Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs

Aloha Paragraphs

Deep colors of a beautiful flower lei

The gusty trade winds of the last several days will be gradually mellowing out this weekend. A small craft wind advisory remains active in all coastal and channel waters from the north shore of Kauai down through South Point, on the Big Island Friday evening. These trades will slow down this weekend, becoming much lighter by the middle of next week. The latest models show them picking up again around next Friday…then continuing through the rest of the week into the following week.

There will still be the usual showers falling here in the islands. The windward areas as usual will find the most generous rainfall. The leeward beaches will be generally quite dry, although showers could fall along the Kona slopes of the Big Island during the late afternoons. As the winds are so strong now, a few stray showers may make it over into the leeward areas at times on the smaller islands. Weather in general will continue to be pretty normal in most regards otherwise.

It’s Friday evening as I begin writing this last section of today’s narrative.  As described above, a fairly routine trade wind weather pattern prevails here in the islands at the moment. These conditions will hold through the weekend, and start us off into our new week ahead. The current rather strong and gusty trade wind flow will however, begin to soften a little this weekend into Monday.

~~~ A convective weather pattern usually has the days starting off in a clear way, with slightly cooler than normal temperatures giving way to rather hot and muggy afternoons. At the same time we can see clouds stacking-up over and around the mountains during the afternoons, with precipitation falling in the upcountry areas. Clouds typically evaporate again after dark, with the process beginning again the next day.

~~~ It’s after work on Friday, I’m still in Kihei, Maui, leaving soon for the drive to Kahului. I really want to see the new film called Iron Man, but I’m afraid it’s still going to be too crowded, so I’ll give it one more week. As a second choice, I’ll see the new film called Redbelt (2008)…starring Chjwetel Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Rodrigo Santoro, among others. Redbelt is set in the west-side of Los Angeles fight world, a world inhabited by bouncers, cage- fighters, cops and special forces types, Redbelt, is the story of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Jiu-Jitsu teacher who has avoided the prize fighting circuit, choosing instead to pursue an honorable life by operating a self-defense studio with a samurai’s code. The Yahoo critics give it a solid B rating, while the rottentomatoes movie review website gives it 70 out of 100 points. Here’s a trailer if you feel like checking it out. It’s another one of those heavy duty action packed films!

~~~ I’ll be back early Saturday morning, not only with your next new weather narrative, but with my impression of the film. I plan on leaving the house early for a trip to the north shore right after breakfast, more about that in the morning. I hope you have a great Friday night wherever you happen to be spending it, whether in Laramie, Palm Springs, Albany, Austin…or perhaps Portland, Santa Rosa or even Key West, Florida! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Shark Surfer!

Interesting: A new company hopes drivers will kick the oil habit by brewing ethanol at home that won’t spike food prices.  E-Fuel Corp unveiled on Thursday the "MicroFueler" touting it as the world’s first machine that allows homeowners to make their own ethanol and pump the brew directly into their cars.  The portable unit that sells for $10,000 resembles a gasoline station pump and nozzle — minus the slot for a credit card, or the digital "SALE" numbers that whir ever faster at retail pumps as global demand pushes fuel prices to record levels.  Instead of tapping gasoline from an underground tank, the pump’s back end plugs into home power and water supplies to make ethanol for as little as $1 a gallon (3.8 liters), according to E-Fuel.  The company says one of the machine’s top selling points is its sweet tooth. It ferments fuel from sugar, the price of which is historically cheap as global supplies are glutted.  That means it avoids the Achilles heel of today’s U.S. ethanol system — reliance on corn — which has been blamed for helping to spike global food prices.

Interesting2: It’s a happy Mother’s Day for an Arkansas woman — she’s pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year’s Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins. "We’ve had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us,” she said, laughing. The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old. The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled. Duggar has been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health. The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores — or "jurisdictions” — are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a "jurisdiction swap,” where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said. "The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass,” she said. "The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms,” among other chores.

Interesting3: It’s hard for anyone to say what music looks like, but a new mathematical approach sees classical music as cone-shaped and jazz as pyramid-like. The connections between math and music are many, from the unproven Mozart effect (the idea that playing Mozart’s music to children might improve their mathematical abilities) to the music of the spheres (the ancient belief that proportions in the movements of the planets could be viewed as a form of music). Now scientists have created a mathematical system for understanding music. Clifton Callender of Florida State University, Ian Quinn of YaleUniversity and Dmitri Tymoczko of PrincetonUniversity outlined their "geometrical music theory" in the April 18 issue of the journal Science. The team designed a geometrical technique for mapping out music in coordinate space. For music made of chords containing two notes, all musical possibilities take the shape of a Möbius strip, which basically looks like a twisted rubber band (this was first described by Tymoczko in a 2006 Science paper). The team found that the shape of possibilities using three-note chords is a three-dimensional ice cream cone, where types of chords, such as major chords and minor chords, are unique points on the cone. The space of four-note chords is what mathematicians would call a "cone over the real projective plane," which resembles a pyramid in our 3-D universe. Any piece of music can be mapped in these spaces.