Monday, April 15, 2019

"You Can't Trust the Weatherman, Man!"

Math (see previous post). My aversion to math has probably stunted my potential. Maybe. Probably. Aye there's the rub. A very smart person I keep tabs on, tells us most of us don't really understand how probability permeates our everyday existence:

"the ratio of the number of outcomes in an exhaustive set of equally likely outcomes that produce a given event to the total number of possible outcomes."

Right. I'm one of those people who figures whatever happens is whatever happens, whatever actually happens, is what happens, without really understanding the "ratio of outcomes..." and how arbitrary or contingent, or random it all may be.

The last few days in the heartland have been a wild ride; fairly warm and sunny one day, furious blizzard the next, sort of mild the next. I coined my own phrases about the situation...

"You can't trust the weather, man."

AND

"You can't trust the weatherman, man."

Maybe if I knew a bit more about probabilities, computer modeling, and prognostication it would all be so much clearer, but who knows, probably not.