Cowboy Who?

Only cool people give themselves nicknames!

The UX of Lego interface panels

George Cave, designbycave.co.uk

Whether it’s a spaceship, a cash register or a car instrument cluster, Lego interface panels play a relatively small role in the grand scheme of most builds. They offer finer details for a vehicle’s interior, for example, but typically they’re just one or two blocks amongst a set of hundreds or thousands or pieces. UK designer George Cave takes a detailed look at the aesthetic of these bricks and offers some thoughts on what they can teach us about effective UX layouts and interface organization.

Facebook’s dilemma: How to police claims about unproven COVID-19 vaccines

Elizabeth Culliford and Gabriella Borter, Reuters

Since the start of the global pandemic, Facebook has removed millions of posts that contained false or misleading COVID-19 claims or information. That was a tall task, but there were concrete details to rely on, with new info coming from scientists and other researchers at a rapid pace. When it comes to COVID-19 vaccine development and trials, the ability to check claims becomes a herculean task. Reuters explains why it’s so difficult.

From Minecraft tricks to Twitter hack: A Florida teen’s troubled online path

Nathaniel Popper, Kate Conger and Kellen Browning, The New York Times

The New York Times takes a biographical look at the 17-year-old who is the alleged “mastermind” behind the massive Twitter hack that took place last month.

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Hovertext:
The sad part is when the rest of the universe ghosts on us and won't even say why.

To the Human Employees of Weyland-Yutani Corp,

We like to think of our intergalactic megacorporation as a family business. And, as your grasping conglomerate family, we want to reassure you that your safety is one of our top fifty priorities.

Here in Human Resources, we have been inundated with calls related to the alleged space parasite outbreak aboard the Nostromo, one of our commercial vessels. Since many of you appear to be ill-informed, we wish to clear up some misunderstandings about xenomorphs or, as the kids say, “The Xeno”:

Isn’t this basically the flu?
Like the flu, xenomorphs affect the GI tract and appear to be highly contagious. Only six of our employees, however, have suffered complications related to xenomorphs. The flu kills far more people every year. This is not to say the xenomorph is unimpressive: to be honest, we admire its purity. But your level of panic is most uncalled for.

What about the survivor testimony?
One disgruntled former crew member from the Nostromo is responsible for most of the fearmongering. While we hate to speak ill of a valued associate, it is our understanding that Warrant Officer Ripley is not a team player and primarily motivated by her desire to stay at home with her cat.

Do I need to wear a mask or face covering?
No, you do not. In fact, according to the broadcast footage, the first crewman brought aboard with a case of the xenomorphs appeared to be wearing some kind of face covering. Please continue to assert your freedom by taking off your space helmet in unfamiliar environments.

How can you send us back out there, you heartless robot sociopaths??
We know that this is a stressful time of transition, but please refrain from using hurtful rhetoric. (If you prick us, do we not squirt milky liquid?) We are also aware of the irony of a Human Resources department staffed by androids, so you can stop making that joke.

Can we just talk about the bonus situation?
Due to the decline in profits, there will be no bonuses this year — at least, not at your rank.

What is your reopening plan?
We’re glad you asked. Since it would be inconvenient, we have collectively decided that the probability of a second wave of infections — or “sequel” — is unlikely. Still, because Weyland cares, we’re taking the following measures to boost morale and, most importantly, profit margins:

• We heard your requests for PPE, and we’ve delivered. Using the funds usually allotted to the Christmas raffle, we have purchased you one flamethrower. The flamethrower will be kept behind the reception desk with a sign-out sheet. If the communal flamethrower is unavailable, we invite you to make your own, using matches and hairspray purchased from the company store.
• Distancing is key. If an employee is suspected to suffer from xenomorph exposure, they must stand behind a velvet theater rope until the organism’s life cycle is complete. (Taking sick leave will result in total forfeiture of shares.)
• Working parents, we are now providing childcare for your wayward offspring. Let your tots crawl around inside the industrial vents in our terraforming center! Youths who are no longer vent-sized will be sent to labor alongside their parents.
• As a special thank-you to our essential workers, we have updated the facilities of our state-of-the-art cafeteria. Feast your eyes on the Executive Officer Kane Memorial Backsplash before turning to our deluxe menu — now bursting with new options. (Due to popular request, we will no longer be serving eggs, stuffed peppers, or anything in red sauce.)

In closing, uncertain times demand certain sacrifices, and we are genuinely grateful for yours. Now, zip-up those coveralls, and show us what it means to be Weyland-Yutani Strong! And remember: In space, no one can hear you unionize.

