Thank a meteorologist
All I have to say in the wake of Katrina is this: if you are one of those people who (formerly) would gripe and moan about the weather report and complain that the weatherman is never right - please reflect on the fact that as many as a million people may be alive today only because they heeded the warnings of the NOAA. Not too many years ago, it wasn’t possible to predict the path of these huge tropical cyclones far enough in the future to give adequate warnings, but today’s predictive models running on immense super-computers can give us just enough of an edge to, just maybe, escape in time.
Prior to the use of geo-stationary satellites (the 1960’s), it wasn’t possible to accurately predict the path of these devastating storm systems - unless you had a spare reconnaissance aircraft to fly into it. These days it’s a race of processing power to interperet the data we can receive from the satellites and run various predictive models to make a ‘best guess’ as to a storm’s course. The number of variables involved here are huge: one of my professors once said it was a lot like dropping an egg into a pot of boiling water and trying to predict (in real time) exactly where the egg would be in one minute. By the time you’ve run all the models, the minute is up. The farther in time you try to predict the worse your guess gets.
Comment posted on 8-31-2005
I guess I do have another comment. On the looting in New Orleans: "It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things." -Donald Rumsfeld on the looting in Baghdad, 2003. This was the attitude of the current administration toward lawlessness after they threw our woefully under-manned ground force into Iraq blindly following the PNAC war plan. Will the response be different when it’s lawlessness in our own country?
Oh, and let’s hear a cheer for our great leader who finally decided to cut his vacation a few days short! I guess it looked bad, him on vacation hiding away from the anti-war protesters during a natural disaster).