New lightning tool tells a striking story

  “NOAA’s new Lightning Climatology tool for the continental U.S. shows when cloud-to-ground lightning flashes are historically most frequent for any location across the country.  Data about long-term lightning trends, as well as dates and times of reduced lightning risk, can be useful in a wide range of ways for virtually everyone. Organizers and supporters of outdoor events, outdoor workers, the aviation industry, emergency managers and meteorologists who forecast fire weather — or anyone interested in thunderstorms and lightning — can all benefit. 

While the Lightning Climatology tool helps identify how long-term plans may be impacted by thunderstorms, always check the weather forecast for short-term plans. Monitor your local radar for thunderstorms, which will help you know when to seek safe shelter. “Our new tool tells a story about when and where chances for lightning may be higher, putting anyone outside at a greater risk,” said Aaron Treadway, Severe Services Coordinator and lightning safety expert at NOAA’s National Weather Service. “This climatology data will help people make more informed decisions that impact everything from safety to cost-savings, and could improve the chance for a successful event. ”  Imagine that you are planning an outdoor wedding for the summer of 2023 in Tampa, Florida.  You can use Lightning Climatology to find out the probability of one or more cloud-to-ground lightning flashes in a 1-hour, 4-hour or 24-hour time period. We did that search and the data shows that mid-afternoon hours have the highest probability of lightning across the Tampa area for any day of the year…”

Cheating, groupies, big money and drunken brawls: how chess went rock’n’roll

Chess’s fusty image has been shaken by recent allegations of underhand tactics. But as any fan or player can tell you, it has long been younger, hipper – and wilder – than most outsiders realised

There are currently 11 Finnish islands for sale, starting from 113,000 euro

The full list is found on Island Seeker via Present & Correct.

Celeste Ng On Writing A Terrifying Book

The author of Little Fires Everywhere says that as she wrote during the Trump years, she "wanted to look at what had happened in the past, and the dark times in which we have dealt with authoritarianism, and to remember that we’ve gotten through it before." - The Guardian (UK)

October 2, 2022

Quick Q&As With The Authors On A Prestigious Nonfiction Award Longlist

Andrea Elliott: "The intensity of my reporting stems from a belief that well-told stories—those with depth and nuance—are the product of intimate knowledge. And that comes from being with people, day after day, deeply immersed in their lives." - LitHub

The Attempt To Make True Crime TV Less Exploitative

One duo says it can be done. "We’re about understanding the evidence and showing how a case can go from what should have been innocence to guilt, based on one eyewitness or a forced confession." - Los Angeles Times

Mashable: “If you’ve recently received a bunch of suspicious texts from unknown numbers claiming to be USPS, your bank, or another major company asking you to resolve some sort of urgent issue, you’re not alone. Hopefully these bizarre missives tripped your shadiness alarms and you kept your link-clicking fingers at bay, because those texts aren’t legit. They’re a relatively novel iteration of the phishing scam, in which thieves hiding behind the opacity of a screen hope you’ll buy their business disguise enough to give them what they want. This text-centric update on the classic con goes by “smishing,” a portmanteau of “SMS” and “phishing.” Don’t feel too bad if you briefly regarded such texts as plausibly authentic, however. 

They’re cunningly crafted to take advantage of this unique moment in tech, a time when the dangers of an increasingly complicated and online economy have us returning to the relative simplicity of the dumbphone era in search of additional guardrails like using SMS for two-factor authentication or receiving text alerts when a package has been delivered. But since even the savviest among us have off days or unfocused moments when a smishing scam could slip by undetected, we’ve put together a primer on how to spot and avoid them…”

Smash texting scams: How to avoid smishing attacks- Mashable