Invest in Atlantic, Columbus Day, Election (Notes for 14 October 2024)

For a region battered by two major storms in just a few weeks, an invest area with a blob of doom that looks like this is unwelcome:

Throw in a context free “spaghetti map” like this:

and you’ve got lots of angst and, as we have seen a lot of this year, hype. But is this invest area something to get worked up over? Not at this point. NHC does not have any magic words even suggesting monitoring it in their Tropical Weather Outlook, and while the low trackers paint lines on a map, they don’t tell you anything about intensity. In this case, the models aren’t very consistent, and most recent runs show it curving out to sea offshore from the US. But probably worth checking on Wednesday to see if anything has changed.

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It’s Columbus Day (the legal holiday) today and unfortunately due to Milton I wasn’t able to properly note Leif Ericsson Day the 9th. In my ongoing efforts to drive people away from the blog so I can move on to other projects, here are my thoughts on the European explorers (link), and why rather than denigrating them we should strive for a balanced view of history – we can acknowledge their achievements while also noting the harm they did, the times in which they lived, the indigenous peoples and their cultures (good and bad), and how the interactions of the two helped create our modern world. And if that’s not enough, as early voting gets underway here’s a link to an article on the election and why you guys really need to take it down a notch and realize our system is broken, an getting angry at the wrong people isn’t going to fix it.

History – and our situation today – are not comic books with clear cut heroes and villains. Don’t treat them that way.