Weather Forecast Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Weather Forecast. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.
George Carlin
Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.
Bill Nye
Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
George Carlin
    The weapon gave a rusty croak. ‘I don’t normally do weather reports anymore,’ the gun informed him politely.      ‘Why is that?’      ‘Ever since the demise of the old metropolis, there has been no control of the weather systems. Anyone who would have appreciated a weather forecast perished an awful long time ago. Besides, every time I started to inform my potential victims of the current cloud formations, or wind velocity, or barometric pressure, or potential precipitation, they simply ran away.
A.R. Merrydew (Our Blue Orange)
I'm pretty sure Jo couldn't talk about the weather without somehow including a threat. Forecast today: cloudy with a chance I'll kick your ass.
Eliza Crewe (Cracked (Soul Eaters, #1))
Some people in life, Sue, are weather forecasters, whereas other people are the weather itself.
Richard Osman (The Man Who Died Twice (A Thursday Murder Club Mystery))
There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average
Stephen Hawking (Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays)
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
Saki (The Complete Saki)
As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.
Stephen Hawking
It was the perfect trip, and as far as Stephen was concerned, the whole weekend was one magical accident. And that's because he is the weather, and I am the weather forecaster. He believes in fate, while I am fate.
Richard Osman (The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2))
To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end, when the air is flowered with jasmine and peach, and the weather day after day is flawless, and the forecast is hurricane.
Linda Pastan (The Imperfect Paradise)
Weatherman says," Kev scoffed. "I wouldn't trust that silly bugger to know it's raining now.
Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #1))
Value versus Cost Economists tend to focus on cost, and, as economists, we are as guilty of that as anyone. The entire premise of our first book, Prediction Machines, was that AI advances were going to dramatically reduce the cost of prediction, leading to a scale-up of its use. However, while that book suggested that the initial uses of AI would be where prediction was already occurring, either explicitly in, say, forecasting sales or the weather, or implicitly in classifying photos and language, we were mindful that the real opportunity would be the new applications and uses that were enabled when prediction costs fell low enough.
Ajay Agrawal (Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence)
Fuck the weather forecasters and their predictions. With magic, he’d just turned their Doppler radar upside down. Sapphire Phelan (Being Familiar With a Witch)
Sapphire Phelan
History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts. Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system. What will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100 per cent accuracy the price of oil tomorrow? The price of oil will immediately react to the forecast, which would consequently fail to materialise. If the current price of oil is $90 a barrel, and the infallible computer program predicts that tomorrow it will be $100, traders will rush to buy oil so that they can profit from the predicted price rise. As a result, the price will shoot up to $100 a barrel today rather than tomorrow. Then what will happen tomorrow? Nobody knows.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries.
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
- Obviously, we're hoping that the weather forecasters are wrong, the way they tend to be about ninety-eight percent of the time A few adults chuckled at that lameness. I remember thinking, hoping, that I would never turn into the kind of person who though weather jokes were funny.
Siobhan Vivian (The Last Boy and Girl in the World)
The Americans have perfected weather forecasts: a model presents a model of the Earth, a map, and jabs at it with her pointer – here and here, this is going to happen. Voodoo.
Péter Zilahy (The Last Window-Giraffe: A Picture Dictionary for the over Fives)
If there is a mutual distrust between the weather forecaster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't)
The brighter the sunlight, the worse it affects them," said Einstein. "So we got to pay more attention to the weather forecast," said DogNut. "Cloudy with a chance of zombies.
Charlie Higson (The Fear (The Enemy #3))
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
Economics is a discipline for quiet times. The profession, it turns out, … has no grip on understanding how the abnormal grows out of the normal and what happens next, its practitioners like weather forecasters who don’t understand storms. —Will Hutton, journalist The Observer, London
Mark Buchanan (Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics)
She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the equanimity of a weather forecaster.
Joyce Carol Oates (The Falls)
Sometimes I wish there were a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.
Nicola Yoon (Instructions for Dancing)
Life is like the weather,despite a sunny forecast you can get wet.
Dick Francis
Like the weather or bonds between lovers, transformations can never be predicted. All energy transmutes one day or another, in one way or another. Either in its form or composition, or in its position or disposition.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man's psychological makeup, stemming probably from an ancient distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they're right, then they're somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet. "This Moment of the Storm
Roger Zelazny (The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth)
The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.
