It sure is funkin' hot!

NASA - What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate?

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time.

When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather. Today, children always hear stories from their parents and grandparents about how snow was always piled up to their waists as they trudged off to school. Children today in most areas of the country haven't experienced those kinds of dreadful snow-packed winters, except for the Northeastern U.S. in January 2005. The change in recent winter snows indicate that the climate has changed since their parents were young.

If summers seem hotter lately, then the recent climate may have changed. In various parts of the world, some people have even noticed that springtime comes earlier now than it did 30 years ago. An earlier springtime is indicative of a possible change in the climate.

In addition to long-term climate change, there are shorter term climate variations. This so-called climate variability can be represented by periodic or intermittent changes related to El Niño, La Niña, volcanic eruptions, or other changes in the Earth system.

What Weather Means
Weather is basically the way the atmosphere is behaving, mainly with respect to its effects upon life and human activities. The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure.

In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space. An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, like a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms.

It has not dipped below 70F for over a week! There have been thunderstorms, almost everday. Some gully washers.

How pop culture warps our perception of reality

“Pop culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid-20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.”

The United States of America would have a mainstream culture even without mass media. However, every aspect of life in America is so saturated with mass media that you can’t even walk into a grocery store or dentist’s office without seeing televisions, magazines and advertisements. Since every American has been raised on ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes and images broadcasted through mass media, those ideas and behaviors have become America’s mainstream ideas and behaviors, and since the rest of the world also consumes American mass media, America’s habits are becoming the world’s habits.

This wouldn’t be a problem if most of America’s mass media were enlightened and humanitarian. Unfortunately, intelligence in American media is the exception, not the rule, because media producers don’t sit down and ask themselves what they can do to edify the general public and make the world a better place. They ask what they can do to make more money, and the way you make money is by creating a product that costs a little as you can get away with paying, and then you sell it to as many people as possible for as high a price as you can get away with. In order to sell a product to the most people, your product has to appeal to the most people.

It’s hard to sell something to everyone, because individuals are so different. Plus, we’re all cognitive misers, which means our brains are programmed to use mental shortcuts to help us navigate our way through life without thinking. Sometimes this is efficient and useful to the individual, but sometimes it causes one to think irrationally, which can be bad for marketers, whose job it is to convince people to buy a product, because it’s hard to reason with irrational people. This can also be good for marketers, because irrational people are easy to manipulate… especially if the manipulator understands psychology, and thousands of trained therapists, who should be making the world a better place, are making a comfortable living advising businesses on how to better manipulate their customers.

Turn off the television! You kids go outside and play!

Human Herding: How People are Like Guppies
Following the herd may seem prudent to individuals, but it's risky for society.

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel on ethics at a ‘Future of Finance’ conference at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. An audience member asked our panel to comment on herding behaviour in banks, and since then I’ve been giving this issue some more thought. To what extent can human herding be explained in terms of the same goals that motivate herding in other social species?

In human societies, herding often involves people using the actions of others as a guide to sensible behavior, instead of independently seeking out high-quality information about the likely outcomes of these actions. Herding can be particularly destructive in market contexts, because blind faith in market trends by a swarm of individuals can lead to huge bubbles and devastating crashes. But if herding can lead to outcomes that are so damaging and maladaptive at the level of the society, then why did it evolve in the first place? Because herding evolved to benefit individuals, not groups or societies.

We’re used to thinking of social groups as fundamentally cooperative entities, but with some kinds of groups, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the best-known biological theory of herding, William Hamilton’s “selfish herd” idea [1], proposes that herds are the result of individuals trying to ensure that other members of their species, rather than themselves, will get eaten by predators. According to this theory, in many social aggregations, the risk of predation is higher at the periphery than at the center. A herd’s form and movement can be the result of individuals competing to stay close to this center, so that other individuals end up between themselves and the predators. Selfish herds have been proposed to occur in many different species, from wasps to guppies to sheep.

Another likely reason why evolution has favored herding is related to information access. By aggregating in groups, individuals can more easily benefit from knowledge that other group members have gained about, for example, the location of key resources. Herding can thus improve individual foraging success, and this appears to be a primary reason why fish such as (once again) guppies form shoals [5]. From this perspective, as with that of selfish herd theory, herding is the by-product of individuals pursuing their own self-interest.

Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online

"the spread of false or misleading information is having real and negative effects on the public consumption of news."

Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas.

Far-right groups develop techniques of “attention hacking” to increase the visibility of their ideas through the strategic use of social media, memes, and bots—as well as by targeting journalists, bloggers, and influencers to help spread content.

The media’s dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable to such media manipulation.

While trolls, white nationalists, Men's Rights Activists, gamergaters, the "alt-right," and conspiracy theorists may diverge deeply in their beliefs, they share tactics and converge on common issues.

The far-right exploits young men’s rebellion and dislike of “political correctness” to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture.

Media manipulation may contribute to decreased trust of mainstream media, increased misinformation, and further radicalization.

full report

That's about it for me. I took my motorcycle to the shop and they gave me a shop loaner.

See what I mean? Gotta move.

Have a great funkin' weekend!