Fastest Wind on Earth: 253 MPH

American has held this record for 60+ years. Now Australia wrested it gustily from us.

World record wind speed measured

I’m not sure what took them 14 years, but a new world-record wind speed of 253 mph was confirmed this week by scientists at the World Meteorological Organization.

The record wind gust was measured on April 10, 1996, on Barrow Island, Australia, during Tropical Cyclone Olivia. This is the highest official wind speed ever recorded on land on Earth, and breaks the previous world record of 231 mph, which was set in April 1931 atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

Tropical cyclones are the same type of storms as hurricanes and typhoons. Olivia was the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane as it roared along the northwest coast of Australia. The storm injured 10 people in the mining town of Pannawonica.

According to the WMO, “the panel came to its conclusion after an extensive review and evaluation of instrumental, phenomenological and statistical data.” The Mt. Washington wind speed of 231 mph remains the highest on record in the Northern and Western Hemispheres.

A wind gust of 318 mph was measured by Doppler radar during a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, in 1999. However, Doppler records are not considered official.

By Doyle Rice

For a visual from Accu-Weather of what that wind looked like:

Credit: AccuWeather.com

Notice how when the 253 mph wind gust occurred, it was significantly higher than the sustained winds at the time. In fact the gust factors increased from an average of 1.33 to 2.27-2.75 at the time of the peak wind gust. Click here for more detail.

Congrats to the Aussies!

Curiosity Has No Bounds. Read This

Scientists have improved on the old caesium clock, the standard for accurate time. It kept time to within 1 second

NIST quantum logic clock (Credit: Greg Kuebler/JILA)

every 100 million years. This glaring inaccuracy inspired the need to improve. The new quantum logic clock will keep track of time to within 1 second every 3.5 billion years.

Here’s the thing. Most species only last about 2 million years. Man will be long gone before we can appreciate the importance of that lost second. So why did these brilliant minds spend their time tweaking the caesium clock? For the same reason people climb Mt. Everest: It was there.

On the other hand, if this was the by-product of proving/disproving Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity–that time slows–huzzah to Chou and his brilliant mind. I have always been curious about that concept.

Here’s the story:

Sunday Stats: College Grads are Unemployed

Breaking into the job market is proving to be an especially difficult task in the current economic climate, and we have the data to prove it:

Unemployment by far highest with the youngest workers

Looks daunting, but I’m willing to bet that college grads stand a better chance of finding one of the few available jobs than high school grads. If they don’t, they’ll just have to go to grad school for a few years, until the economy recovers.

The Science of Freedom

For over a decade the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have tracked the economic freedom of nations around the world. In their words,

Future Leaders Dismiss Columbus Day–My Response: Get a Life

A colleague at Brown University sent this story to me. It relays how colleges and universities seem to be losing site of their goal: to educate future American citizens. Why is renaming Columbus Day as Fall Weekend a critical educational move?  They claim that Columbus was tied to the enslavement and abuse of native inhabitants of the West Indies. Since when is it an acceptable standard in American academia to ignore history instead of use its errors to educate?

Sunday Stats: Lets Talk Video Games

Source: Online Education

Sunday Stats: Hong Kong is the Freest Nation in the World

According to the Heritage/Wall Street Journal-sponsored report, Hong Kong continues its sixteen-year reign as the freest economy in the world.

For details visit the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. You’ll be surprised where America shows up, one year into Barrack Obama’s Presidential term.

What Causes CO2 to Rise

If not man, what is causing CO2 to rise, raining disaster and doom on our modern world? It’s convenient to blame the Western World. Muslims hate us for our self-indulgent, wasteful attitudes. We hate ourselves for that.

But the goal here is to solve a problem, not lay blame, so it’s important to discover the true cause and then determine the fix. Since less than 2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by man and industry, here are other causes of the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere:

• Earth’s rising temperature causes CO2 levels to rise in the air
• CO2 occurs naturally, primarily from volcanoes and plant respiration
• Insects produce more CO2 than industry could ever dream of.
• The sun. Like all naturally occurring fires, our Sun burns hotter at times. Solar scientists (and common sense) indicate that affects global temperatures. The Russian Space Agency has been monitoring the temperatures on other planets for the past 25 years. Every one of those monitored has experienced a temperature increase and decrease concurrent to the Earth.
• human activity from methane (from crops and livestock)

So what do we know about Mother Earth and her temperature:

• As CO2 levels rise, plants will grow larger, absorb more CO2, driving levels back down again
• the earth is constantly going though periods of warming and cooling. Currently, we are in an Ice Age–albeit a warming period before it gets colder. CO2 might be keeping us away from the freezing temps historically experienced
• 1400-1890 CE is known as the Little Ice Age. During this time the average global temperature dropped drastically. Since then, it’s increased. Is that really ‘global warming’?

