Why does category 5 hurricane not also constitute a category 2 hurricane. Seems silly to differentiate by what level they end up at when a cat 5 has also, by definition, made it to cat 2 at some point.
I think it makes sense to differentiate them, just as you would differentiate them if it was displayed as a graph of "number of hurricanes by category". If you only include the highest category, you miss out on data that might also be useful, for instance whether there have been more category 1 hurricanes compared to category 5.
If it didn't differentiate them and the last category 5 hurricane was 110 days ago but the last category 1 hurricane was 2 days ago, how would you learn about the category 1 hurricane? In your example it would just show hurricane categories 1-5 sequentially all bunched together, so you'd also be duplicating data which wouldn't be that useful.
I mean, you can ask the meteorologists about the process of naming, but those hurricanes actually existed, on the dates suggested, so I'm not sure what's "fishy" about it.
I believe that the naming relates to which ocean they're forming in, but it's probably good for you to do your own research, so you can clear up any "fishiness" yourself.
Not sure if you're referring to the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull that shut down air travel, but that was a VEI 4 eruption, and there have been more recent VEI 4 eruptions (the most recent, according to this, was the Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba eruption in 2021) and so it doesn't show.
I'm fairly certain the point of this page isn't to worry about these events. Knowing the type of things Neal builds (you should definitely explore his other stuff), it's likely just for fun, and an interesting way to present this information.
Days Since Incident – tracker of natural disasters on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33018771 - Sept 2022 (38 comments)