A picture is worth a thousand words...

Death or cake?

This is from NOAA's hurricane strength prediction chart for Gustav. I've got a feeling it will continue to pull to the right. I was pretty impressed by the data services at NOAA, especially the use of RSS feeds. I just wish there was a feed/API to get the long/lat of Gustav currently. In theory you could look for:

THE CENTER OF TROPICAL STORM GUSTAV WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 19.1 NORTH...LONGITUDE 74.4 WEST OR 90 MILES...150 KM...SOUTHEAST OF GUANTANAMO CUBA

in the most recent RSS item and parse it out there. I think I may whip up a quick howcloseisraytodeath() method tonight to see how accurately it can track the distance. Of course, I've got a nice Flip video recorder now so I have no excuse to avoid filming the fun this time.