TV favors the young — but Betty White only got more famous as she got older. White's career began in the earliest days of television, and she was active until her death at the age of 99.
Yep. Just talkin' about this thing and low-pressure sodium lights for a bit. Oh and we plug it into the Kill-a-Watt and take a look at its power specs.
Good morning. This will be my final post of 2021—Matt will have an update for you on New Year’s Eve of course. It has been a strange and challenging year. In terms of weather, locally, there has been good and terrible and anomalous weather. Under the “good” category I would say we’ve gone through another year without a disastrous drought, and we saw some of the nicest weather this fall on weekends that I can remember. The “terrible” category includes the extremely hard freeze and its effects in February, and Hurricane Nicholas in September, which packed a surprisingly strong punch although it could barely be classified as a Category 1 storm. Finally, the heat this December has definitely been “anomalous,” as Houston has set or tied 6 records this month, and Galveston 14, with more to come.
My wish for the new year is better weather, of course. But I’m also hopeful for other reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic is now entering its third year, and it has fractured our communities and killed our loved ones. Now, I believe that we are probably seeing a transition to it becoming an endemic disease, with less virulence, better treatments, and ultimately less transmission due to widespread immunity. Omicron is likely a harbinger of this, and hopefully will be responsible for the last major spike in hospitalizations. So while the next few weeks may be pretty terrible, I strongly believe that a brighter future awaits us. My heroes in 2021 are all of the nurses, doctors, and medical researchers who toiled to help so many, through such a difficult time.
Looking ahead, what I can say for sure, is this: A colder near-term future awaits us. Many of us will see our first freeze of the season by Monday morning, if not sooner.
Thursday
The front made it to much of the area, knocking temperatures into the 60s this morning across the area. Its effects will be short-lived, with southeast winds resuming today and highs likely to reach about 80 degrees under mostly sunny skies. Lows tonight will only drop to around 70 degrees in Houston, with slightly cooler conditions inland.
The final day of 2021 will be very very warm for late December. (Weather Bell)
Friday
The final day of 2021 will be warm once again, with highs in the low 80s and partly to mostly sunny skies. Winds will be a bit gusty, out of the south at about 20 mph. New Year’s Eve evening will be mild, with temperatures in the 70s, and partly to mostly cloudy skies. It will be plenty humid, but aside from that there is nothing to complain about as we bring in 2022.
New Year’s Day
The only real question is when the cold front will arrive. The models have been bouncing around a little bit, and now it appears that an initial front will push down to around Interstate 10 on Saturday afternoon, and be followed by a much stronger surge of colder and drier air on Saturday night. For most of the area, then, Saturday will see highs of around 80 degrees, and for coastal areas those warm conditions should persist through the evening. Some scattered, light showers will be possible during the day and overnight. Temperature wise, it will be a whole new world outside on Sunday morning, with sunrise temperatures likely in the 30s for nearly all of the area.
Sunday and beyond
COLD. It now looks as though highs probably won’t get out of the 40s for most of the area on Sunday, and with gusty northerly winds this will be a cold, sunny day if you need to be outside. Clear skies and lighter winds will lead to a very cold night on Sunday, with most of the Houston region away from the coast likely to see a freeze on Monday morning.
Freezing conditions are likely on Monday morning for much of the area. (Weather Bell)
We’ll gradually warm up next week, probably reaching the 70s on Wednesday, with another cooldown Thursday. Details to come. Happy New Year, everyone!
Through yesterday, the average temperature in Houston (Bush) is 67.5° for the month of December. Adding an expected 83 and, call it 68 today gets us to 67.8° for the month, shattering the record from 1933 by 3.4 degrees. This will also be the widest gap between warmest and second warmest of any month in Houston. Only August comes close, where the difference between the horrific August of 2011 and 2010 was 2.7 degrees. Basically, this December was Houston’s most anomalous warm month on record. There are a number of other stats and nuggets we could share, but we may save that for a separate post. Our spring fling is almost over though, and it’s time to break out the winter clothes.
Today
More of the same. 80s, sun, clouds, some fog this morning. Today’s record high in Houston is 82°, set back in 1974, and that seems likely to be tied or exceeded. The main difference between yesterday and today will probably be that coastal sea fog. Winds may kick up just enough today to dissipate most of it by afternoon. Look for haze and/or mist at times, however.
Saturday morning & early afternoon
Tomorrow will begin like most other days this month: Warm and humid. Look for temperatures at or above 70 degrees to start the day. It will be quite warm through the afternoon with highs pushing back into the 80s again. The 2006 New Year’s Day record of 81° seems destined to be broken.
