Events

One of the benefits of visiting a small city in the off-season: you get a great hotel room for £98. So let it be with Cardiff. I think during the summer, this kind of view of Cardiff Bay goes for many times more. Combine a great room with a camera that has mind-boggling low-light capabilities, and voilà: See? You thought I was going to post about the election.

Ever the Pollyanna, Nate Cohn lays out the nightmare scenario: With the West Coast providing the margin of victory for any Democratic candidate in a close election, Republican presidential candidates outperform their eventual share of the popular vote until the West Coast reports its results. In 2008, California, Washington, and Oregon voted for Obama by a 4 million-vote margin, representing nearly half of his national popular vote victory. But the time zones are not alone in delaying results from...

I expect I'll have a thing or two more to say about the election this week. Today, let me just highlight a couple of things I'm watching: The election matters. Whether you believe that every person should stand or fall on his own, or instead that governments are formed to promote the general welfare, this election will be a referendum on your philosophy. I have a clear bias: I believe public governments do many things better than private concerns can possibly do—and some things that private concerns...

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've had some difficulty moving the last remaining web application in the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center, Weather Now, into Microsoft Windows Azure. Actually, I have two principal difficulties: first, I need to re-write almost all of it, to end its dependency on a Database of Unusual Size; and second, I need the time to do this. Right now, the databases hold about 2 Gb of geographic information and another 20 Gb of archival weather data. Since these...

NOAA has put up an interactive map of aerial photos they took Wednesday, Thursday, and yesterday.

The Weather Channel has some doozies. And the Peoria Journal has a round-up of photos as well.

From Krugman, on why the GOP hasn't seemed to get much for its billions in ad spending: [W]hat if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing. Also, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent now but formerly a Republican, has endorsed the President for re-election, largely on the basis of their shared belief in anthropogenic climate change: Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be -- given this week’s devastation -- should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action. We need leadership...

Air New Zealand has a hobbit of making awesome safety videos; here's the latest:

Josh Marshall checks in from the disaster: What I found so surreal about this storm is that in Manhattan at least there really was barely a storm at all. For whatever reason, through the period when there was the worst part of the damage the ‘rain’ never got worse than maybe a slight drizzle. Really no more than that. It got windy. But not all that windy either — though there were definitely gusts that were quite unlike anything normal. So through Monday night everything was pretty normal — just a wet...