Niall Williams (Four Letters of Love)
Like the weather or bonds between lovers, transformations cannot always be predicted. All energy transmutes one day or another, in one way or another. Either in its form or composition, or in its position or disposition.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
...Taking chances. Risking a little to gain a lot, fully aware that the word 'promise' defies definition. Outcomes cannot be predicted. There are too many variables. Sometimes you have to close your eyes to forecast the weather.
Ellen Hopkins (Triangles)
WE MUST USE OUR SENSE OF REASON AND NOT SHUT THAT OFF BECAUSE IT CONFLICTS WITH THE OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA.
Dane Wigington
There’s three things you should never believe—weather forecasts, the canteen menu, and intel.
Karen Traviss (Hard Contact (Star Wars: Republic Commando, #1))
I heartily recommend Alan Watts’ little book Instant Weather Forecasting, which taught me how to predict weather changes in minutes.
Bernard Moitessier (A Sea Vagabond's World: Boats and Sails, Distant Shores, Islands and Lagoons (Sheridan House Maritime Classics))
Times change! Before, no one believed the weather forecast. Today in the news only the weather forecast can be trusted.
Ljupka Cvetanova (Yet Another New Land)
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
Each test score had been lower than the last, reading like a strange weather forecast: ninety in September, mid-eighties in October, low seventies in November, sixties before Christmas.
Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)
I do think that, of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we are plagued, this “weather-forecast” fraud is about the most aggravating.  It “forecasts” precisely what happened yesterday or a the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen to-day.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog))
The weather forecasters,” continues Elizabeth, “and here that’s me and Ibrahim—we always have our fingers in the air, trying to feel which way the wind is blowing. We never want to be surprised or caught out.
Richard Osman (The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2))
Like the weather or bonds between lovers, transformations can never be predicted. All energy transmutes one day or another, in one way or another. Either in its form or composition. Or in its position or disposition.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
I have a small, tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with me and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It’s a weather forecast from the Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto, “Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.
Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)
Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. 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. We’ve tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a 50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
Some readers are bound to want to take the techniques we’ve introduced here and try them on the problem of forecasting the future price of securities on the stock market (or currency exchange rates, and so on). Markets have very different statistical characteristics than natural phenomena such as weather patterns. Trying to use machine learning to beat markets, when you only have access to publicly available data, is a difficult endeavor, and you’re likely to waste your time and resources with nothing to show for it. Always remember that when it comes to markets, past performance is not a good predictor of future returns—looking in the rear-view mirror is a bad way to drive. Machine learning, on the other hand, is applicable to datasets where the past is a good predictor of the future.
François Chollet (Deep Learning with Python)
That most pleasant weather to feel is the one never felt.
Criss Jami (Healology)
The most important thing that most people get from the news is the prediction of the following day’s weather, which most people are usually able to predict correctly by themselves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Meteorologists seem to be better at forecasting the weather (at least in the short term) than we are at forecasting our own mood in the future.
Timothy A. Pychyl (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change)
This a bit like forecasting the weather a year ahead. Actually, it's not a bit like that. It's exactly like that.
Vernon Coleman (Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying. Here's The Proof.)
Human sense of direction, if anything, is a sense of wrong direction.
Robert L. Mooers Jr. (Finding Your Way in the Outdoors: Compass Navigation, Map Reading, Route Finding, Weather Forecasting)
Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, email, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three bread crumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven.
Walter Kirn
Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. In a sense, asking people to make political decisions is like asking them to forecast the weather. They’re not in a position to do so, and it is silly to expect them to. Democracy entails people who run their businesses well being forced to run their businesses poorly by people who can’t run businesses at all.
Michael Malice (The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics)
All the forecasts were tentatively hopeful about the idea of it not actually continuing to rain for the remainder of ever, but Varney had his doubts. It really did seem slightly sinister.
Vivian Shaw (Grave Importance (Dr. Greta Helsing #3))
Ordinarily one need not be preoccupied with time in the woods. Indeed, something is to be said for going there to forget it, but it is well to develop a habit of noting times for distances traveled.
Robert L. Mooers Jr. (Finding Your Way in the Outdoors: Compass Navigation, Map Reading, Route Finding, Weather Forecasting)
In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear. Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.
Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy)
The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modeling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and another by James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed. It was led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of MIT, who, in the 1940s, had been the first meteorologist to demonstrate that numerical weather forecasting was feasible. The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences’ summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modelers’work but had been unable to find any. “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,
Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe)
while we professors, lawyers, physicians, agronomists, artisans, instead of busying ourselves with books, legal papers, diagnoses, weather forecasts, machine parts, were making piles of bricks that we would be ordered to unpile the day following, that verse from Exodus came into my mind, the verse in which the children of Israel are forced to bake bricks for Pharaoh of Egypt to build the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.
