[That's Hurricane Earl—now a Category 4 hurricane expected to drench the East Coast in rain—near the bottom of this NASA photo and former Hurricane Danielle—now a tropical storm—at the top. Click to enlarge. Via Bad Astronomy.]

Hurricane Earl is "gathering strength" off the coast of Puerto Rico, and may send squalls all the way to Maine this week. Earl has kindly agreed to leave the Gulf coast alone, though, because it's got enough to deal with.

Coastal dwellers brace yourselves: It's officially hurricane season.

The tropical depression near Florida has been given a name—Danielle. It should become a hurricane this week.

Monster making! Russian warming! Frog mountains! Bat extinction! Multiple sclerosis! Hurricane season! Quantum entanglement! Pet meds! And Polish geologists! It's your Friday Science Watch, where we watch your science—while screwing in a light bulb, all alone!

Hurricane Alex has made landfall in northern Mexico and southern Texas with 105-mile-an-hour winds.

Tropical Storm Alex has become Hurricane Alex.

This summer should bring an "active to extremely active" hurricane season, with up to 14 storms. This will help disperse the oil slick, but hurricanes are "potentially far more hazardous to the population than leaking oil." You can't win! [WaPo]

A funny thing about New Orleans is nobody has any idea how many people live there since that hurricane destroyed everything. You might say the census is the biggest thing to hit New Orleans since Katrina! Don't say that. [NYT]

This Weather Channel reporter was just following in the footsteps of his colleagues at CNN and every other news network when he stupidly stepped into the hurricane-force winds still remaining from Hurricane Ike this weekend. But unlike them he was nearly blown into oblivion. Luckily there was a residential fence to keep him from, you know, dying. All this for one of the most clichéd shots in TV news. Someone end the madness.

Why do we anthropomorphize the weather? The standard convention of naming large tropical storms began as way to simply keep track of multiple simultaneous events, but it also has the unusual side effect of allowing people to believe that the storm is literally out to get them. Hurricane Ike is currently "ravaging" South Texas with his "ferocious" winds and "roaring" floodwaters and will soon spread his "wrath" across the whole Gulf Coast. This time it's personal! Now we obviously don't want to make light of the situation the individual residents find themselves in, because it is personal for someone with a basement that is now underwater. But if you want to tell the human drama of natural disaster, is it really necessary to turn the low pressure system into a sentient being with a grudge? Hurricane Katrina Changed Everything, of course, but a little perspective on "catastrophic" storms might be in order. The death toll currently stands at three (one was a nursing home patient and an other a 10-year-old struck by a tree branch) but, sad as that is, it's still less than the death toll from that California train crash—another disaster that the cable news networks have all but ignored. Oh, and the big Galveston Hurricane of 1900? 8,000 dead and the town was nearly erased from the map. That rain cloud must have been pissed. [Check the local coverage from the Houston Chronicle.]