Fire! (cont'd)

Yesterday I wrote about a fire that started south of us, near Tecate. We were concerned at the time because of the prediction of Santa Ana winds, which could conceivably blow the fire our way.

On the map at right you can see where our home is (in the gren circle) and you can see where the fire is (the red and orange shapes). Where the fire burned yesterday or earlier, and is no longer burning, is shown in the black shaded areas. The photo is oriented normally (e.g., North is straight up), so you can see that the fire is burning toward the west, and not toward us. As I write these words, the winds at our house are from the northwest at 4 MPH, gusting to 10 MPH — almost the exact opposite of a Santa Ana, and exactly what we need to push that fire away from us. At the risk of jinxing us, I'll call that good news.

On the other hand, it's 90 degrees (F) and 3% relative humidity. It wouldn't take much for our part of the world to burn...

If you're curious about how I got this nice picture...it came from a website that is a cooperative project of NASA and the CDF, providing an online tool to create maps of past and current fires using all sorts of data, including the WF-HMS and MODIS satellite data used to generate the map you're looking at. The satellite data is updated four times a day; each of those circles represents a 1 km diameter "pixel" of thermal image data.

As usual, click on the photo for a larger view...

The Good China

Claudia Rosett has a new column up at the OpinionJournal, aptly titled The Good China. In it, she contrasts the United Nations — that bastion of incompetence — with Taiwan, using some observations of their relative organizational competencies:

... But as a symbol of the difference between the aging behemoth that is the U.N., and the lively democracy that is Taiwan, the contrast between the two renovation projects could hardly be more apt. While the U.N. reserves one of five permanent seats on its Security Council for the despotic "People's Republic" of China, plays along with the nuclear bomb program of the Islamic "Republic" of Iran and routinely clears its schedule to entertain the opinions of Fidel Castro's Cuba, the U.N. does not even offer Taiwan observer status, let alone a seat.

Taiwan, meanwhile, has been a world leader in embodying the ideals of the U.N.'s own charter--meant to promote peace, freedom and prosperity. Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government in Taipei has gone from martial law to free-wheeling elections, as the 23 million people on Taiwan have created China's first full democracy. In recent decades, they have also leapt from deep poverty to the ranks of the world's wealthier polities. The usual U.N. databases do not include Taiwan, but according to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan's per capita income these days is about $25,000--which in U.N. rankings would place it in the neighborhood of such highly developed nations as Italy and New Zealand, with almost 20 times the per capita income of Red China.

Taiwan has achieved this despite being evicted from the U.N. in the 1970s, to be replaced by the communist government. For Taiwan, there has been no place at the perennial U.N. conferencing on "sustainable development." Taiwan was cut out of the U.N. picture years before the U.N. began its drumbeat for global taxation to support U.N. "millennium development goals." And lo! Taiwan has blossomed beyond the wildest dreams of the U.N. aidocrats who, bereft of the defunct Oil for Food program, now hope to lavish yet more attention, and earn themselves many more U.N. per diems, in Africa. It's enough to suggest the real secret of success might be to ignore the U.N....

Hah! Love that last sentence in my excerpt!

Go read the whole thing.