Saturday late afternoon into Sunday
Our change in seasons will arrive in two pieces. The first will be a cold front on Saturday afternoon. This front will come through and shift winds from onshore to offshore. Onshore winds may actually be a bit stronger ahead of the front, so look for calmer conditions once the front is through. Temperatures may drop off just a few degrees. Additionally, there could be a shower or two but nothing serious.
The second piece will arrive Saturday night. Look for that to hit the northwest suburbs before Midnight and the city and southeast suburbs and coast around Midnight. There won’t be any mistaking this one.
The temperature forecast around or just before midnight will show mid-60s ahead of the front and plummeting temperatures into the 40s behind it, with even some 30s well off to the north and west. (Pivotal Weather)
Temperatures will quickly drop from the 60s into the 40s and winds will kick up out of the north, gusting 25 to 30 mph or even a bit stronger at times. By Sunday morning, temperatures will have fallen into the 30s in most spots, with freezing temperatures north and west of Houston and even some upper-20s possible near Huntsville.
Sunday morning low temperatures will be near freezing or a few degrees below north and west of Houston, with 30s elsewhere. (Pivotal Weather)
For those of you heading off to services or for a walk on Sunday morning, temperatures will be 30 to 40 degrees colder than they were on Saturday morning, and with wind chill values in the 20s, it will feel 50 degrees colder. Bundle up! The day itself should be fine, just windy and cold with highs in the mid-40s.
Monday
Temperatures will drop steadily on Sunday night, and we should see much of the area, save for maybe the city and immediate coast reach the freezing mark by Monday morning.
Morning lows on Monday will be near freezing or slightly below everywhere except probably inside the 610 Loop and along the beach. (Pivotal Weather)
This will be a pretty standard freeze for the Houston area, the type we usually see several times a winter. Sensitive plants should be protected, particularly outside the city. If you have a sprinkler system, it’s probably also a good idea to have it shut off and drained. Typical winter preps. But as far as significant problems, we shouldn’t see any.
The rest of Monday will offer a transition back to onshore winds and temperatures bouncing back into the 50s. A freeze is unlikely Monday night anywhere in our area. This will be a quick shot of cold.
Rest of next week
Warmer weather will really be noticeable by Tuesday with temperatures warming well into the 60s. On Wednesday we warm into the 70s again. By Thursday or Friday, another, potentially much weaker front is likely to push into the area to cool us back a few degrees. Model guidance suggests another significant warm-up into next weekend before perhaps more sustained seasonably cool weather for the second week of 2022.
Final word
I just want to echo Eric’s sentiment from yesterday. It’s been a great year for us, between, among other things, launching an app, launching a Spanish language site and bringing Maria on board, being honored by the city of Houston, and arguing with each other about whether September or August is worse.
But we recognize that it’s been another rough year for a lot of folks. I am grateful for the doctors and nurses and medical research community that makes Houston a true global hub for medical research and care. Essential workers, restaurant employees, and so many others who have toiled through sickness, closures, and just mean people, thank you as well. My hope is that 2022 will offer a return to stability, both in life and weather. I’m more hopeful for the former than the latter, but either way, we’ll be here for you. Thanks for relying on us as a source of weather information to keep you and your family prepared and informed. It’s a duty and responsibility we take seriously, and we look forward to continuing doing so in 2022, which hopefully marks a return to somewhat more precedented times. Happy New Year!
A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. ScienceAlert reports: The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it's a stark warning that even apparently harmless additives have the potential to cause health issues when introduced to our food supply. In this case, trehalose is being linked with the rise of two strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, capable of causing diarrhea, colitis, organ failure, and even death. The swift rise of the antibiotic-resistant bug has become a huge problem for hospitals in recent years, and the timing matches up with the arrival of trehalose.
"In 2000, trehalose was approved as a food additive in the United States for a number of foods from sushi and vegetables to ice cream," said one of the researchers, Robert Britton from the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, back in January 2018. "About three years later the reports of outbreaks with these lineages started to increase. Other factors may also contribute, but we think that trehalose is a key trigger."
