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Flickers and Grackles
Before Ann Arbor became Storm Central in the past 48 hours, birds were everywhere. One reader (and someone who knows her avians), Dorothea of the fantastic Caveat Lector, wrote to tell me that the bird I was mystfied about the other day was a yellow-shafted flicker, otherwise known as a Northern flicker, or by its…
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It Was a Dark and Stormy Afternoon
Okay, Yankees, when the sky turns as dark and ugly GREEN as it did at 2:30 this afternoon, that means you’ve got yourself a tornado somewhere VERY. CLOSE. BY. This means get in the cellar, fool, ‘fore you get sucked up like Helen Hunt’s daddy in that Twister movie. But the sirens didn’t even sound…
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Storm Quotes
The title of a paper given by MIT meterology professor and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC on 29 December 1979: Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? From Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1900): The…
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