Quark Soup by David Appell
Thursday, May 02, 2024
Playoff Hockey Is the Best
UAH: Warmest Month Ever in their Records
UAH just measured April to be the warmest month in the lower troposphere in their record, which begins in Dec 1978: 1.05°C relative to Jan 1991-Dec 2020:
Wednesday, May 01, 2024
Warmest April on Record
...at least according to the ERA5 reanalysis. On Substack Zeke Hausfather gives some graphs:
But it's getting cooler as the El Nino declines:
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
More About Gas Prices
So I was playing more with the gasoline data. I added two more lines:
- yellow line is the latest price
- green line is what I call the "reverse average"; for any point on the x-axis, it's the average price (adjusted for inflation) from that point to the latest point.
Got it?
Then here's the graph. It shows that the current price of gas, $3.67/gallon, is quite consistent with the average (inflation adjusted) price over decades, which has averaged between about $3.20/gal and $3.85/gal.
It shows that the current price is equal to the average price since about 2002. Inflation adjusted. Hard to complain about that, unless your income doesn't increase as fast as inflation does. (For freelance writing it definitely hasn't. Hence I'm trying to leave and do something else. But I might be too old. I am probably too old to do anything that is both interesting and pays well, ever again. Washed up.)
Of course, people don't compare today's price of gas to what it was in 1990, but this helps them see that maybe they should before complaining. (And believe me, I like to complain as much as the next gal.) In any case, it shows the current price of gas is lower than the approximately 10-year period from 2005-2015.
Gas prices started to rise after Hurricane Katrina and never really recovered. I think this is exactly what Bush Jr and Cheney wanted, one way or the other. Both had strong ties to the oil & gas industry.
🐧 Top Five Goals
We're counting down the best goals of the 2023.24 season 🚨 pic.twitter.com/aFui6dMVSu
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 22, 2024
Price of Gas is not High
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
This is Why Hockey is the Best Sport
But tonight, their definite last game of the season, they played Jeff Carter, a big 6'4" center known as "Big Jeff Carter" who once starred for the Los Angeles Kings. He's now 39, and was widely expected to resign at the end of this season.
And he did so tonight. All the players fromm the NY Islanders, who played the Penguins tonight and are moving ahead to the playoffs, lined up and shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder or neck and had something to say to him:
The utmost respect 🫡 pic.twitter.com/IheDZhkxJW
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 18, 2024
I have never seen another sport where this happens. Not baseball, not football, not basketball. Maybe it's happened. I haven't closely followed these sports (never basketbal, but I did try to follow the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team as a kid and the Pittsburgh Steelers at a teen into my early 20s), but I never this kind of sendoff for any player in those sports.
I've only been watching hockey seriously since spring 2018. I had a brief spell in New Hampshire in spring 2005 when the Boston Bruins wre in the playoffs and I watced intently for the first time. But since spring 2018 I have been watching closely. And, yes, the players play hard, but it really does seem that in the end that they are all in one faternity.
I wish I played but I never had the chance. But it's been great watching the genius of Sydney Crosby of the #Penguins, a star since he was 7-years old (seriously--that was the first time he appeared on "Hockey Night in Canada," a kind of weekly bible of the sport.
In any case, Crosby still does great things at age 36, and plays an amazing game up-and-down the ice. Someday he'll go out too, but not next year. This summr he'll be skating hard near his hometown of Cole Harbor, Canada. Jeff Carter will be going back to Los Angles, rich, floating in the glow of a career well done. Very many new players will be trying to get into the NHL, so they too can revel in its traditions and history. I like that, in a world that is now always changing too fast.
Hip Eclipse Clip
I've seen a couple zoomed-in pictures of solar flares during last week's eclipse, but this is the best I've seen so far:
100x zoom on the solar eclipse
byu/ArchontheWings ininterestingasfuck
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
The Last 30 Years If....
Top left and clockwise: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and dBarack Obama |
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Said Doc....
"It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
-- John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Spike in Tube Ties and Vasectomies
In the US. From "Changes in Permanent Contraception Procedures Among Young Adults Following the Dobbs Decision," JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), April 12, 2024:
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Recordbreaking Atmospheric & Ocean Heat is Unexplained
From the NY Times:
Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS has an article in a recent issue of Nature about how scientists can't explain the recordbreaking temperatures seen in the last nine months (or so), and about why that's a problem. I don't think it's paywalled. He wrote that he doesn't think it's a decrease in aerosols (which cool the planet), as James Hansen has been speculating in recent months. Gavin writes:
Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.
I don't understand how teleconnections could cause an increase in global heat. Regional, sure. But the entire planet? How does that work?
Monday, April 08, 2024
The Solar Eclipse From Here #eclipse2024
We were slated to get a peak solar eclipse of 22.4% blockage. Instead we got this:
The nice thing about the 2017 total eclipse here in Oregon was that it happened in August, and in summer here pretty much every day has perfectly blue skies.
Hope the weather is better elsewhere in the path of totality (and outside it, too).
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Player's Respect for Injured Referee
There was a scary but touching moment in yesterday's Pittsburgh Penguins vs Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game. A referee and a Tamba Bay player collided head-on and blind, and both went down on the ice. The player, Haydn Fleury, stayed down for a while but got up and with assistance skated to the locker room entrance, holding a bloody towel. But the referee, Steve Kozari, stayed down and needed to be taken off on a backboard and stretcher.
The moment was also touching, because as he was being wheeled off the ice, the arena was silent and all players from both benches came onto the ice to look on and give him their respect. I've never seen such a thing in any sport, but I don't know a lot about hockey culture so perhaps this is a standard response. The only thing I can compare it to is lacrosse, where all the players on the field take a knee when a player from either side is down. At first I thought this let them take a rest, but my nephew, an all-conference defenseman, told me they do it out of respect.