The C. difficile lineages Britton is referring to are RT027 and RT078. When the researchers analysed the genomes of these two strains, they found DNA sequences that enabled them to feed off low doses of trehalose sugar very efficiently. In fact, these particular bacteria need about 1,000 times less trehalose to live off than other varieties of C. difficile, thanks to their genetic make-up. [...] It's still not certain that trehalose has contributed to the rise of C. difficile, but the study results and the timing of its approval as an additive are pretty compelling. More research will now be needed to confirm the link. According to figures from the CDC, "C. difficile was responsible for half a million infections across the year and 29,000 deaths within the first 30 days of diagnosis," adds ScienceAlert. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
A health care worker hands out a Covid-19 test kit at a drive-through testing site in Riverside, California, on December 21. | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The variant has changed how we get from “pandemic” to “endemic,” but that doesn’t mean we’re back to square one.
With omicron rates soaring, you may find yourself despairingly asking when — or even if — this pandemic is ever going to end.
The good news is that it will end. Experts agree on that. We’re not going to totally eradicate Covid-19, but we will see it move out of the pandemic phase and into the endemic phase.
Endemicity means the virus will keep circulating in parts of the global population for years, but its prevalence and impactwill come down to relatively manageable levels, so it ends up more like the flu than a world-stopping disease.
For an infectious disease to be classed in the endemic phase, the rate of infections has to more or less stabilize across years, rather than showing big, unexpected spikes as Covid-19 has been doing. “A disease is endemic if the reproductive number is stably at one,” Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray explained. “That means one infected person, on average, infects one other person.”
We’re nowhere near that right now. The highly contagious omicron variant means each infected person is infecting more than one other person, with the result that cases are exploding across the globe. Nobody can look at the following chart and reasonably conclude that we’re in endemic territory.
Our World in Data
Looking at this data might make you wonder about some of the predictions that were floating around before omicron came on the scene. In the fall, some health experts were saying that they thought the delta variant might represent the last big act for this pandemic, and that we could reach endemicity in 2022.
The outlook is more uncertain now. So how should you be thinking about the trajectory and timeline of the pandemic going into the new year? And how should omicron be shaping your everyday decision-making and risk calculus?
When we’ll know we’re finally in “endemic” territory
Here’s one big question you’d probably like the answer to: Does omicron push endemicity farther off into the future? Or could it actually speed up our path to endemicity by infecting so much of the population so swiftly that we more quickly develop a layer of natural immunity?
“That is really the million-dollar question,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. “It’s really hard to say right now.”
That’s partly because endemicity isn’t just about getting the virus’s reproductive number down to one. That’s the bare minimum for earning the endemic classification, but there are other factors that come into play, too: What’s the rate of hospitalizations and deaths? Is the health care system overburdened to the point that there’s a precipitous space or staffing shortage? Are there treatments available to reduce how many people are getting seriously ill?
In general, a virus becomes endemic when we (health experts, governmental bodies, and the public)collectively decide that we’re okay with accepting the level of impact the virus has — that in other words, it no longer constitutes an active crisis.
With omicron surging right now and many governments reimposing stricter precautions as a result, it’s clear we’re still in crisis mode. “But so much depends on the burden it’ll place on the health care system,” Rasmussen said. “And that’s going to be different from community to community.”
Even though omicron so far seems to resultin milder disease than previous variants, a massive increase in cases could still lead to a big increase in hospitalizations and deaths. That could further stress health care systems that are already in dire straits. That’s why Rasmussen concludes that “omicron certainly has the potential to delay endemicity.”
But there are also some hopeful things to bear in mind. “The incredible number of infections is building up population-level immunity. That’ll be crucial in terms of muting future waves,” said Joshua Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In addition to omicron potentially building up some immunity in the vast numbers of people who are becoming infected with it, vaccinations and boosters are also contributing to “a significant immunity wall that’s being built,” he said. But he cautioned that “that’s a wall to the variants we’ve seen already. There could be another variant which could evade immunity down the road.” Some experts are already conjecturing that getting infected with omicron may not give you much cross-protection against other variants, though a small early study showed positive signs on that front.
This is why Ramussen says “the key determinant” of when the pandemic ends is how long it will take to make vaccines accessible around the world (and to combat ongoing vaccine hesitancy). Currently, we’re not vaccinating the globe fast enough to starve the virus of opportunities to mutate into something new and serious. “If only a very small proportion of people are getting access to vaccines, we’re just going to keep playing variant whack-a-mole indefinitely,” Rasmussen said.
In the meantime, we do have another ace up our sleeves, which will hopefully also become available around the globe sooner rather than later: new treatments —like Pfizer’s paxlovid, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and Merck’s molnupiravir, also FDA approved — that reduce the rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19.
“Very important in the context of endemicity is the antiviral pills,” Michaud said. “If we have those tools, we’re looking at a very different state going into 2022. People shouldn’t feel like we’re back to square one.”