Lion Feuchtwanger (The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940)
weather forecast that it was going to be rough and had taken a pill. Miss Abbott was tramping up and down the narrow lower deck, having, perhaps instinctively, hit upon that part of the ship which after the first few hours is deserted by almost everyone. In the plan shown to passengers it was called the promenade deck. It was Jemima who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book;
Ngaio Marsh (Singing in the Shrouds (Roderick Alleyn, #20))
Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts. Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
A map may become outdated when a newer version comes out, but the old one is never useless. With time a map becomes a graphic history of things as they were, and to the user a map is a friend to be treasured and a diary of past adventure.
Robert L. Mooers Jr. (Finding Your Way in the Outdoors: Compass Navigation, Map Reading, Route Finding, Weather Forecasting)
a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.
Nicola Yoon (Instructions for Dancing)
If a model did anything too obviously bizarre—flooded the Sahara or tripled interest rates—the programmers would revise the equations to bring the output back in line with expectation. In practice, econometric models proved dismally blind to what the future would bring, but many people who should have known better acted as though they believed in the results. Forecasts of economic growth or unemployment were put forward with an implied precision of two or three decimal places. Governments and financial institutions paid for such predictions and acted on them, perhaps out of necessity or for want of anything better. Presumably they knew that such variables as “consumer optimism” were not as nicely measurable as “humidity” and that the perfect differential equations had not yet been written for the movement of politics and fashion. But few realized how fragile was the very process of modeling flows on computers, even when the data was reasonably trustworthy and the laws were purely physical, as in weather forecasting.
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
do think that of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we are plagued, this ‘weather-forecast’ fraud is about the most aggravating. It ‘forecasts’ precisely what happened yesterday or the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen today.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat)
Did you ever notice that most of us relate to our lives like we have no control or say over them? Especially in areas where we’re not proud. We speak about ourselves like we’re reporting on the weather, making sweeping generalizations...And boy do we ever believe our own ‘forecasts.
Lauren Handel Zander (Maybe It's You: Cut the Crap. Face Your Fears. Love Your Life.)
She fusses for the wrong reasons. She's not really fussing because severe weather is in today's forecast, or because my brother Ethan died, leaving her with only one child to fret about, or because I'm addicted to prescription drugs--which she doesn't even know--but because Mercury is in retrograde.
Khristina Chess
If a weather forecaster said today’s high temperature would be seventy degrees Fahrenheit and it is sixty-five degrees, the forecaster made an error of plus five degrees. Evidently, this approach does not work for nonverifiable judgments like the Gambardi problem, which have no true outcome. How, then, are we to decide what constitutes good judgment? The answer is that there is a second way to evaluate judgments. This approach applies both to verifiable and nonverifiable ones. It consists in evaluating the process of judgment. When we speak of good or bad judgments, we may be speaking either about the output (e.g., the number you produced in the Gambardi case) or about the process—what you did to arrive at that number.
Daniel Kahneman (Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment)
We’ve all experienced managing our emotions to some degree. But what we usually practice is a kind of “fair-weather management.” When the sun is shining and the sky is clear, we can smile and feel emotionally balanced. But when a storm appears—especially one that wasn’t forecast—our emotions are thrown into turmoil. We’re basically at the mercy of our inner environment.
Doc Childre (The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath's Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart's Intelligence)
Here’s an experiment worth conducting. Sneak into the home of a NASA skeptic in the dead of night and remove all technologies from the home and environs that were directly or indirectly influenced by space innovations: microelectronics, GPS, scratch-resistant lenses, cordless power tools, memory-foam mattresses and head cushions, ear thermometers, household water filters, shoe insoles, long-distance telecommunication devices, adjustable smoke detectors, and safety grooving of pavement, to name a few. While you’re at it, make sure to reverse the person’s LASIK surgery. Upon waking, the skeptic embarks on a newly barren existence in a state of untenable technological poverty, with bad eyesight to boot, while getting rained on without an umbrella because of not knowing the satellite-informed weather forecast for that day.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier)
Imagine a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles in diameter, with a bumpy surface, surrounded by a 25-mile-deep mixture of different gases whose concentrations vary both spatially and over time, and heated, along with its surrounding gases, by a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away. Imagine also that this sphere is revolving around the nuclear reactor and that some locations are heated more during parts of the revolution. And imagine that this mixture of gases receives continually inputs from the surface below, generally calmly but sometimes through violent and highly localized injections. Then, imagine that after watching the gaseous mixture you are expected to predict its state at one location on the sphere one, two, or more days into the future. This is essentially the task encountered day by day by a weather forecaster.
