Graham Knopp's Blog

Topics in land use, culture, and nature.

  • The proof is in the pudding.

    Recent events and commentary. There’s been a lot of chatter about 5-sigma weather events. 5 sigma means five standard deviations from the mean and implies that you’re assuming the distribution is random. It means about 3 in ten million in a normal (random) distribution. If you see many 5-sigma events, it implies that your statistics…

  • Galactic Ecology

    When I was in the field of astronomy, I studied both comets and some of the most distant objects in the universe, high redshift radio galaxies or HZRGs. The two object types are at opposite ends of the distance scale, but can be said to be connected in this weird way. A term that was…

  • What’s Up With the North Atlantic Cold Blob?

    And also, art history. Richard Feynman said that unless you can explain something simply, you don’t really understand it. That’s the idea here, if you approach understanding things from fundamental principles and physical laws, you can develop an intuitive understanding of complex natural processes. With that in mind let’s consider the topic of the north…

  • Let’s talk about the weather.

    Being from Wisconsin, I just have to. Right now we’ve got a lot going on. And it may be part of a pattern. In the east Pacific, Tropical Storm Elida is spinning away obliquely towards northern California. It’s not supposed to have much strength if it does encounter the California coast, even now it has…