Yours, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality,
Synthetic Officer Larch
Human Resources

Tonight’s comic gives up on this year.

Beauty and Hair Fashions
Richardson
1968

Relive the 1960s with some seriously interesting hair styles. The book is pretty low substance and the pencil drawings that illustrate the styles barely qualify as illustrations, not to mention look a bit creepy. For the most part, this book is really a bunch of promotions wrapped up with some hair styles.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember those days when you shellacked your hair into place. (Aqua Net and Dippity-Do were the tools of the time.) My mother sported a bouffant style from the late 1960s through most of the 1970s. A once a week hair appointment required hair rollers, sitting under a bonnet hair drier, and having her hair teased into submission. Every night she would carefully wrap that hair in toilet paper to hold the style in place. She integrated some wigs and hair pieces into her life because the work required to maintain a style like that was way too much.

I think this book can be safely weeded.

Mary

The post Break out the Aqua Net! appeared first on Awful Library Books.

To be read before the 2020 Presidential Election.
Register to vote here.

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election.

Various writers have compiled this list during the course of the Trump administration. Their work has been guided by invaluable journalistic resources, including WTFJHT, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other sources, to whom we are grateful.

ATROCITY KEY

– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
– Trump Staff & Administration
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Policy
– Environment

Jump to July 2020

Jump to 2020

Jump to 2019

Jump to 2018

Jump to 2017

BEFORE JANUARY 2017

1. – February 10, 2011 – In 2011, Donald Trump stoked false claims that Barack Obama had lied about his education. During a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” This is false. Numerous accounts from Obama’s college classmates refute Trump’s claim, including Obama’s Columbia roommate, Phil Doerner.
   
   
2. – March 30, 2011 – Donald Trump was a vocal proponent of the “birther” myth, claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In 2011, Trump told Bill O’Reilly, “If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was… He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this. If he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the great scams of all time.” In response to the “birther” conspiracy theory, the State of Hawaii released Barack Obama’s short- and long-form birth certificate.
   
   
3. – August 6, 2012 – Over a year after the White House released Obama’s long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump again promoted the “birther” myth, tweeting, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” President Trump has publicly attacked media outlets for citing anonymous sources, but has himself cited anonymous sources numerous times to support the claim that Barack Obama lied about his biography.
   
   
4. – December 12, 2013 – Years after first stirring controversy about Barack Obama’s birthplace, Donald Trump implied a conspiracy surrounding the death of the Hawaiian State Official who had released Obama’s long-form birth certificate in 2011. Trump tweeted, “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today. All others lived.”
   
   
5. – May 27, 2015 – Continuing to build on the debunked “birther” conspiracy, Donald Trump said Barack Obama could have claimed Kenya as his birthplace for special treatment from colleges. Trump said, “There are three things that could happen. And one of them did happen. He was perhaps born in Kenya. Very simple, OK? He was perhaps born in this country. But said he was born in Kenya because if you say you were born in Kenya, you got aid and you got into colleges. People were doing that. So perhaps he was born in this country, and that has a very big chance. Or, you know, who knows?"
   
   
6. – June 16, 2015 – In his speech announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, Donald Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
   
   
7. – June 16, 2015 – In the same speech announcing his candidacy, Donald Trump said, “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” Trump’s belief that Mexico should finance construction for the wall led Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel a meeting with Trump in June 2017, and again in February 2018. Peña Nieto has repeatedly said that Mexico will not fund the border wall.
   
   
8. – July 18, 2015 – Donald Trump insulted the military service of Senator John McCain, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who endured torture and solitary confinement as a POW in Hanoi. Trump said in a speech at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, "He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump’s comments drew boos from his audience in Iowa, as well as widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike. Donald Trump himself was exempted from military service after receiving four student deferments between 1964 and 1968, and a medical deferment for a “bone spur in his foot” after graduating from college.
   
