California’s Central Valley runs from Redding in the north to just past Bakersfield in the south, and is the home of frequent fall and winter Tule fog. Since the Central Valley is almost completely surrounded by mountains (the Coastal Range to the west, Sierra to the east, Tehachapi Mountains to the south and Cascade Range to the north), air tends to become very stagnant in the Valley. This combined with frequent low-level temperature inversions (the air near the ground is colder than the air higher up) and moisture from fall/winter storm systems creates one of the world’s largest fog-bound areas. In fact, for weeks at a time the majority of the Central Valley can be entrapped in fog.

Even worse, when the rest of California is enjoying sunny, warm weather (like today), it is frequently cold, damp and foggy/overcast in the Valley. For example, the high temperature along California’s central coast will peak in the mid 70s today, while cities in the Valley will be lucky to get over 50 degrees.

The GEOS West satellite has a fog spectrum view which vividly shows the presence of Tule fog in the Valley.

Up and down the Central Valley the National Weather Service maintains a series of profilers that measure wind and temperature at various altitudes. The temperature inversions can easily be see on these. Here’s one for today from the Lost Hills profiler.

The classic set up for Tule Fog is the presence of high-pressure in the Great Basin region. These high-pressure systems effectively put the lid on the Central Valley with warm air aloft, but also heat up California’s coastal areas through adiabatic heating. Today’s surface-level pressure map shows high pressure in the Great Basin.

What’s the view like in the fog? Flickr user emdot shows us.

Zoinger says, no PTHs (peak tanning hours).

A pretty cool Flash-based application.

This morning, there was a small (magnitude 3.1) earthquake in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the small town of Felton. More precisely, three miles NNE of Felton at 37.096N, 122.049W.

You can read all about the quake here on the USGS site.

It’s amazing the kind of data that you can find almost instantaneously on quakes. A few minutes after I felt this one, I popped online to see if it had been registered at the USGS. Indeed it had.

I picked up the screenshot of the map above at the USGS’ Recent Earthquakes in California and Nevada homepage.

If you want to report feeling a quake, you can do so here. From these reports, the USGS site also generates “response maps” of the quakes. Here’s one for the Felton quake.

And finally, the USGS generates a couple of graphs analyzing the response data. The top is intensity vs. distance from the epicenter and the bottom is number of responses vs. the time since the earthquake.

Sometimes the government works.

Ugh, my not-quite-one-year-old Audiovox SMT 5600 is pretty much broken now. The microphone on the thing doesn’t seem to work reliably now. People can’t hear me talk or I am very, very faint. Too bad, because the phone was pretty nice.

However, one HUGE complaint is that Microsoft’s “synchronization” software only works with Outlook (big surprise there), and the synch software doesn’t store a copy of how you have set up the phone. Before my phone totally broke, I did a hard reset (which erases everything) figuring that I’d at least be able to get my phone set up back once I synched it. No way. My phone was back to its OEM state. Realistically, I would have taken me several hours to re-set up my phone (ring tones, menu look and feel, etc.). Ridiculous! This is just another sad example of the pathetic state of the mobile industry.

So what am I gonna get for a replacement? I’m going on Ebay and am buying an old-school, used Nokia. One without a lot of fancy features, and one that is SMALL. My previous Nokias have been bomber… never giving up the ghost.

Here’s one I’m hoping to get. It’s a Nokia 8390.

Update: 2006-01-05
Classic! I forgot I had an AT&T Wireless SIM card in my phone. That’s not gonna work with a locked Cingular phone.

So today I went down to the Cingular store to see if I could get my SIM card changed to a Cingular one. Yeah they could, but only if I started a new account with Cingular and pick a current rate plan. Well, at least I can get a rebate on a new phone. The Ebayed 8390 will be a good back-up phone anyway.

Also turns out that they would have warrantied my SMT 5600 (since it wasn’t yet a year old) if I had not of broken the LCD. That happened the last time the microphone stopped working. Disgusted, I threw it into a plastic storage bin (not even that hard… really…not really a “throw”… more like a shovel pass) full of paper and somehow the phone hit something metal.

However, actually breaking the phone was a good thing because I now have a fully-working phone. If I had not of broken the Audiovox, I would have just kept fiddling with it — barely getting it to work — for a few more months instead of just getting it fixed or replace.

Here’s some interesting statistics from an op-ed piece that ran in the WSJ on 12/29/05 entitled Hollywood, the Remake. It was written by Edward Jay Epstein who is the author of The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood.

• In 1948 2/3 of the US population went to the movies in an average week. This works out to about 90 million people. Obviously, this was before TV.

• Currently only 10% of the US population sees a movie in an average week.

• Up until the late 1940s, virtually all of the studios’ revenue was generated at the box office.

• By 1950 the US government broke up the studios’ monopoly on theater outlets, which they controlled through direct ownership or “block booking” contracts.

• By the late 1980’s, the number of ticket sold had fallen to just over one billion vs. 1948 when sales were 4.6 billion. The US population about doubled between these two years.

• Theater owners keep about 1/2 of the ticket revenue.

• In 2005 15% of the studios’ revenue will come from ticket sales while DVDs, Pay-TV, Free TV licensing and videos make up about 85%.

• Mr. Epstein argues that Hollywood’s business is now much more about creating licensable properties and that the box office is more of a way to generate awareness.

I’d say that last point will become more and more true in the future with things like the video iPod, portable DVD players, DVD players in cars, HDTV, HD-DVDs, video-capable cell phones and the hyperglobalinterweb.