Matt Igel

I’ve posted about this broad idea before.  Here in the Central Valley, the transition from summer to winter happens very fast.  And, it happens in October.  What I think is especially cool about October is that the ‘Normal High” for the first of the month is the same as the ‘Record High’ for the last of the month.  The ‘Record High’ drops over 20 degrees from 10/2 to 10/28.  Neat.

Good question.  I don’t know, but an ex-group member does.  Click to find out

Quick congratulations to our graduating seniors in the atmospheric science and applied physics majors in the class of 2025.  Thanks for all your hard work across your ATM classes.  Good luck.

I received an email the other day from the Zeiss Planetarium Bochum.  Staff recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Planetarium with a big party.  The institute’s lead artistic director baked a cake that was meant to look like something called a ‘meat hedgehog’.  It’s usually a German dish made of pork constructed to look like a hedgehog.  Because German’s love their compound words, ‘meat hedgehog’ is ‘mettigel’.  Naturally, this meant that the cake version needed a punny name.  Hence, I received the following picture from the Planetarium.

Congratulations to the Planetarium Bochum on 60 years.

By every account I’ve ever heard, Pete Rose was an absolute scoundrel.  This post isn’t about him exactly, rather it’s about different ways to success.  I previously posted about (the incomparable) Hank Aaron.  Hank was naturally skilled and hardworking, and the result was that he hit the ball very, very far.  That is usually good in baseball; hitting homeruns in a well-trodden path to success.  Hank Aaron had a career WAR of over 140.  In contrast, Pete Rose was not a natural homerun hitter nor a gifted fielder yet ended his playing career with 80 WAR.  So how did a man from the westside of Cincinnati without natural homerun skills accumulate over half of Hank Aaron’s WAR (and 10 more WAR than Derek Jeter, just saying)?  Pete Rose hit singles.  Pete Rose hit doubles.  Pete Rose hit nearly as many triples in his career and homeruns.  It’s how he earned the nickname “Charlie Hustle”.  Pete Rose put the ball in play and ran his ass off.  He figured out what he could do better than anyone else and did it.  Pete Rose’s method of success wasn’t complicated.  In many ways, it was the opposite.  And while off the field, Pete Rose was no role model, on the field, we could probably all learn a little more “hustle”.

I’m currently in the year-long process of promoting from Assistant Adjunct to Associate Adjunct.  Like my tenure-track colleagues, the process of going up for promotion has several steps.  One, is requesting external letters from faculty colleagues across the country that assess the quality of my contributions to the University’s mission.  I merely wanted to thank anyone who wrote me a letter.  It’s heartening to read frank assessments of my contributions and to see interesting anecdotes of my interactions with folks across the years.  So, thanks for taking the time to write on my behalf.

I’ve moved upstairs in Hoagland Hall to room 253.  Come check out my new digs.

I’ve spent the last few months in Sweden.  The local official forecast entity here is the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI).  They provide local forecasts with a dash of uncertainty thrown in.  So, in the picture below, you can see that today’s forecast is “fairly certain” while Friday’s forecast is “uncertain”.  That’s pretty cool, although even to me, it’s not entirely clear what those assessments mean despite looking around SMHI’s website for definitions.

What I think it even more fun, is a product they have rolled out in a beta form.  Below, you can see that they provide different possible forecasts.  So, rather than just providing the most likely forecast (what we might traditionally think of as the best forecast), they provide a range of reasonable forecasts.  It’s probably going to be partly cloudy today, but hey, it could be mostly cloudy, or possibly cloudy.  Regardless, it’ll probably be ~7C.  Tomorrow is more interesting.  It will most likely rain, but the second most likely forecast is sunny.  Without this kind of categorical forecast, we might be tempted to split the difference and provide some kind of intermediate precipitation probability and cloud cover.  But doing so risks misrepresenting the forecast.  Maybe the possible futures are 1) 100% cloud cover and extensive rain or 2) clear skies.  Providing a forecast that weights by the probability of those outcomes might be A) 75% cloud cover and intermittent rain.  But that’s not really a likely future because it’s not 1) or 2) so it’s wrong from the star

Warning: this post has no real point!

We’re almost done with another quarter, and it’s been one I never anticipated.  I’ve been here in Davis since 2016.  In that time, I’ve done a lot of things I never expected to do in this adjunct position.  I’ve given a lot of interesting media interviews.  I’ve gotten to go all sorts of interesting places.  I’ve gotten to work with lots of interesting and clever students.  And, I have taught a lot more than I ever expected.  It’s a fun job.  But, it’s a job that doesn’t come with enough hours in any given week to do everything that needs to be done.  Teaching essentially full time this quarter has been good in some senses because I can compartmentalize.  I hope students have learned something useful and that I haven’t led them too far astray.  If nothing else, I’ve had fun.  If I owe you an email response, it’s coming in June.

Yep, November was reasonably cool in the Sacramento area.  This was felt mostly in the lows.  The median low temperature for the month was 39F while the normal median is 45F.  The median high temperature was 1 degree below the normal median of 65F.   Below are the distributions of November 2022 lows and highs.  Despite the cool weather, we never even came close to setting a record low in Sacramento*, but it is quite possible that the high temperature on the 8th of just 53F was at least within sight of the record-low high-temperature for the day.

*The official low this morning in Davis of 30F would tie the official low in Sacramento for this date.  The low at Travis AFB was 26F!