matter how a breathless reporter phrases it. It's worth noting that the unnamed "scientists" are supposed to be associated with the UK Climate Impacts Programme, whose site prominently states, as of today:

The average global temperature is warmer than any other century in the last 1,000 years. About 0.6C of warming has occurred over the last century, with land warming more than the oceans. The 1990s were the warmest decade in the last 100 years.

I suppose that you want something like OSXvnc, which allows you to share your main (and only) quartz display.

But you may also want to check out Xvnc for MacOS X, which allows you to share secondary X Window sessions (:1 through :99, in theory). This is one of the few huge advantages of X over Quartz/Aqua: you can create several simultaneous sessions that are kept alive independently, and that may be created by different users. It is a really useful feature but unfortunately you can only launch X applications in them, not common Cocoa/Carbon/Classic ones, and you need an X-Win window manager such as WindowMaker or AfterStep or even a full desktop environment as KDE or Gnome.

You know, the government ought to collect and disseminate the temperature data that the National Weather Service collects in a computer parseable format via anonymous ftp.

Oh wait, they do. They even provide you with loads of docs that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the format of government weather data.

For those that don't want to worry about when the satellite is passing overhead and happen to live in the US (or thereabouts), consider EMWIN, the Emergency Managers' Weather Information Network. You can receive data by satellite, radio, or Internet. NOAA has links to schematics, free software (with source) and other good information.

You could just go to NOAA's Geostationary Satellite Server page and D/L the damn things.

I guess I have to turn in my geek card now...

As far as I know, the consensus opinion about the last 1000 years' global temperature time series looks like this for what it's worth. Let us know your basis for disagreeing so dramatically.

Or you may take a look at Longhorn itself (it's free to download! Thanks Microsoft!). I think it looks a bit old-fashioned.

• a story from the Southeast Missourian website that features several quotes such as this one from Professor Nicholas Tibbs of the Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau:
  
  "You can't accurately predict earthquakes," he said. "The technology to do that doesn't exist. It sounds like a scam to me."
  
  
• this entry on the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics" website identifying a Michael J. Kozuch, Ph.D. as being a geoscientist "with active interests in Honduras"
  
  Michael J. Kozuch; Ph.D., Peace Corps Volunteer Geologist, Honduras 1987-1990; Seismologist with the Institute of Geologic & Nuclear Sciences (New Zealand). Honduras Expertise: General geology of Honduras, tectonic modeling and geophysics Current activities: Investigation of novel approaches in seismic hazard analysis and collection of geophysical information relevant to Honduras, email: m.kozuch@gns.cri.nz Mail: P.O. IGNS, P.O. Box 1320, Wellington, New Zealand, Tel: 64-4-473-8208 (wk) or 225 Country Club Dr., San Francisco, CA 94132 USA. additional information at: http://www.gphs.vuw.ac.nz:80/staff/kozuch.html
• this web page listing Michael J. Kozuch in an academic reference to a geological map of Honduras.
• this web page listing him Michael as part of the GNS of New Zealand. The GNS, formerly New Zealand's Geological Survey, which was transformed into a government-owned company in 1992. Interestingly, the GNS website hosts the New Zealand Hazard Watch web page which provides "up-to-date information on volcanoes, floods, landslips, tsunamis, solar activity and earthquakes." The GNS website identifies Mike Kozuch as one of two project leaders of the Quake Tracker Development Team. Perhaps Michael used his experience with this development to try to make a website that was more financially rewarding.

I think this depends a lot on the kind of research you do. I do ocean modeling, and beyond the actual model code, which is written mostly in Fortran, the only packages I use are Matlab, Scientific Python, and an open source oceanography analysis package called Ferret. This is mostly because I don't have to solve any equations; all my results are based on number crunching. If you are doing theoretical work, and have to find polynomial roots or something, you use something different.

Actually though, I am trying to get away from Matlab more and more. It has some terrible features in it (Like a completely botched graphics library and a for loop command that takes EONS to run) and it costs at least $100 for a personal copy. Sci Py is free and does most of the same things, except that it has no standard plotting routines. At least, none I am aware of...

I did research under a professor who specializes in bioinfomatics. One particular goal of his research group is in visualization. Specifically, how the f*** do you graphically represent gigabytes of genetic data in a meaningful way? And how do you do it so that you can get useful information from it, like repeated patterns and whatnot?

The answer to the above is to do it in 3-D. One of the (mad-skilled, overachieving, indian) grad students wrote a program which renders DNA base sequences into a 2D plane, and then looks for important sequences (such as functional groups). When it finds one, it raises it out of the plane. All of this could be shown on our ImmersaDesk, but not everyone has an SGI Onyx. For that project, having a lot of processing power on individual PCs was a life-saver.

• Run a weather model on my machine 4 times/day, initialized off of the NCEP Eta model (which it also uses for boundary conditions). I use the lower-resolution grids and omit every other model output time, and it's still ~700MB/day (over 20GB/month).
• Download archived Level II Nexrad data for examination (usually to perform ad hoc, informal case studies). Data amounts for a single day of interest for a single radar typically run between 300-500MB compressed.
• Download model output data for examination. Using the Eta model as an example, a single "tile" (covering only a few states in the U.S., for example) for a single time is around 1.5MB (which might not sound like much, but it adds up really fast when trying to look around at various parts of the model domain for various times).
• View and download for processing a wide variety of constantly updating real-time weather data (bandwidth usage varies widely based on current conditions).
• Run Gentoo.

The ionosphere itself wasn't very active either. First, the pre-dawn ionosphere tends to be weaker than after the sun heats things up. Also, the sun's xrays were not strong, and geomagnetic storm activity was subdued.

The ionosphere itself wasn't very active either. First, the pre-dawn ionosphere tends to be weaker than after the sun heats things up. Also, the sun's xrays were not strong, and geomagnetic storm activity was subdued.

Well, considering the zip code for Hell, Michigan is 48169, I'd say pretty damn cold.