This week 15 years ago, scientists took a big step in understanding some of the driving forces of everyday weather on earth by heading into space. A satellite launched from the space shuttle Discovery identified huge windstorms in the upper atmosphere, some clocked at up to 200 miles an hour, flowing in masses 6,000 miles wide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Not to be outdone, the highest wind gust ever recorded on the earth’s surface gusted at an amazing 231 miles an hour. That was in April, 1934, at the peak of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, making those “This Car Climbed Mount Washington” bumper stickers sound significantly more impressive.

Among U.S. cities, the highest annual average winds are not, as you might expect, in Chicago, but in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at almost 13 miles an hour, the Census Bureau affirms.

Find out what else happened on this day in history.

Author’s Note: Please excuse the non-sciency (technical term) angle of this post. Just something I thought was worth noting here regardless. And Happy Halloween all…keep safe!

Eleven years ago today, exactly at this hour, I was biting my fingernails into non-existence. October 30, 1995 was the night Quebeckers (a largely French-speaking province within which I am considered a minority) were deciding whether we wanted to split from Canada and form our own nation. The ‘No’ side prevailed–fortunately, from my perspective–by a sliver tinier than the bits I’d just chewed off: 50.5% to 49.5%.

The point of this story, beyond the Coles Notes history lesson, is what I remember happening on October 31. Absolutely nothing. Despite the contentious vote, there were no riots. There was no violence. Quebeckers, English and French, got back to doing what we usually do that time of year: Trick or Treating, watching hockey and complaining about politics over beers at the pub.

I wonder sometimes what it would have been like if we’d lived somewhere else. Maybe you do too. What if, after the debacle that was the 2000 Presidential election (and, come to think of it, the one in 2004 too), people responded the way they have recently in Somalia or Nepal?

My point is: after these upcoming midterm elections, be grateful whether your candidate wins or loses. Two weeks later, your Thanksgiving turkey will taste the same, the football games will be played as scheduled and you’ll probably complain about politics over beers at the pub too (some things are universal).

The way history seems to work is that, ten or eleven years down the road, you won’t really remember who won or lost, just whether life went on the same.

When some major world event happens - a natural disaster, terrorist attack, political maneuvering - I always wonder how long it will take before that moment becomes “history”. Not in the strict timeline sense, but in the way that the event, at some intangible tipping point, ceases being fresh and newsworthy and drifts into the sterile zone of TV retrospectives, in-depth book analyses and (my personal favorite) history class lectures.

There is no need to discuss the whos and whats of today’s somber anniversary - you already know the facts down to their last detail. What I want to know is when will 9/11 become “the past”? In 2001, my guess was later rather than sooner, and most other journalists tended to agree. But now, five years later, there are stirrings: some are ambivalent about commemorating the day, others are stripping away at the previously untouchable varnish of its heroes, still others are disillusioned with what unfurled after America was attacked. On all fronts, people seem less afraid to look at 9/11 with a critical eye, dissect what happened and how it’s changed the country and the world, for better or for worse.

It’s still early in the game, but I bet the 9/11 survey courses will start popping up at American universities after this fifth anniversary has faded from view.

Our nation’s oil addiction - is Uncle Billy Smith to blame?

Much is being written of late about the nation’s dependency on oil and the daily need to fuel our cars, trucks, railroad locomotives, ships and jetliners. Well, it all goes back to this day in 1859, when Uncle Billy Smith saw a dark film floating on the water of a shaft he was digging near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Soon, the nation’s first commercial oil well was pumping out crude oil.

Today, there are 520,000 oil wells in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, producing more than 2-billion barrels of crude oil a year. But to meet our needs, we still need to import over 3.5-billion additional barrels annually, the majority of which comes from Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Department of Energy says. That means that every day, Americans use more than 15-million barrels of petroleum products. Oil addits, indeed. One has to wonder what date will bookend this one, as scientists are already pondering just how long the dwindling supplies will last.

Thanks, Uncle Billy…I think.

Walking around the office today, it’s been a quite normal day… I made a few copies, zoomed through my collection of blackberry emails and phone calls, and even did some real work on my laptop.

I mean my Vaio.

I mean my PC, wait, make that Personal Computer.

Here we are 25 years after the advent of the personal computer, first brought to us by IBM. Today, there’s really no such thing as a personal computer - EVERYTHING is a personal computer, right down to your ipod, TIVO, XBox, Playstations, satellite radio, thermostat, and your car. We have ThinkPads, iMacs, Mac Minis, PowerBooks, Palm Pilots, and OnStar auto navigation We have Windows, WindowsME, Leopard, Linux, Unix, Apache, iTunes, and Opera (thank god for a little culture around here)

One could make a strong argument that all these personal computers have made life better and made us more productive as a society.

But that sure is a lot of stuff - is this a good thing?

Absolutely - quit being a grump and enjoy your personal computer gadgets. Show a little love.

