At the risk of driving more old people to South Florida, I'm going to link to a New York Times article by Marginal Revolutionist Tyler Cowen. The article is about all sorts of things economists have learned in the past year, and the one Professor Mankiw pointed out and I find I'm able to relate to the most (as someone who has gone the other way) is the part about people who live in warmer climates tend to have a higher life expectancy:
Extreme cold brings cardiovascular stress as human bodies struggle to adjust to the temperature; many of the deaths in these periods come through heart attacks. Heat waves tend to kill people who were already weakened and would have died soon anyway; cold periods bring additional people to the verge of death.
When retired people move to a warmer state, their life expectancy rises dramatically. In fact, 8 to 15 percent of the increase in American life expectancy over the last 30 years comes from people moving to warmer climates.
(He also mentions that more people die in cold periods than in homicides, although I think that may not be true here in Philadelphia. ;-))
Technorati Tags: economics, New York Times, life expectancy, health, climate, South Florida, Tyler Cowen
Posting from inside T.S. Ernesto. It's not quite as bad as the news was reporting (and as I expected), but we prepared everything just to be safe. I was here during Katrina which was stronger than Ernesto and we only lost power for less than 24 hours, but the Category 3 Wilma was the last one to hit Florida and that was in everyone's minds.
As expected, my 10am flight tomorrow was canceled but I managed to get onto a 1:40pm flight to get me in to Philadelphia at 4:20pm.
Technorati Tags: weather, tropical storm, hurricanes, Ernesto, Tropical Storm Ernesto, Miami, Florida, South Florida, Philadelphia
Google has added a new overlay option to their Google Maps for the New Orleans area that displays satellite photos of the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused. The color balance is not off, the bluish tint is due to the entire city being covered by water. The best place to see before/after is the Superdome, located towards the south of the city; you can see that the white tarp from the regular satellite image is gone in the Katrina pictures. Props to Google for offering this functionality and getting this data up so soon.
Technorati Tags: Katrina, Google, Google Maps, satellite, Superdome, New Orleans
The weather started calming down at around 6, when the eye was passing over us. My sister and I were hungry so we waiting for our parents to wake up from their nap to go eat at Flanigan's, open and only two blocks away. They didn't want to come with us so I went alone with my sister. We got to Flanigan's and it seemed like business as usual. There was sports on almost all of the TVs and people at the bar and most of the tables. Our parents started watching TV and saw that there were 60mph winds just a couple of miles away so they told us to get our food to go. We did, and as we were leaving Flanigan's, the storm picked up again. Not 10 minutes after we get home, we lose power (around 9pm). After eating dinner in the dark, we kept ourselves entertained by draining the battery on a few laptops. We started watching a Mexican movie about a wedding which we couldn't bear to watch for more than half an hour. After that, we watched National Treasure which, despite having essentially the same plot as The Da Vinci Code was quite an entertaining movie.
We only got some rain and very little wind today. A lot of places without power (our house included) but still a lot of people out. I ended up going to the Apple Store for a bit to check my e-mail and do some web browsing. The Mac mini I was using had a Mighty Mouse attached, so I finally got to try it out. I came back home and the power came back around 5pm. We were lucky to only have had lost power for less than 24 hours. I've heard that a lot of people are still without it and both Miami-Dade and Broward County officials will be handing out bags of ice tomorrow for people to keep perishable items cold.
From what I've seen, the damage here on the beach is pretty minimal. I've seen lots of downed and uprooted trees and some crooked electricity poles (and one that came down completely at the corner of our street) as well as lots of missing signs. The worst damage I've seen by far is the roof (the part that's over the pumps) of a Shell gas station in Sunny Isles that has collapsed completely. The station is across the street from the beach, but other similarly located gas stations didn't see that kind of damage. The worst damage they saw (at least visibly) is some missing numbers from their price lists (free gas!).
Hurricane Katrina was only a Category 1 (winds of 74-95 mph) when it hit South Florida, but she came with very little advance warning. Notwithstanding, I think officials got everything squared away pretty quickly with regards to closing services and opening up shelters and I applaud them for that. They say Katrina could develop into a Category 4 hurricane (winds of 131-155 mph) in the warm Gulf waters before making landfall again. I wish people on the northern Gulf Coast the best of luck and hope that everything will be alright.
Technorati Tags: hurricane, katrina, hurricane katrina, weather, florida
Katrina is practically upon us. Most (if not all) municipal services are closed, my sister is off from school today and tomorrow. Luckily I made it out to Publix last night to pick up some supplies. So far there's just been rain and it hasn't been that bad, but the National Weather Service predicts that it will become a Category 1 hurricane by the time the eye makes landfall. The storm is only moving at 6mph, so flooding is expected to be the biggest problem. Here on the beach we've never had much trouble with flooding, but further west it's always a problem. I'm hoping Blockbuster is still open so I can pick up some DVDs because it looks like we'll be indoors for a while.
