Tag Archives: wind

My Austin allergy recovery story

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Most people who live in Austin suffer from respiratory allergies. The weather reports always show the pollen and mold counts. One so-called joke is that in the early days of Anglo settlement, native Americans called this area “beautiful place with bad air”.

I moved here in 1986 (after a couple of earlier sojourns when I was young), and within a few years, I was taking prescription allergy medicine every day, all year round. I still got sinus infections, usually one or two per year, for which I was prescribed antibiotics.

In 1997, I moved to Dallas where I didn’t need to take allergy medicine. When I moved back to Austin in 2000, the allergies started up again. That was my least favorite thing about living in Austin. I asked around and decided to go to an acupuncturist who did NAET (Nambudripad Allergy Elimination Technique).

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Wind map

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Okay, so this is probably unrelated to anything else on my blog except my curiosity (and that would make a good name for a blog — “My Curiosity”), but I discovered this website a while back, and I keep it open on my laptop screen and refresh it several times a day just to marvel.

It’s a wind map of the continental U.S., that shows wind velocity and direction based on thousands of places that collect data. It takes a few seconds to load, and then you can see movement…

Here’s a snapshot of current wind data, and here’s a link to see it live:

Wind Map

Wind Map

Amazingly, this is a personal art project of two people who lead Google’s visualization group. You can check them out here. They’ve done a lot of other cool stuff.

There’s a gallery depicting wind patterns during Hurricane Sandy and at other times. You can see that the Midwest is very windy.

It reminds me of when I watched the weather report on television, and there were highs and lows. I’m no meteorologist, but I bet they influence wind patterns greatly.