windstorm

The powerlines thread through the trees, and the trees fall on them during a windstorm.

I live in Newcastle, it's very consistent with the first windstorm of the year. I just assume we'll lose power but you know it's coming.

You've got to draw a line between "act of god" and an "act of man" for being stupid enough to let an earthquake, windstorm or snowstorm knock your power out.

And they still sucked, especially in a windstorm. Bicycles that would be insanely futuristic when I was a kid, with disc brakes, aluminum frames, and more gears than I need, cost the same as my hunk-of-steel Schwinn.

When a major windstorm blew through Cincinnati and 1,000,000 people lost power, I was able to use Twinkle to get updates on where there was and where there was not power in real time. I knew there was power 2 miles away, I knew there was power in certain areas, I knew where to go for a Starbucks.

The idea of a house that just safely collapses in a windstorm or floats away in a flood is, I suspect, outside of most building codes' conception of a safe building. The code focuses on the idea of a strong, permanent structure that will resist nature's forces.

There's enough seed bank stored up from previous years that if a scouring windstorm breaks all of the stalks in an area, then the seed bank can help recover next year, and if that's not enough then some seeds will blow in from the edges eventually, and ten years from now you can't tell. Perennial plants have to be sturdier.

Google technology looks like we're on a different Galapagos island from the rest of tech, and the landbridge sunk into the sea in 2003, and once in a while a bird in a windstorm carries a seed across. Usually Google tech is superior to comparable outside tech, sometimes it's inferior.

If there was evidence that there was a windstorm in the area at the time and/or that a big piece of sheet metal fell in some field, that would probably be enough to make it less-weird. Edit: comments in the thread suggest it might be camera distortion, which seems more reasonable to me, but doesn't account for it appearing to go behind clouds.

Even when there was a horrible windstorm that blew trees all over the tracks and stopped the ICE from coming down to Ingolstadt, I was able to hop onto regional alternates to where the ICE was, and get back to Berlin without too much insanity. The trains are pleasant and clean, and the stations are massive and have lots of nice convenience stores.

Well, there was a windstorm, so Sunday evening I check it, and there is a sequence of 24 messages from the UPS "power lost, shutting down server X#", with a gap of a few hours, then 23 messages from UPS "power reappeared, booting up server X#". As I said, I didn't really get this whole on-call thing so I ignored it until Monday when I manually booted server X24.

It's not only the potential loss of revenue they might incur if sales taxes were no longer part of the price comparison between local and internet sales, it's the huge, possibly inestimable, cost of complying with the wacky tax codes rates set by random politicians in every dinky municipality, county and state, which change faster than leaves fall in an Autumn windstorm. If Illinois wants to squeeze more tax revenue out of its citizens, let it join with other states and demand a single, uniform, federal sales tax.