We’re not back to March 2020. But it makes sense to modify our behavior during the omicron surge.
Dire headlines notwithstanding, we’re in much better shape than we were at the start of the pandemic. We’ve discovered a lot more information about how Covid-19 works. We’ve manufactured effective masks, vaccines, boosters, treatments, and rapid tests.
We’ve also learned that having to hunker down comes at a real cost to our mental and economic health and wellbeing. The cost of a strict lockdown may have been worthwhile in March 2020, but by and large, that’s not what US experts are advising now.
They are, however, urging us to take more precautions than we might have been in the weeks leading up to omicron.
Take Bob Wachter, for example, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. In the fall, he shifted from being very cautious about Covid-19 to taking some more calculated risks, including dining indoors at restaurants and even hosting an in-person medical conference with 300 attendees. But now that omicron is causing cases to skyrocket, he’s being more cautious again.
“I see the next few months as a time to fortify one’s safety behaviors,” he wrote on Twitter. Here’s how he explained his reasons:
... and most importantly people (many MDs/RNs out sick too). Trust me, you want to avoid getting sick when the system is stressed. Third, I see the Pfizer oral anti-viral as a very big deal, and it won’t be available for 4-6 weeks (even then it'll be in short supply).(10/25)
The other experts I spoke to agreed that now is a time to limit risky activities.
“I had taken my foot off the brakes in terms of my own behavior. But I’ve now started to put it on again,” Michaud told me. “I canceled plans to go to New Jersey to visit my family over Christmas. I’m avoiding more indoor environments. As of now, it does make a lot of sense to me to take additional steps to prevent yourself and those around you from getting infected.”
After the omicron wave passes, he said, he envisions relaxing precautions again. Modeling suggests that omicron could peak in mid- to late January in the US, with case rates steeply declining — and activities becoming correspondingly safer again — in February.
Rasmussen is also modifying her behavior in light of omicron, though she emphasizes that’s not the same as going back to a spring2020-style lockdown. Although she canceled an international flight over the holidays, she still felt comfortable going over to her colleague’s house for a Christmas meal. That’s because she and they had vaccinations, boosters, rapid tests, and great ventilation working in their favor.
“We have a lot more tools at our disposal for dealing with this than we did in March 2020,” she said.
We’ll know endemicity has arrived when those tools — and the long, painful experience of the pandemic itself — has enabled us to fully adapt to the virus, as the virus has adapted to us.
Another day, another handful of records set for both high temperatures and warm overnight conditions. As of 6 am this morning, the temperature at Hobby Airport is 75 degrees, a staggering 30 degrees warmer than normal for late December. A weak front will approach the area and bring some drier air to inland areas tonight, but I don’t think these conditions will reach as far as Highway 59. After this front washes out we’ll see warm weather until a strong front arrives on New Year’s Day.
Wednesday
Today will see partly to mostly sunny skies, with temperatures rising into the low- to mid-80s. Winds will generally be light, out of the southwest. The aforementioned front will sag southeastward this evening, likely reaching College Station a few hours before midnight, and maybe as far as Katy and The Woodlands by around sunrise on Thursday. Otherwise, it will be another warm and muggy night.
This map of dewpoints at sunrise on Thursday offers a good approximation of how far the dry air will reach. (Weather Bell)
Thursday
Inland areas behind the front may stay in the 70s on Thursday, but most of the rest of the region will be back around 80 degrees. Skies should turn partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon after a cloudy start. Thursday night will be, you guessed it, very warm.
New Year’s Eve
The final day of 2021 will see partly sunny skies and very warm temperatures in the low- to mid-80s. The evening will be mild for any festivities, with temperatures in the mid-70s and likely mostly cloudy skies. A very slight chance of light precipitation comes into the forecast after midnight.
New Year’s Day
Change is on the way in 2022. After a muggy morning, it now looks like the front will reach inland parts of Houston by Saturday morning, and likely push down to the coast by around noon or shortly thereafter. This is a little sooner than our previous forecasts. Some light rain is possible with the front, but it may well be a dry passage. Colder air moves in quickly overnight, with temperatures dropping into the 30s by Sunday morning. A freeze is likely for inland areas, although the “freeze line” will remain in flux for some time yet.
