a personal commentary on science, religion and other things I find interesting
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Something unusual happened at IU Southeast: a tornado. This was at about 9am on Sunday, May 7, 2023.
I live about a mile and a half from campus (as the crow flies). That morning, we had a severe thunderstorm. I was surprised at how strong the storm appeared: the sky was very dark, and there was a lot of wind. Also plenty of lightning, although this appeared to be to the north (not much thunder at my place). A severe thunderstorm warning appeared as the storm was in progress.
A short while later, email and text notifications appeared from the university warning of hazardous conditions on campus due to storm damage, and advising us to not go to campus. I was curious enough to disregard the warning and head to campus with my camera.
I went up to campus on the usual route (Klerner Lane to Grant Line Road), and saw that not only was the entrance to campus blocked off, Grant Line Road itself was closed.
I then went around the long way to the south side of campus, which was open. I was able to drive in and park in the usual lot close to my building.
I walked around my building with my camera to see the damage.
The damage was mainly on the other side of my building (the north side of the building), and there was plenty of damage: about eight mature trees were down, and there was damage to the roof of my office building (Life Sciences).
I walked further north and west to see the other end of campus, and I was struck to see there was little damage on that end of campus. It became clear the damage was focused on a relatively small part of campus around my building. I didn't notice at first, but the downed trees were pointing in different directions. I was not surprised to learn later that afternoon that the National Weather Service had determined we had an EF1 tornado with 105mph winds.
I also learned why Grant Line Road was closed: traffic lights and utility poles were damaged or broken. And what I couldn't see from campus was the damage to the apartments across the street: One building had half of its roof torn completely off—drone photographs showed views into people's apartments from above.
The weather service determined the tornado had actually formed over my office building; it dissipated past the apartments, with a total track about 100 yards wide and 0.35 miles long. It was a "spin-up" tornado, which severe thunderstorms sometimes produce. It turns out there were five different tornadoes in my county that morning, all EF0 or EF1: Tornadoes and Severe Storms from May 7, 2023
Notice the strip of roofing in the lawn (right of center):
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Notice the tree damage on the right edge of the frame: The top half of the tree was snapped off by the tornado.
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Almost exactly 11 years ago, my original Foraging for Clues site began, as a WordPress blog.
My plan was to complement my older site, wclang.net, with a site where I might be more political; the idea is that the older site would focus math and science, and the newer site would focus on religion, LGBT, and politics.
I also wanted to make the new site use modern technology for blogs, to keep my blog well-organized; I already knew that it was hard to keep a static, hand-edited html site organized. (Say if you want posts categorized into various topics, each accessed by separate menus, you need to update these every time you post.) I decided to try WordPress, which would also allow readers to post comments on my posts.
I soon learned what WordPress entails: You need a hosting service that will set up the needed database access to allow management of the site. I used SpireTech as the hosting service. They set me up, and they've always been very helpful.
So in July of 2011, I made my first post; it was fun playing with my shiny new toy.
Problems eventually arose. The first problem was the appearance of comment spam: Chinese-language posts advertising irrelevant things. There are tools to combat these, but they were infrequent enough to delete by hand. But this required regularly visiting the blog. Posts by readers were even less frequent, so eventually I turned off blog comments entirely (inviting readers to send comments directly to me; no one ever did).
A much more serious problem surfaced a couple of years ago: A hack of my WordPress blog. This appears to have been the result of my WordPress site not having been updated recently. The hacking incident was brought under control by SpireTech, and they set up my WordPress site to send me reminders to update the site when needed; no further troubles of this kind occurred.
But in all of this I realized WordPress had become a real liability to me. I seldom actually posted anything, and there is a significant danger involved. If I wanted a vanity site, it needed to be walk-away, passively safe. This meant it needed to be a static html-based, hand-edited site. So eventually I decided to revert to that kind of site.
This presented an interesting challenge: How to convert my WordPress site, with more than 100 posts, into a static site. The basic idea was to download an archive of the database and resources (photos) from the original site. I'd played with this before; I had already learned a smattering of SQL, and the rudiments of how to use a MySQL database in a programming language (I used R). I eventually managed to get the database to output very bare-bones pages; with some hand-editing, I had essentially the entire WordPress site. I've written a simple R script that should make it easier to update my blog when I wish to post something (to keep posts organized into various categories or topics).
So last week, I finally pulled the trigger: with a bit of help from SpireTech, I deleted everything associated with the WordPress site, and uploaded my static site, which you see here.