Dem hurricanes is humblin’
Insert your fav weatherman joke here…man cannot accurately predict the weather or the future. We are about to create black holes, and maybe Higgs bosons at the LHC in CERN, Switzerland…but we cannot tell with 
anything approaching accuracy what path a hurricane will take. It’s quite humbling for us homo sapiens.
In Thursday morning’s Houston Chronicle:
Ike’s forecast 60 hours before landfall called for a Palacios landfall. Rita’s forecast three days before landfall called for a Palacios landfall, and it struck the Texas-Louisiana border 190 miles away.
During the Rita evacuation, I was driving down I-10 to Austin via hwy 71 on my way to a meeting…took almost four hours for what is normally a two and a half hour trip, as the gulf coast was evacuating (along formal evacuation routes and informal). When my meetings were over, I headed back to lovely Tomball…I was the only car going SE, and there was a traffic jam from Houston to Giddings. I got home, tied everything down, move possible projectiles, and waited….
Nothing happened. At least not in Tomball in NW Harris County. Hurricane Rita went east, so we were on the ‘clean’ side of it.
So here we go again: gas stations out of gas (even the neighborhood ones here in good ole Tomball), newscasters on 24/7 about Ike (a decent replacement for round the clock McCain/Obama, but I turned both types off after a few minutes of repetition), evacuations and dire predictions. Like before, everything that could be a serious projectile (except them damn acorns) has been put up or tied down.
I like the fact that we collectively do not know where this thing is going, just like we don’t know if a black hole or Higgs Boson will appear at the LHC. There are ‘too many variables’ (you anti-mathies remember variables? I love variables, best thing ever for a Math Major) to accurately predict many outcomes.
It’s a good humbling thing for the human race to not know or be able to predict everything.