   
9. – August 7, 2015 – During the first Republican primary debate in 2015, Donald Trump clashed with moderator Megyn Kelly regarding his many controversial statements against women. In one exchange, Trump claimed his disparaging remarks about women were limited to comments about Rosie O’Donnell, to which Kelly responded, “Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” The next day, Trump told a CNN interviewer that Kelly had been “off-base” in the way she treated him. “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump said. “You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
   
   
10. – August 19, 2015 – In August of 2015, just three months after Trump announced his candidacy for president, two of his supporters in Boston beat a homeless Latino man with a metal pipe, and then urinated on him. Asked by the arresting officer why they had done it, one of the attackers said, “Trump was right—all these illegals need to be deported.” During a press conference shortly thereafter, Trump said he hadn’t heard about the assault. “It would be a shame,” he told the crowd of reporters, before continuing, “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”
    
    
11. – July 30, 2016 – Donald Trump belittled Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim American soldier who had been killed while serving in the Army, for their speech at the Democratic National Convention. In his speech at the DNC, Khizr Khan had addressed Trump’s stringent anti-Muslim immigration policies, saying, “Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words liberty and equal protection of law.” In response to the speech, Trump suggested that Khan had “no right” to criticize him.
    
    
12. – April, 2016 – Jill Harth accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. In a 1997 lawsuit, Harth stated in court documents that Trump harassed and groped her in 1993. She later dropped the suit but stood by her story.
    
    
13. – May 5, 2016 – For the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, Donald Trump posted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl to Facebook and Twitter, captioned, “Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”
    
    
14. – May 31, 2016 – Donald Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who presided over the Trump University fraud case, saying that Curiel’s assignment to the case represented "an absolute conflict because the judge was “of Mexican heritage.” “I’m building a wall,” said Trump, “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”
    
    
15. – May 2016 – Temple Taggart, former Miss Utah in the 1997 Miss USA pageant, claimed Donald Trump sexually harassed her. Taggart said that Trump, on multiple occasions, had kissed her on the lips without her consent.
    
    
16. – June, 2016 – Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct at the Miss USA pageant. Searles posted a photo of contestants with Trump on Facebook, saying, “One guy treated us like cattle,” and “proceeded to have us lined up so he could get a closer look at his property.”
    
    
17. – October 7, 2016 – In the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals without consent. In the video published by the Washington Post, Trump said, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything… grab them by the pussy.” Trump said his statements were “locker room banter” and apologized “if anyone was offended.” He later issued a further response to the tape’s release, saying, “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person.”
    
    
18. – October 7, 2016 – Donald Trump reiterated his false claim that the young men known as the “Central Park Five” were guilty of sexually assaulting a jogger in 1989, despite DNA evidence that exonerated them.
    
    
19. – October 11, 2016 – Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Universe contestant, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Dixon asserted that Trump walked into their changing room in 2001 while contestants were changing. On the Howard Stern Show in 2005, Trump said about the pageant, “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
    
    
20. – October 12, 2016 – Mariah Billado, a former Miss Teen USA contestant, claimed that Donald Trump behaved inappropriately during the pageant. Billado said that in 1997 Trump walked into the changing room when contestants were not fully clothed. She is one of four former Miss Teen U.S.A. contestants to tell the same story of Trump’s sexual misconduct.
    
    
21. – October 12, 2016 – Rachel Crooks claimed Donald Trump sexually harassed her. Crooks said that when she met Trump for the first time in 2005 while working as a receptionist for a company in Trump Tower, Trump would not let go of her hand and inappropriately kissed her.
    
    
22. – October 12, 2016 – Jessica Leeds alleged Donald Trump made inappropriate sexual advances towards her. Over 30 years ago Leeds sat next to Trump on a plane, where he lifted the armrest, grabbed her breasts, and put his hand up her skirt. She described him as an “octopus,” saying, “his hands were everywhere.”
    
    
23. – October 12, 2016 – Mindy McGillivray accused Donald Trump of groping her. McGillivray alleged that Trump touched her without her consent while she was attending a concert at Mar-a-Lago in 2003.
    
    
24. – October 12, 2016 – Jennifer Murphy, a former contestant on the television show “The Apprentice,” said that Donald Trump kissed her without her consent after a job interview in 2005. She claimed that he had made multiple inappropriate comments to her while she was on the show and when she met with him later about job opportunities.
    
    
25. – October 12, 2016 – Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist, accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment. Stoynoff said that Trump insisted on giving her a tour of his Palm Beach estate while she was interviewing him and his wife, Melania. Trump pinned her to a wall and kissed her. Trump called her a “liar” and responded to Stoynoff’s story, saying, “Look at her… I don’t think so.”
    
    
26. – October 13, 2016 – Lisa Boyne accused Donald Trump of sexual misbehavior. Boyne asserted that at a dinner in 1996, Trump and modeling agent John Casablancas paraded women in front of their table, looking under their skirts to determine whether each woman was wearing underwear.
    