Check out the low temperatures for Sunday, January 2. (Weather Bell)
Sunday and beyond
Sunday will be cold, with a northerly wind and highs likely topping out at around 50 degrees. This will feel especially cold after the very warm December weather, and Monday night will again flirt with a freeze. We’ll gradually warm back up to the 70s by the middle of the week, but another front by Thursday or so should cool us down again toward the end of next week. Rain chances remain low throughout the period.
I wrote to you several months ago about resigning after accepting a promotion. I also posted a brief update in the comments.
It got worse before it got better. I used your and commenters’ excellent suggested wording to push back against the ED’s statement that I didn’t deserve to be “rewarded” with the agreed-upon salary given that I was leaving the org in a difficult position. He responded that “[he] and [I] will just have to disagree on whether [my] recent actions amount to a breach of trust” but agreed to pay my salary at the higher rate with vacation pay-out at pre-promotion rate. He suggested I end employment early and begin contracting with them because it’d be easier to run monthly payroll. I’d wanted to time my departure to maintain healthcare coverage for the month; the org is too small to qualify for COBRA. Luckily, when I called the Finance admin they said it was no issue to keep me on payroll for the duration of my notice.
I worked out the rest of my notice period with very little sleep and a lot of emotional stress. But I made it through. And I stopped feeling so guilty and thinking I somehow needed to make amends for resigning after nearly 10 years of dedication and good work. I moved towards the opposite extreme – feeling bitter and resentful – for a short while but that balanced out with time.
I heard nothing from the Board of Directors throughout this entire process, except for one board member who advised that my resignation would damage my reputation. They hired an external consultant to do an exit interview a month after I’d started in the new role. I doubt my responses went anywhere. I did get a kick out of one question though: the consultant pre-empted it with, “I want you to know that I wouldn’t normally ask this in an exit interview; this is from the board,” and the question was, “How can ORG retain energetic, talented employees such as yourself so that they are happy and stay forever?”
Thankfully, the requests/expectations that I’d participate in hiring new staff and work as a contractor were dropped. You and the commenters were spot-on that I wouldn’t be able to do my new role justice if I was still thinking about past projects. Plus the ED wrote, “my assumption is that a fair rate is close to your departing salary paid hourly”, and I just couldn’t face the potential drama of trying to negotiate.
I left a novella of documentation, including recommendations such as hiring/contracting HR staff, standardizing onboarding/offboarding procedures, developing support structures for staff burnout, and implementing policies that promote workplace equity. I fielded a few questions from my former teammates, which I was happy to do, and otherwise made a clean break with only minor hitches.
I am super happy at the new organization and just had a great three-month evaluation in which my manager affirmed that I am meeting/exceeding all expectations and that my skillset is a valued addition to the team. The amount of resources available and encouraged for skill development and career growth are amazing. My former org has since hired two new staff so I guess they’re doing well too.
Thank you and huge thanks to all the commenters – your responses were 100% the reality check I needed. Also, pretty much everyone who participated in my hiring process commented that I had fantastic application materials and interviews, so thank you again for the advice in your book and blog!
Good morning, all. Just a quick post today as the forecast has not changed all that much—we’ve got five warm and muggy days before a significant cooldown arrives on the first day of 2022. Speaking of winter heat, how warm has this December been? By the month’s end it will rank not just as Houston’s warmest December in more than 120 years of records, but also among the top 10 warmest Novembers.
Tuesday
Skies will be partly sunny today, with morning lows around 70 degrees rising into the low 80s this afternoon. Winds will be noticeable, out of the south, gusting up to about 20 mph. Yesterday we mentioned the possibility of some scattered, light showers for today, but now I don’t think those will materialize. Temperatures tonight will, again, be very warm for December.
Another day, and more record heat is on the way. (National Weather Service)
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
More of the same with continued partly sunny skies. The only noticeable change will be the approach of a moderate cold front from the northwest later on Wednesday, but I don’t think that will make much of a dent for areas east of Katy and south of The Woodlands. If you live in such inland areas, enjoy the briefly drier air and slightly cooler morning on Thursday. Otherwise we’re continuing to look at highs in the low 80s. Each day will carry about a 10 or 20 percent chance of very light showers or misty rainfall. If you’re going to be out and about for New Year’s Eve, the weather will cooperate, with warm temperatures in the 70s, and little to no chance of rain.
New Year’s Day
The year of our Lord 2022 will dawn warm and muggy, just as the previous year ended. Skies should be partly sunny, with highs once again in the low 80s. However at some point during the afternoon, evening, or overnight hours a strong front will sweep through. At this point the front is trending drier, so maybe it will bring just a smidgen of rain with it, and maybe not. But there will be plenty of colder and drier air.
