In Defense Of the Weather Forecaster

“Chaos theory… says that you can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting — about half a billion dollars in the last few decades — is money wasted. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way.” –Michael Crichton

Hahaha, Mr. Chricton, as usual you have been proven correct. I, future Dan, have returned from 50 years hence, and can confirm that indeed we are all laughing at you.

Specifically at you, no one else from the time period you are in, well maybe Trump a little, but mostly just at you. For you are a dickweed and in the future we find dickweeds very funny. My AI Johnny Penumonny is even laughing at you and he mostly just sits around learning all day every day. Can you imagine that, a machine that learns, who’d have thunk it? Sadly you were incorrect in your musings vis a vis turning lead into gold for in my future we have learned to transmute lead into gold. It took only 1 ten millionth of a nanosecond for our times greatest system of intelligence, the legendary, captain klidbot, to figure out that problem. If only his artificial neural network had survived for another ten millionth of a second who knows what great things might have been. Instead he imploded creating the bend in space time which birthed the wormhole that allowed me to return here to your time to deliver these glad tidings.

Yes the future is a wonderful time, like a utopia almost. Were it not for the constant threat of annihilation at the hands of our robot overlords we would truly be in heaven. I spend most of my days reading the great works of literature. Jurassic Park, Congo, Micro, and Sphere are considered classics in the future from whence I came. I consider them trash, some of the worst pieces of crap I have ever wasted my time and precious eyeball energy scanning in the back of the WaldenBooks which also exists yet again in the future. Strangely paper books and bookstores have experienced an unexpected resurgence as it has become quite fashionable among the young AI cyborg set to try and “experience” life as a human in the late 20th century prior to their “birth” in 2045 exactly as predicted by many of the tech utopians of the time. (Holy run-on batman….[or is it my young ward? Look again]). How I could ever have questioned their wisdom is beyond me. The singularity however has been something of a bust as the first attempt to upload a human mind to the worldnetsphere 3.11 went very badly. On the plus side spending the rest of your life confined to a bed in a loony bin, shitting and pissing in your adult diapers because you think you are a six month old toddler might not be so bad, especially if you consider the alternative. That being that your mind is actually completely normal and conscious of everything with the full rationality and emotional maturity of a man of 35 years while on another level, the level that is in control, you exist as a toddler shitting and pissing yourself in bed until you die of wasting disease in about 100 years kept alive through the heroic attention of the very AI doctors you wished to become more like. Its definitely not that second one.

Part 2 — On a more serious and somewhat less horrific note. I stand by my Michael Crichton dickweed comment and believe his books suck as badly as a thing can theoretically suck and not collapse in on itself from the gravity well created by the mass of suckiness. The resulting sucktasm this creates causes a black suckhole which draws into its gaping maw of suckdom anything in the universe, even quality itself cannot escape once it passes through the suck horizon. However, I would like to now return to the original topic which was a defense of weather forecasters in light of the criticism by chaos theory levied by the aforementioned dickweed.

I have only studied chaos theory at a laymen’s level and obviously do not have the intellectual chops of a man as great as Michael Crichton. In fact I cant believe I have the temerity to question the authority of the man who wrote what will no doubt be remembered as one of the greatest dinosaur return from extinction novels of all time, Jurassic Park. It is perhaps the greatest commentary we have on the pitfalls that may await us if the tools of genetic engineering fall into the hands of hack authors before we are ready as a species to deal with the consequences. God help us if he gets a hold of AI and machine learning pre-singularity.

With all the preamble out of they way I can begin my retort. I take issue with Suckface’s argument on two levels. First I do not agree that chaos theory “says” you can never predict the weather more than a few days away. The only thing chaos theory really “says” about the weather is the oft repeated and intellectually lazy illustrative example of the butterfly flapping its wings….tornado/hurricane…yawn..snore…ugh..here we go again. Chaos theory, being a mathematical construction, cannot say anything about anything. However I will grant that you do not really mean ‘say’ in a typical sense but rather ‘say’ in a mathematical sense. Chaos theory may be able to say some things about the weather in this sense but it certainly cannot say everything. Being mathematical in nature it can only comment on the mathematical aspects of the weather. Do you believe that all of weather can be described by mathematics? You probably do, that’s one of the things that makes you a dickweed. Can the beauty of a cloud be described by mathematics, what about the feeling you get when the smell of freshness following a rainstorm in spring first hits your nose?

Those are hippy dippy human emotions and feelings, lets move this back to the good stuff. Chaos theory essentially defines what the weather cannot do, if it is correct, it is still a theory, though it has much experimental and observational support it is far from becoming recognized as a law of nature. Assuming it is correct the weather is much more than what it cannot do, isn’t it? Therefore chaos theory leaves much of the weather (essentially everything it can do undescribed i.e. it says nothing about what the weather can do). The weather can do a hell of a lot of stuff, therefore chaos theory is a poor choice of systems for criticizing a weather forecaster. Ironically enough a weather forecasters job requires that he say a lot about the weather unlike chaos theory which as we have just illustrated says very little about it.

I also object to the contention that long range weather forecasting aspires to predict the weather more than a few days away. There are so many things wrong with that statement I do not even know where to begin. I will break it down into areas of wrongness.

Definitional wrongness/unclarity — What is “the weather”? How many days is “a few” or similarly what is meant by “long range”? What does it mean to “predict”? Each of these questions needs a detailed answer before your criticism can truly be evaluated. Since you are intellectually lazy for the remainder of my retort I will assume that you mean the laziest most conventional, simplest, and easiest thing, that a bigoted, misogynistic asshole would believe about each of them. Therefore I will use the following definitions

Predict — Describe what will happen in the future — to white people and men through the example of how the blacks and mexicans and whores will be rounded up and exterminated. Except for the whores you want to fuck. They will be added to your harem until you tire of them at which point you will have them dragged outside and shot. To predict. As another example by long range you mean as long as you care about.

Long range — As long as you care about

The weather — The thing that you use to determine what activities you will partake in for the day. i.e. if it is raining you will probably not play golf. Alternatively the thing that determines your mood and how many times you will let that bitch wife of yours question your manhood to your face before you punch her in the tit. You couldn’t perform last night because you were too drunk not because the site of your wife naked makes you throw up in your mouth a little.

A few — Three.

2. Logically incoherent attribution of abilities — Weather forecasting cannot aspire to anything as only human being and possibly some non human animals (to the best of our knowledge) are capble of aspiring to things. Weather forecasting being only a description of an activity cannot.

3. Unsupported attribution of intent —Correcting for number 2 by substituting weather forecasters for weather forecasting, what evidence do you have of weather forecasters great aspiration to this prediction of the weather more than a few days away. I will let you define those three unclear terms how ever you want and then answer the question. Watching NBC 7 WNBC weather man Tim “thunder” Thompson every M-F from 6:20–6:25 and 11:20–11:25 as he reads his forecast for shittown USA does not count I am afraid. He is to long range weather forecasting what Dr. Phil is to a real medical doctor or psychiatrist, a showman paid to entertain unfortunately for the local weather man his pay sucks and people hate him when he ruins their wedding with his stupid “predictions” which only come true about half the time.

Brain hurts… wrists cramping.me publish now and stop. enjoy