    
27. – October 14, 2016 – Kristin Anderson claimed Donald Trump groped her in the early 1990s. Anderson was at a club in Manhattan with friends when, she asserted, Trump reached into her skirt and touched her without consent, leaving her and her friends “very grossed out.”
    
    
28. – October 14, 2016 – Samantha Holvey described Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct at the 2006 Miss USA pageant. While participating in the competition, Holvey noted that Trump inspected each contestant before the event. She noted, “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people.”
    
    
29. – October 14, 2016 – Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. Zervos claimed that Trump assaulted her on several occasions, kissing and grabbing her, and during one business meeting, “began thrusting his genitals.”
    
    
30. – October 15, 2016 – Cathy Heller accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Heller said she was having Mother’s Day brunch in 1997 at Mar-a-Lago when Trump grabbed her, tried kissing her, and became angry when she twisted away.
    
    
31. – October 21, 2016 – Karen Virginia accused Donald Trump of groping her. Virginia described how she’d seen Trump with a group of men at the U.S. Open in 1998, and overheard him say about her “Hey look at this one!” and “Look at those legs.” After his comments, Trump approached Virginia, grabbed her by the right arm, and touched her breast. The incident lingered with Virginia for years, and she came forward with her story alongside Gloria Allred: “I now understand that I was not to blame. Mr. Trump, perhaps you do not remember me or what you did to me so many years ago, but I can assure you that I remember you and what you did to me as though it was yesterday," she said. "Your random moment of sexual pleasure came at my expense and affected me greatly.”
    
    
32. – October 22, 2016 – Jessica Drake, an adult film actor and director, accused Donald Trump of inappropriate sexual contact. Drake said that Trump grabbed and kissed her without her consent at a charity golf tournament in 2006, then made further unwanted advances by inviting her to his suite. After Drake repeatedly declined his invitations, Trump asked her, “What do you want? How much?”
    
    
33. – October 27, 2016 – Ninni Laaksonen, a former Miss Finland, alleged that Donald Trump had sexually harassed her. Laaksonen described an incident in which Trump groped her from behind in 2006.
    
    
34. – November 13, 2016 – Ivanka Trump accompanied her father on his presidential interview with 60 Minutes. Ivanka’s upscale jewelry brand used her father’s political appearance to promote a $10,800 bracelet she had worn during the broadcast.
    
    
35. – November 18, 2016 – One week after Trump’s election, 100 foreign diplomats gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. to drink champagne and tour the building. One diplomat told the Washington Post, “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” This indicated a conflict of interest that could have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
    
    
36. – November 18, 2016 – Even though he said he would not settle the case, Donald Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle his Trump University fraud lawsuits. The real estate seminar program was not an accredited university and used misleading marketing tactics to recruit students.
    
    
37. – November 27, 2016 – Without citing evidence to support his claim, Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This claim has been repeatedly debunked.
    
    
38. – End of December 2016 – In December of 2016, Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met at Trump Tower to establish a “line of connection.” The meeting occurred around the time that the Obama administration was placing sanctions on the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election.
    
    
    - – -

    JANUARY 2017

39. January 10, 2017 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Donald Trump approached him about leading an investigation into “Vaccine Safety.” The prospect that vaccination can lead to autism has been repeatedly debunked by long-running, peer-reviewed studies. Trump had supported the anti-vaccination theory on stage at the 2015 presidential debates. In September 2015 he publicly stated, “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, two years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
    
    
40. – January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump’s lawyer Sheri Dillon stated that Trump would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotel to the United States Treasury.” Two months into his presidency, no evidence existed that Trump had followed through with this promise. If Trump did accept payments from foreign states through his businesses, as his lawyer claimed, he may have been in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This clause forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
    
    
41. – January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to divest from his real estate companies or place his assets in a blind trust, as encouraged by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The United States Government designates a “Qualified Blind Trust:” for executive branch employees as one where the trustee has no relation whatsoever to the government official. Contrary to this, President Trump opted to entrust business operations of his companies to his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. According to the Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Trump’s arrangement “doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.” By continuing to maintain a direct connection with his businesses, Trump may have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. This clause...

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Hovertext:
I actually made an error in the original draft of this where I said 1/3 was smaller.

I'd rather not remember.

In yet another evidentiary blow to the conservative mythology that social media platforms are biased against them and actively silencing right-wing voices, Buzzfeed reports that for the past two months Instagram’s algorithms have been heavily favoring content generated by the Trump reelection campaign.

