Recently in Friends Category

I’ve been holding off on posting this for a little while, but now makes as good as sense as any. This is about juggling, something which I’m okay at (I can do 3 at a time in a couple of variations). However, the son of a co-worker is something of a prodigy. He’s still in high school, but he’s already competing on a national and international level. He’s competing this weekend in Las Vegas at an international convention, which follows on his performance this summer where he placed third, second and tied for first in three different disciplines.

I’ve never met his son before, but his father is cool. (He also writes science fiction.) But I’ve seen some of his videos on YouTube, and he is really impressive. Up to 9 balls and 10 rings in the air at a time, plus all sorts of different acrobatic moves and exchanges. So I hope he’s doing well in the competitions. I hope you can at least partially appreciate his talent.

This first video I share is from back in the spring this year, as he tries out different things in outdoors settings. (You can mute the music if you don’t like harder-sounding music, particularly the second video. You don’t need the music to appreciate the display.)

This video is his current video taken in support of his trip to the convention. This shows off some of his skills he’ll probably be competing for in Las Vegas. Good luck.

It’s with a bit of trepidation as I watch Hurricane Ike decide to take aim at Texas and possible even head for Houston. I still have a bit of a soft spot for Houston, where I attend college for 4 years at Rice University. I still have relatives, friends and classmates in the area (and elsewhere in Texas, like Austin and the Hill Country), so I pray that they are able to stay safe during this storm, wherever it decides to make landfall and proceed inland.

This is true for any storm that comes along.

I’m also a bit of a weather nut (just like Will and one of my cousins, who is a meteorologist), so when there is a storm, I particularly like to look at the prediction models for the path and try to see what I can deduce from what those models are saying. (Just the inner geek, I guess.) Two sites that give a lot of information are StormPulse, which has an awesome interactive map and lets you check back on some of the previous storms of the season, and Weather Underground, which has a plethora of maps and history on each storm. I especially enjoy the Computer Model Verification, which shows the daily predicted path for the different models versus the actual path.

Again, I don’t want to make light of the death and destruction that unfortunately comes with these storms. But as we attempt to understand the storms better, hopefully this allows us to better protect ourselves in the future. We’re praying that everyone who has been affected so far in the Caribbean and those who eventually find themselves in the path of Ike (or any other storm) will be safe and sound.