Letters to the Editor
catling
Published Letters: 37 Editor's Choice: 8
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Not much interest in indy films in Pensacola either
[Read the article: Black and white in color]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And I can't say I'm surprised at how Mardi Gras in Mobile sorts itself out. We end up in the Mobile area maybe once a year for various reasons, and my impression of it has been that it's very much a voluntarily segregated place, and the contact between blacks and whites in the city is actually decreasing in recent years due to continuing middle class white flight into Baldwin County on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.
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No blanket age restrictions please
[Read the article: "She was just in diapers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Best to keep letting each sport set its own limits. Wear & tear and developmental appropriateness are so very different from sport to sport. Think of the different skill sets and effect on the body workout have when you compare sports like shooting, archery, swimming, and gymnastics.
While swimming practices can be mentally and physically draining, they're also far lower impact and less stressful on the body than what the gymnasts do. Two of the youngest athletes on the American team will be swimmers Elizabeth Beisel and Chloe Sutton. Beisel is 15 and a medal threat. She made her first international team at 13, still goes to a regular high school, and also finds time to play in a highly regarded youth orchestra. (She's skipping a band trip to the UK to compete in Beijing) Sutton, now 16, won her first international open water medal in the 10K swim at the age of 14 and is good enough to swim with the lead pack of men at some major races that can be twice her age.
I'd hate to see those kinds of happy, healthy and well-adjusted athletes not be allowed to compete because of abuses in other sports.
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Hurricane recovery is hard
[Read the article: Why I love the city that brutalized me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And even in a best case scenario, it still wouldn't seem like much was happening in some parts of New Orleans. I live down the way along I-10, not too far from where the folks from Lakeview and Metairie spend their vacations.
If you know where to look, you can still find the bones of homes here destroyed by Hurricane Opal in 1995. And even if you aren't paying attention, it's easy to find the abandoned strip malls and modest homes that were torn apart by Ivan (2004) and Dennis(2005), some of them with tattered bits of blue tarps still stapled to damaged roofs, in between Ft. Walton Beach and the Alabama state line.
The report in early 2005 was that it would take ten years for the Pensacola area to be considered to be fully recovered from the damage Ivan caused. And we're talking a smaller area where the damage was very severe, but not a Katrina level of catastrophic and that the state and local government were surprisingly good in assisting in the recovery process.
The best case timeline for New Orleans recovery would probably be described as a 25 year process. Even if New Orleans was a well-run city, and everything went right and quickly, it's going to be a long grind, slug, whatever you want to call it.
Yes, there are things that are causing hurricane recovery to happen more slowly than they might otherwise happen, but at the end of the day, it's a hard and long process that happens on its own timeline, not the timeline you think it should be following.
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Warm water is only part of the equation when it comes to hurricane wind speed
[Read the article: Gustav, global warming and Sarah Palin]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In order for a storm to develop into a hurricane, you normally need a very specific set of circumstances- warm ocean waters and the air above the water needs to be warm, moist, and still.
The dryer and more disrupted the air is around the storm, the harder it is for the storm to pull more energy into itself in order to grow. Think of being on the outside part of a merry go round, and trying to grab a ring from the ride operator's hand- it's far easier and takes less effort on your part to successfully grab the ring and pull it onto the ride if the ring is held still than if the person holding it waves it all to and fro and make you lunge for it in order to get it. Same goes for hurricanes- if they waste too much energy trying to grab the calm moist air, then they can't increase wind speeds in the spin, and if the wind shear, as this disrupted air is called, is high enough, it can destroy a storm altogether.
Hurricanes also need moisture to keep spinning- if they enter areas where there is a lot of dry air, same thing happens there.
Gustav passed over some extremely warm parts of the loop current in the Gulf of Mexico, but never got as strong as it could have based on water temperature alone because the wind shear was stronger and the air was drier than it could have been. (For an even better example of just how badly wind shear can destroy a storm over warm waters, see Tropical Storm Chris in 2006)
And the modeling on global warming currently seems to say that wind shear will increase as global warming does, something that could keep monster storms in check to a degree.
How this sorts itself out in terms of increases, decreases, or normal patterns of hurricane/tropical cyclone activity because of global warming remains to be seen. Even when you use the best supercomputers on the planet, we're still just starting to understand the amazingly complex world of weather, climate, and what's happening as man changes it long term.
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Kerry has done some serious rides
[Read the article: John Kerry: The road bike warrior]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In 2007, he was part of a bike tour that did some of the most famous climbs the Tour de France has to offer, including Alp d'Huez and Mount Ventoux. You've got to be a far more hardcore cyclist than Shrub would ever think of being if you're going to try Alp d'Huez.
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Stuff like this
[Read the article: McCain: I've gone to Palin for foreign policy advice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is why McCain's starting to tank in Florida. You just don't do well in a state with a huge elderly population what your ramblings start to make people think of the Alzheimer's patient that lives down the street.