Into the Void

I haven’t looked at a weather report today but last night they were saying possibly a foot of snow. The weather people run a Monte Carlo simulation then incorrectly take an average of the results. This is stupid because the European model is sometimes so far off the American models that the average is wrong, just wrong. Last big storm closely matched the Eu model.

A model is a computer program. You type in past temp, humidity, wind speed and direction. It spits out an answer based on over 50 years of accumulated data. There are lots of possible weather but most of the possibilities are almost identical and so your weather person tells you the most likely. You probably have noticed that weather has been chaotic and extreme lately. Soon the models will no longer work. Yahoo!

A model isn’t really a lookup table, it’s a bunch of equations. The more data points you enter and the better the resolution of the data points, the more accurate the prediction. I invite you to read James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science for a history of weather prediction, among other topics.

Yes, weather patterns have changed due to global warming. The models no longer work very well.

There’s a theory that isn’t widely accepted, in part I think because narrow-minded scientists can’t grasp the fullness of the theory. The theory is that there have been multiple large meteor hits throughout the life of the solar system – which wasn’t accepted at all when the book was written. Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision.” They laughed at him because he related Greek Mythology to the planets they named their gods after. Velikovsky’s theory was that in human time there was at least one near miss by a large celestial body that visibly changed the courses of the planets. He specifically talked about the sound made by a large meteor entering the atmosphere of earth. Do you remember the sonic boom from the meteor that hurtled across the sky over Russia in February 2013? Nobody in biblical times would have heard anything that loud before. The loudest thing they might have heard is trumpets. So that’s what they’d call the sound. The Greeks heard or described the sound as “typhooooo” and invented the monster Typhon around it. You recognize the word typhoon as a terrible storm.

I think some brain cells died and are releasing this stuff.

Velikovsky had celestial bodies bouncing around the solar system like billiard balls. That’s why scientists laugh at him. But there’s a possibility that Greek Mythology was based on multiple occurrences of a comet flyby, not one huge cosmic cataclysm.

What are the chances that a large meteor would hit the earth just as Israelites were attacking a fortress. VERY slim except they were pretty much constantly attacking somebody during that time period and most of their attacks weren’t accompanied by trumpets.

While God’s chosen were still wandering goatherds there were actual civilizations. Sumerians, Babylonians, PhoenicianZs… And they had astrologers. Kings consulted the astrologers before making any decision and for some reason it worked pretty well.

Then around the same time as the battle of jericho something happened. The astronomers could no longer predict the future. Velikovsky surmised that there was a cosmic event that was so big it changed the length of the day. Which sounds kind of crazy. BUT experiments putting people in deep caves and allowing them to sleep whenever they want to showed that humans tend to revert to a 25-hour day. Prior to that experiments with mosquitos showed the same thing.

But anyway, I like to say that the astronomers can no longer predict the future. %-P

The mosquitoes, btw, have their internal clock reset every morning at dawn. It can be reset with a flash of light too. These internal clock functions are called “circadian rhythms.”

As an aside, a fellow named Winfree realized that a burst of electricity could be used to restart a fibrillating heart. To test his theory he set up an experiment. He used a burst of current to stop his heart and another to restart it. This led to the invention of the defibrillator used in hospitals today. NOTE: the janitor found him dead on the floor of the lab. Oops!!

One theory in bipolar disorder is that a time gene doesn’t work, so the bipolar’s circadian rhythms aren’t reset every day. There’s also a time center in the hypothalamus that can cause problems.