Scientists are rabid on both sides of this debate.

For more on this topic read:

• Global Warming: Nature vs. Nurture
• Global Wa– er, Coo– er, Which is it?
• Is Belief in Global Warming Cooling?
• Anyone Who Still Believes in Global Warming, State Your Case
• Climategate: The 21st Century Piltdown Hoax
• Science Takes Another Hit

Since When Was Competition a Bad Thing in America?

I was surprised to read this article, Is America competing?

America still produces some of the most well respected science, but with the growth seen in Asia, that may not be the case for much longer, according to new data released from the National Science Foundation (NSF) today (15 January).

What’s wrong–in the NSF’s opinion–with foreign scientists? Worse, why the fear-mongering conclusion that America can no longer compete? If it was meant to get me to read the article, I didn’t go too far. Opinions and science are a bit oxymoronic. Scientists report non-emotionally, based on facts and observations.

Sunday Stats: Who’s Qualified to Serve in Congress–A Surprising Answer

45% Say Random Group From Phone Book Better Than Current Congress, according to the latest Rasmussen poll.

Do you agree?

Science Takes Another Hit

Not only did scientists take a big hit from the buffoonery of global warming, but here’s one that missed the mainstream media: Merck published a fake journal through Elsevier, a well-respected scientific publisher, as peer-reviewed and unbiased:

Sunday Stats: America is ‘Fair and Descent’

…according to a Rasmussen Poll and in the opinion of Americans:

Grad Students–You’ll Love This

Click to enlarge

If you’re in the PhD trenches and haven’t read this, you’re missing out. Cham (the creator) captures so many of the scenarios that fill grad school days. Check it out.

Sunday Stats:Who’s the Better Judge of Economic Issues?

…Obama with his Harvard degree or the average American? This might surprise you (from a Rasmussen Poll).

Sunday Statistics: Religious Freedom

Americans take religious freedom for granted. This is not true with the rest of the world. Only Japan and Brazil have less social hostilities and less government restrictions inspired by religion. Read on:

What’s the Top 2009 Science Breakthrough? Ardi

It’s a 4.4 million year old fossilized female skeleton that may be our earliest ancestor. She walks upright but is almost completely covered with fur–overall, a pleasing mixture of “primitive” traits shared with its predecessors, and “derived” features, shared with later hominids. At over a million years older than Lucy, the Australopithecine that made history in the 1970’s, she’s 4 feet tall, 110 pounds, an Ethiopian forest-dweller–not the savanna we have become acclimated to imagining as our ancenstor’s homelands.

Sunday Stats: Offshore Drilling

68% of Americans think we should drill off our own shores for oil.

America needs oil. We have not yet evolved to a post-oil society, no matter that our spirit wills it. Since we outlaw offshore drilling, we rely on others without environmentally-sensitive laws (thank you Middle East and Venezuela).

Here’s Proof Science and Music Don’t Mix

A cell phone concert. Using Apple iPhones as instruments, Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble plays an electronic “music” piece at Seamus Regional Concert, November 14, 2009, at McIntosh Theatre, University of Michigan.

Climategate: The 21st Century Piltdown Hoax

Piltdown Man was discovered in Britain in 1912. Prior to his discovery, paleoanthropologists frantically searched for the missing link between Man and Ape. Scientists fought vociferously over whether man’s big brain preceded his upright stance or followed it. The greatest minds in paleoanthropology held out that the enlarged brain resulted in our expanded ability to solve problems.

When Piltdown Man came to light with his large braincase, simian jaw, and near human dentition, he fit the theoretical picture. Fifty years later, he was revealed as the greatest hoax in the history of science.

Science Statistics Sunday

A new University of California, San Diego (UCSD) study found that the average U.S. citizen consumes 34 gigabytes of information per day outside of the workplace, and overall U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 trillion gigabytes of information in 2008.