Here’s an early look at potential low temperatures on Monday, December 2. (Weather Bell)
Next week
Sunday will be cold and windy, with highs likely topping out in the 50s. Sunday night will be the coldest of the year—sorry, I couldn’t resist that—with temperatures probably dropping into the 30s for most of Houston. A freeze is possible, and perhaps even likely for at least inland areas. Then begins a slow warmup, with temperatures rebounding into the low 70s by mid-week. Another front may arrive at that point. In other words, it may feel decidedly more winter-like for awhile.
This lovely book book is another result of the shake up and break up at AT&T that was in the late 70s and early 80s. It really was a bizarre time in telecommunications. My mother is still mad at the phone company for making her “buy” a phone.
If I were a librarian in the 1980s, I would have definitely picked several of these books. It was confusing for consumers and no doubt library reference desks were being inundated by phone drama. However, I am a bit concerned that these books are still floating around in 2021. Academic/ archive libraries could make a case, but public libraries should have tossed most of these after a few years, since the situation was constantly changing. Also, one look at that font should have been a big clue this book was old. Think of this as a reminder to get into your technology titles and weed.
I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend celebrating Christmas and the other holidays that make this such a special time of year. I’m sorry the weather was not particularly festive.
Overall, the forecast is pretty simple. The last week of 2021 is going to be blazing hot for December—we are going to obliterate this month’s temperature record—and then our weather will turn much more winter-like at the start of next year. Read on for full details.
Monday
Light southerly winds have kept the fog mostly at bay this morning, and these winds will at times gust to 15 or 20 mph this afternoon. This is part of an overall southwesterly flow in the atmosphere that will help to keep conditions very warm this week. Highs on Monday will reach the low 80s for most locations despite partly to mostly cloudy skies. Rain chances are near zero and lows Monday night will only fall to around 70 degrees in Houston.
Low temperatures on Tuesday morning will be 20 to 30 degrees above normal for this time of year. (Weather Bell)
Tuesday
A weak atmospheric disturbance may bring some very light showers to the region on Tuesday, although accumulations should be less than a tenth of an inch. Otherwise, expect partly sunny skies with highs in the low 80s. Winds will again be a bit gusty out of the south.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
These will be three more warm and partly sunny days, with highs likely reaching the low 80s. A weak front will approach the area on Wednesday from the northwest, and this may briefly drop lows on Thursday morning into the mid-60s with some drier air for locations inland of Highway 59/Interstate 69. But this front will likely be gone before you know it.
If you’re planning to be out and about on New Year’s Eve, expect temperatures in the low 70s as the clock counts down to midnight. I’d be concerned about fog, but I think there will be enough wind from the south to preclude that. Rain chances on New Year’s Eve look to be near zero.
Change is coming in the new year. (Weather Bell)
First week of 2022
New Year’s Day should see more of the same warm weather, but sometime during the afternoon, evening, or overnight hours a strong front should arrive. Details remain sketchy, but I think at least a little bit of rain is likely with the front, if not some showers and thunderstorms. We’ll see.
What we can be more confident of is that significantly colder and drier air will follow. We’re looking at daytime temperatures in the 50s and lows in the 30s and 40s for a time. Conditions will be windy and cold. It even seems possible that inland areas may see the season’s first freeze by around the morning of Monday, January 3, but again it’s way too early to put any precision to such temperature forecasts.
In this video I tell the story about how I found some sticklebacks in an old aquarium I forgot about and put them in a new dedicated fish tank. These are nine spine sticklebacks. Enjoy!
Phoronix reports:
The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there.
Longtime Linux developer Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been responsible for numerous x86 laptop/tablet improvements in recent years along with other desktop-related improvements at Red Hat. He has now queued up into the x86 platform drivers tree the x86-android-tablets driver he wrote for dealing with the mess of x86 (mostly Android) tablets that don't behave properly out-of-the-box with Linux.
As part of the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table), many x86 tablets have simply invalid entries and other problems that cause issue when trying to run mainline Linux on said hardware. Hans explains as part of the commit currently in the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch....
"This driver, which loads only on affected models based on DMI matching, adds DMI based instantiating of kernel devices for devices which are missing from the DSDT, fixing e.g. battery monitoring, touchpads and/or accelerometers not working."
This new x86-android-tablets driver will basically be a catch-all solution for overrides based on device matching. Hans ended the patch message with, "This is the least ugly option to get these devices to fully work and to do so without adding any extra code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz) when built as a module."
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Our World in Data
