July 2006

5:36pm CDT; July 13, 2006

While flying from Kansas City to Las Vegas (via Denver) on July 13th, we were fortunate enough to observe a couple of beautiful thunderstorms from about 40,000 feet. Having the window seat on the right side of the west-bound plane afforded me a beautiful view of a string of storms lined up along an E-W boundary drapped over northern Kansas and southern Nebraska:

Low resolution archived radar image from NCDC.
If you know where I can find a better quality image from July 13-14th, email me

Frontier Airlines even offers in-flight tracking from every seat: The small LCD screens offer up several channels of cable TV programming as well as a real-time graphical representation of the plane’s location, speed, and altitude:

Below are a couple more shots of the same cell in NE Kansas taken several minutes apart between 5:36 and 5:44pm CDT:

While I’m not much a fan of some of the ways Google has done business, particularly with regard to China, I never fail to be amazed by the new tools they come up with. Google Trends - a cool new tool offered by Google which allows you to track the search and news trends of given keywords. For instance, Phish. When you google trend Phish, you see the peaks that occured around the time they announced they were breaking up, around the time of the final concert, around the time of their new individual side projects, etc… Fun tool.

As an extention, you can pit two keywords against each other to check how the trends compare. Global Warming is getting a lot of attention lately…another fun issue (in the same vein as Global Warming) is “Peak Oil“. Google Trends the two and you’ll see that peak oil isn’t getting the attention global warming has garnered quite yet…but I have a feeling it will with time. If I have it in me, I’ll write more about my impression of this whole Peak Oil theory someday (hint: time to put on the tin-foil hat) .