Electricity is Good

All,

We've been without power since Ike, until a few hours ago. That made a little over two weeks.

The worst part was that we never had a real clue when it might come back. Centerpoint Energy published very vague maps about when certain zip codes would have their power restored. Going by zip code is too coarse; most of ours had power a week ago, but not us!

More later,

Tom

Ike approaches

The latest forecast for Hurricane Ike is discussed in an interesting note at
Jeff Master's blog. He notes that the storm is very much stronger than the indicated intensity of 2, due to its vast size. The storm surge will rival that of Carla.

He notes that a good measure of the total strength of a hurricane is its Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE!). For Ike, this is around 149 Terajoules. For comparison, Katrina was rated at 122 Terajoules.

Sadly, I've seen several news reports about people refusing to leave Galveston Island and other low-lying areas. They face almost certain death. In fact, the police are asking them to put identifying marks on themselves, so they can be more easily identified when they are found. I can't believe it.

Time to get back to work!

Tom

This doesn't look too promising

I'm talking about Hurricane Ike; here are the latest computer models, which have it going pretty close to us in Houston:



On a more positive note, the LHC is still scheduled to start up on Wednesday. Also, experimenters at Fermilab have discovered a new type of baryon, the Ω_b, which contains two strange quarks (along with a single bottom quark). (In contrast, the proton is composed of two up quarks and one down.) It mass is about 6 times that of the proton, just as expected from lattice gauge theory calculations.

A rap song about the LHC

I mentioned the coming startup of the LHC in my last post. Well, there's a great rap song on YouTube by alpinekat that explains what it is going to do! Check it out here: Large Hadron Rap

Enjoy!

Tom