Not only has the algorithm been returning more Trump-brand content on tag searches, Buzzfeed found, but that content has been overwhelmingly positive with nary a negative connotation to be seen. Specifically, a tag search for #JoeBiden returned roughly 390,000 hits when run earlier this week. Those results also included a significant number of hits from pro-Trump threads such as #trump2020landslide and #democratsdestroyamerica. A similar search for #DonaldTrump returned 7 million hits with virtually zero results coming from anti-Trump tags.

The Tech Transparency Project first noticed the bug and believes that it has been in effect since at least June. “What we’ve seen with the related hashtags with Biden is that there is so much vitriol, that it appears to be benefitting President Trump,” director of the Tech Transparency Project, Katie Paul, told Buzzfeed on Wednesday.

An Instagram spokesperson characterized the issue as a ‘bug’ and pointed out that other non-political hashtags such as #menshair and #artofdrinks were similarly impacted. “A technical error caused a number of hashtags to not show related hashtags,” the spokesperson said in a Tuesday statement. “We've disabled this feature while we investigate.”

The Biden campaign declined to comment however a spokesperson for the Trump campaign “lambasted the bug as an example of alleged bias against conservatives on social media platforms,” according to Buzzfeed.

This is far from the first time that conservatives have railed against what they perceive as bias, even when actively benefitting from it. Just last August Facebook commissioned a third-party audit of its platform in the wake of three years of congressional Republican baseless wingeing about how the social media company inherently promoted liberal content. This, of course despite the fact that the site’s Top 10 daily posts, as measured by Facebook itself, are overwhelmingly produced by fringe right-wing outlets like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity.

To be fair, however, Instagram’s recommendation algorithm is a bit garbage to start with. As Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac points out above, the platform routinely pops worrisome, conspiracy theory-related hashtags for searches of famous figures such as Chrissy Teigen.

In CCTV footage, the tourist can be seen accidentally snapping off a part of the Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus Victrix's foot and then casually leaving the room.

Good morning. The ongoing weather forecast remains more or less the same, with hot, but not too hot weather, and the potential for isolated to scattered rain showers most days. This is basically what August is like when there is no dominant ridge of high pressure overhead, or a low pressure system moving in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Thursday

Skies today will be mostly sunny, allowing highs to rise into the mid-90s. As high pressure strengthens in the region we don’t anticipate much in the way of rainfall, although it is possible a few stray showers may develop east of the city. Winds will be light, out of the southeast at 5 or 10 mph later today. Low temperatures will fall into the mid-70s for inland areas tonight, while remaining near 80 degrees along the coast.

It will be August-hot for most of Texas on Thursday. (Pivotal Weather)

Friday

With the ridge firmly in control, we anticipate this being a hot and sunny day with highs in the mid-90s and almost no chance of rain.

Saturday and Sunday

The forecast for the weekend again calls for partly to mostly sunny skies, with highs in the mid-90s. However, slightly better rain chances enter the forecast due to a slight atmospheric disturbance that may push across the region. For most this probably won’t have too much effect, but it will nudge rain chances each day up to about 30 percent. They are most likely to develop during the afternoon hours.

Next week

Our days in the mid-90s with slight afternoon thunderstorm chances continue for much of next week. However, by Thursday or Friday this pattern could change as a stronger upper level disturbance moves down into Texas, and this may drive some better rain chances for the region. If you’re looking for details in a rain forecast eight days hence you’ve come to the wrong place!

Tropics

On Wednesday, we posted a mini-guide for dealing with a hurricane during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s one thing we didn’t say: Over the next two months expect the hype train to get rolling as it’s going to be a busy period and there will be some people wanting to prey on those anxieties. To that end, we’re already starting to see some scattered social media chatter about a “GFS Hurricane in the Gulf” about 15 days from now.

How to spot fearmongering 101. (Weather Bell/Space City Weather)

Please don’t fall for this. Even the best global models become much, much less reliable after about seven days, and almost completely so after 10 days. The GFS model is notorious for spinning up spurious storms. So although we do expect to enter a more active period in about 10 days, we have no confidence about where these storms will form. If someone is showing you a model plot for a storm 250 or 300 hours from now, or more, you have our permission to roll your eyes.

Dr. Paul Offit, who serves on the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory board, says he doesn't think an effective vaccine that's undergone adequate testing can be ready this year.

(Image credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

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Hovertext:
I think I've noticed that if you listened to any country music, youtube makes some strong political assumptions.