Gotta get back to playing Asteroids…

A few months back I wrote a story about the unveiling of an early 15th-century map that, some historians claim, seems to support the notion that the Chinese were the first explorers to reach the New World. Many experts wrote the map off as a fraud and the theory’s main supporter, Gavin Menzies, as a bit of a kook. Regardless of the ideas he presented in his book “1421: The Year China Discovered America”, a lot of the criticism lobbed at Menzies had to do with his less-than-impressive credentials as an amateur historian.

Enter Paul Chiasson, a one time professor of historical architecture at Yale and real, live academic. Looks like Menzies has at least one friend in high places.

Currently milling on some bestseller lists, Chiasson’s recent book entitled “The Island of Seven Cities” describes his discovery of a wall and road remnants on his native Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Chiasson claims the ruins predate John Cabot’s 1497 “discovery” of the island and were, in fact, leftovers from a once-thriving Chinese settlement.

Are these the first murmurs of a historical movement, I wonder, or is thinking the Chinese got here first just the latest “trend” that will eventually trickle away into oblivion (see: New World, Italian discovery of; New World, Polynesian discovery of…etc.)??

Blistering heat, oppressive humidity, and frequent power outages… summer really is here, and it’s going full bore with most of the United States blanketed in 100 degree temperatures.

With so much heat and humidity, is it surprising that we haven’t seen more activity from Atlantic hurricanes this year? And wasn’t last year at least a little milder in terms of temperatures? What should we believe?

According to data from the Tropical Prediction Center, we had already experienced 7 Atlantic storms, 3 of which were named hurricanes, the other 4 being tropical storms by the end of July 2005. By comparison, this year, we’ve narey had a rumble, with Alberto and Beryl being the only 2 named Tropical Storms this year and no named hurricanes to-date.

So what’s normal? Looking back at stats for the last 10 years, 5 out of the last 10 years had exactly zero named Hurricanes by the end of July and only 3 of the last 10 years had more than one tropical storm or hurricane occur by that same time.

While hurricanes certainly feel like a summer-time activity, they are more commonly found to be late summer to early fall activities. The kids are back to school in some areas of the country in another week - and not a whisper from the Atlantic.

History shows us that as quiet as June and July have commonly been for major hurricane activity, August and September tell a completely different story. Stay tuned.

One of the most notorious criminals in U.S. history — John Dillinger — was killed on this day in 1934, in a shootout with FBI agents outside the Biograph movie theater in Chicago. His trail of bank robberies, murders and jail escapes throughout the Midwest had made Dillinger the first official “public enemy number one.”

The events of that hot July night have been described as the beginning of the end of the era of famous gangsters. Today, there are more than 400,000 robberies a year across the U.S., including 10,000 bank robberies, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Can you name any one of those? And though Dillinger may have been able to make a living from his gun-toting ways, turns out crime doesn’t pay any longer. The average bank robbery nets only some 4,800 dollars, says the Census Bureau.

What else happened today?

The course of commercial aviation witnessed a major change on this day in 1954, when the prototype of the nation’s first production jetliner, the Boeing 707, lifted off a runway near Seattle for its maiden flight. The 707 quickly replaced propellor-driven aircraft and served both airlines and the military for many decades, logging 30 million flying hours and carrying more than half-a-million passengers in its many passenger and cargo versions by the time its production ceased, says the U.S. Census Bureau.  

Could those pioneering folks at Boeing have been able to predict what was to come? Now, jet airliners take off nearly 31,000 times a day, carrying close to 2 million passengers to their destinations around the country, according to the Census Bureau. Super-jumbo planes like the beleaguered Airbus 380–with seating for over 550 and capable of flying Chicago to Sydney non-stop–have taken over the skies, alongside debates over everything from airline food to security measures against terrorism. Most airlines are cramming more and more passengers into tighter spaces (even crassly proposing to make a few stand) while, ironically, at the same the demand for super-luxury in the world of commercial flight has spurred the creation of uber-comfy (and expensive) sections offering a select few lucky passengers more room than some New York City apartments.

So what’s next? Oh, right: commercial space travel.

 

Only about 20 people scattered in small towns near the California-Nevada border can still speak Washo, a Native American language. In Africa, some 17 languages are designated as “endangered” by the researchers who track such things.

By the end of this century,  more than half of the roughly 7,000 human languages could disappear, they say. Many don’t have dictionaries or any documented grammar.
So today the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $5 million in grants and fellowships to help study and document rare languages. One of the grants will be used to create a multimedia documentation of interviews with the last speakers of Washo.

Experts are looking at the silver lining.

“Not only is this a time of great potential loss,” said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, “it is also a moment for enormous potential gain. In this modern age of computers and our growing technological capabilities, we can preserve, assemble, analyze, and understand unprecedented riches of linguistic and cultural information.”