Daily Pulse: Godzilla El Niño! Elon Musk Bets Big on Himself, Coke's Fizzy Shakeup

The Perfect Storm: A major incarnation of the weather phenomenon known as El Nîno is gathering force in the Pacific Ocean and could become one of the most powerful ever, “bringing once-in-a-generation storms later this year to drought-stricken California,” writes Rong-Gong Lin II of The Los Angeles Times.

The worst El Nîno on record was in 1997 but the computer models are predicting an even more perfect storm for late fall or early winter. They aren’t kidding around. “This definitely has the potential of being the Godzilla El Niño,” Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the newspaper. “If this lives up to its potential, this thing can bring a lot of floods, mudslides and mayhem.”

Not the best news for California, which is suffering a drought. Forgive me: It never rains, but it pours.

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"Is this an atomic bomb?" Fifty people were killed in two massive explosions in the China port city of Tianjin we first reported about last night. Another 700 were injured, 71 seriously.

It is still unclear what the cause of the blasts were, but they knocked down walls nearly two miles away and could be seen from space. In one video posted to YouTube the photographer could he heard to say: ""Our building is shaking. Is this an atomic bomb?"

 View a captioned photo gallery of the explosion below:

Elon Musk is putting his money where his mouth is: $20 million, to be exact, as part of a $500 million stock offering in the company he runs. Tesla first stock offering in more than two years will distribute 2.1 million shares and is aimed at raising funds primarily for Model 3 production and the Nevada battery gigafactory.

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The Real Thing? Coca-Cola Co has promoted Europe group president James Quincey to president and COO, which would appear to put him in line to succeed CEO Muhtar Kent, Anjali Athavaley reports for Reuters. Adding fuel to the speculation: Coke also announced the retirement of Ahmet Bozer, a senior executive “who had been widely seen as a possible successor to Kent.”

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The iPad Means Business: Apple is partnering with some 40 enterprise app developers to enhance the iPad’s usefulness as a business tool, Shira Ovide and Daisuke Wakabayashi report for The Wall Street Journal.

“The initiative is a bet that Apple, which has never been a big player in the $2 trillion annual spending on workplace technology,” they write, “can grab a bigger slice of the market by reshaping the nature of work in mobile-friendly settings — where Apple has an edge.”

How serious is Apple? It’s been inviting reps from these business application companies to train its employees, and to events typically closed to outsiders. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported $4.5 million iPad sales, the smallest share of the company’s total revenue in the tablet’s five-year history.

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Big Is The New Big: Samsung released what Wired’s David Pierce calls two “Really Big Phones” — the one category, he says, where the company is not “the world’s greatest follower.” But that’s not the feature which will (or won’t) set them apart from a crowded field of high-end smartphones dominated by Apple: The Galaxy Note 5 has a pen, and the Galaxy S6 Edge+ (say that three times fast) has a curved screen. Enough to turn things around? You’ll be the judge, again.

Horizontal, or Vertical? It’s the burning question in video, fired up by the proliferation of live streaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope. In a nutshell, here is the problem Farhad Manjoo dissects in The New York Times:

Holding your phone “the wrong way” to shoot a video provokes surprisingly apoplectic reactions. Professional videographers tend to regard vertical videos as the mark of an amateur, and they react to these clips with the same sense of wounded outrage that snooty writers reserve for people who confuse its and it’s, or who type two spaces after a period when everyone knows there should only be one.

How we got stuck with landscape is an accident of history. As near as anyone can tell, movies began with an aspect ratio of 4:3 because William Kennedy Dickson leveraged Kodak’s then-new flexible film invention to expedite the Kinetoscope — the world's first motion picture device, developed by his boss, Thomas Edison.

Aspect ratios have changed and a number co-exist, especially since the advent of HD TV. But in the entire history of movies and television they have had one thing in common: The are horizontal.

And yet, we hold our phones vertically for selfies and video chats and virtually every other purpose. And since personal video is eating the world, a movement was born. Does vertical video look wrong? Maybe. But it’s not a fair question. The correct orientation really depends on the subject — just as you would frame a still image.

I confess I still favor landscape for the few videos I take. But even though GPS devices are still stuck in landscape mode I use my phone as a navigation device — and orient it vertically. It’s much more helpful to see what’s on the road ahead rather than what you’re passing.

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Cover art: A damaged police car is seen at the site of the massive explosions in Tianjin on August 13, 2015. Enormous explosions in a major Chinese port city killed at least 44 people and injured more than 500, state media reported on August 13, leaving a devastated industrial landscape of incinerated cars, toppled shipping containers and burnt-out buildings. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)