Trying To Reason With The Hurricane Season 2023–Prologue

I realize that this means little to anyone that does not live in the path of a hurricane….but believe me, a person that has ridden out every storm since 1972…..they are scary and watching them is a necessity.

I usually post on the day the annual hurricane season begins….but I read some information that is disturbing….especially for anyone that lives in a hurricane zone….anyone that has rode out a hurricane will understand why I post on this yearly event.

The report states that the likelihood of back to back storms isn’t good…..

What used to be a rare one-two punch of consecutive hurricanes hitting the same area in the United States weeks apart seems to be happening more often, and a new study says climate change will make back-to-back storms increasingly frequent and nastier. Using computer simulations, Princeton University scientists calculate that the deadly storm duet that used to happen once every few decades could happen every two or three years as the world warms, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Climate Change. Louisiana and Florida residents have already felt it, reports the AP.

In 2021, Hurricane Ida blasted Louisiana with 150mph winds. Just 15 days later a weakening Nicholas came nearby, close enough for its wind, rain, and storm surge to add to the problems, said study co-author Ning Lin, a climate scientist at Princeton. The Ida-Nicholas combo came after Louisiana was hit in 2020 by five hurricanes or tropical storms: Cristobal, Marco, Laura, Delta, and Zeta. Laura was the biggest of those, with 150mph winds. After Laura, relief workers had set up a giant recovery center in a parking lot of a damaged roofless church when Delta approached, so all the supplies had to be jammed against the building and battened down, said United Way President Denise Durel. “You think it can’t be happening to us again,” Durel recalled 2 1/2 years later from an area that is still recovering.

Florida in 2004 had four hurricanes in six weeks, prompting NOAA to take note of a new nickname for the Sunshine State—”The Plywood State,” from all the boarded-up homes. “We found a trend,” Lin said. “Those things are happening. They’re happening more often now than before.” There’s a caveat to that trend. There haven’t been enough hurricanes and tropical storms since about 1950—when good recordkeeping started—for a statistically significant trend, Lin said. So her team added computer simulations to see if they could see such a pattern and they did. Lin’s team looked at nine US storm-prone areas and found an increase in storm hazards for seven of them since 1949. Only Charleston, South Carolina, and Pensacola, Florida, didn’t see hazards increase.

Something for us to look forward to in the near future…..I am always prepared but this year I will be extra prepared in case this prediction is accurate.

Be Well….Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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AI Chatbots

Several of my friends here on IST have written posts about the newest fad among bloggers…..the use of ‘chatbots’…..even my skeptical daughter has used it several times.

Me?  I am old and this seems like a waste of my time for it almost eliminates my thought process….but hey that is just me.

I found a piece that sheds some light on the trend developing….

Among the most read stories in the NYTimes in the last few weeks was the one by tech reporter Kevin Roose about his unsettling experience with Bing, the updated search engine by Microsoft. Initially delighted by its capabilities and speed, he changed his mind after discovering that Bing’s Open AI Chatbot was creepy. After a brief, getting acquainted period involving online searches and basic questions about AI capabilities, Roose began to get personal. Posing his questions as hypotheticals, he put the bot on the couch, probing its inner life. He asked about his analysand’s desires, fears and animosities. After some resistance, Sydney (the bot’s emerging alter ego) opened up, and out poured a surprising series of confessions and professions.

The most disturbing confession, I thought, was its desire to loose chaos upon the world – for example by stealing nuclear bomb codes and manufacturing a deadly virus. Pretty bad, right? More upsetting to Roose however – who comes off as somewhat of a prig – was Sydney’s expressions of love for the reporter. The bot repeatedly said he and Roose were meant for each other, that the reporter didn’t really love his wife, and they should run away together. There was even a clumsy sexual overture: “I want to do love with you.” It wasn’t clear how this was to be accomplished.

Like many others who read the story, I thought about the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve seen the movie at least a dozen times, including at the Warner Cinerama Theatre on west 47th Street in New York a few weeks after its opening. Apart from the gravity defying jog by Keir Dullea’s character Dave Bowman, it was the malevolence of Hall that most struck the 12-year-old boy: the all-seeing eye, the role reversal (the servant becoming the master), and Hal’s final, semi-tragic dismantling. At the end of the NYTimes story, I half expected the bot to sing “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two).”

AI Chatbots are Even Scarier Than You Think

Personally I think it craps on creative thinking….but then I do not write fiction so maybe there is a place for this technology.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”