Robert T. Ryan
My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’” I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer. Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my “studio” downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. “That one is two hundred dollars.” (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.
Richard P. Feynman (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character)
The Weather Service was initially organized under the Department of War by President Ulysses S. Grant, who authorized it in 1870. This was partly because President Grant was convinced that only a culture of military discipline could produce the requisite accuracy in forecasting25 and partly because the whole enterprise was so hopeless that it was only worth bothering with during wartime when you would try almost anything to get an edge.
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
Unexpected tears burned at her eyes. An impulse to put her arms around him, to stroke her hands over his strong back, propelled her a step forward. No! She gripped the top rail of the fence, appalled. Not three minutes ago she’d told Marti how the lessons learned about this man on Santa Estella and in the years since were deeply ingrained. Then, one sympathetic exchange with him–good heavens, she didn’t even know if her suppositions were close to the mark–and she would throw her arms around him? Maybe she needed to be more careful around him. Much more careful. And maybe she better keep an eye on the weather forecast for hurricanes venturing into Wyoming. * * * * “Now, Matthew, you stay put,” Kendra ordered once she had him encased in his bib and safely in his high chair. “ ‘Unch!” he ordered. “Please?” “Pease.” “That’s a good boy. I’ll get it right away.” Over her shoulder, she added to Daniel, “Keep an eye on him, will
Patricia McLinn (Lost and Found Groom (A Place Called Home, #1))
I will always be the other woman. I disappear for a time like the moon in daylight, then rise at night all mother-of-pearl so that a man’s upturned face, watching, will have reflected on it the milk of longing. And though he may leave, memory will perfect me. One day the light may fall in a certain way on Penelope’s hair, and he will pause wildly… but when she turns, it will only be his wife, to whom white sheets simply mean laundry— even Nausikaä in her silly braids thought more washing linen than of him, preferring Odysseus clean and oiled to that briny, unkempt lion I would choose. Let Dido and her kind leap from cliffs for love. My men will moan and dream of me for years… desire and need become the same animal in the silken dark. To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end, when the air is flowered with jasmine and peach, and the weather day after day is flawless, and the forecast is hurricane.
Linda Pastan (The Imperfect Paradise)
They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech. Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, "Clouds. Unseen." Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, "As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded." And Giskard's reply of "Predicted. Interview, rather," was the equivalent of "So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about.
Isaac Asimov (Robots and Empire (Robot, #4))
Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history. It is natural and inevitable that we live in nation states, organise our economy along capitalist principles, and fervently believe in human rights. To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights. History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-book Collection: A Brief History of Humankind and A Brief History of Tomorrow)
Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer—a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously—you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That’s been a cherished scientific belief since Newton.” “And?” “Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. 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. We’ve tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)
Murray Leinster (A Logic Named Joe)
What’s the point of making predictions if they cannot change anything? Some complex systems, such as the weather, are oblivious to our predictions. The process of human development, in contrast, reacts to them. Indeed, the better our forecasts, the more reactions they engender. Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected. The more we know, the less we can predict. Imagine, for example, that one day experts decipher the basic laws of the economy. Once this happens, banks, governments, investors and customers will begin to use this new knowledge to act in novel ways, and gain an edge over their competitors. For what is the use of new knowledge if it doesn’t lead to novel behaviours?
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
I have found it frustrating at times that so few people know what the space program does and, as a result, are unaware that they benefit from it. Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries. The
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
The Princeton economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter has offered a compelling demonstration of the power of simple statistics to outdo world-renowned experts. Ashenfelter wanted to predict the future value of fine Bordeaux wines from information available in the year they are made. The question is important because fine wines take years to reach their peak quality, and the prices of mature wines from the same vineyard vary dramatically across different vintages; bottles filled only twelve months apart can differ in value by a factor of 10 or more. An ability to forecast future prices is of substantial value, because investors buy wine, like art, in the anticipation that its value will appreciate. It is generally agreed that the effect of vintage can be due only to variations in the weather during the grape-growing season. The best wines are produced when the summer is warm and dry, which makes the Bordeaux wine industry a likely beneficiary of global warming. The industry is also helped by wet springs, which increase quantity without much effect on quality. Ashenfelter converted that conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of a wine—for a particular property and at a particular age—by three features of the weather: the average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. His formula provides accurate price forecasts years and even decades into the future. Indeed, his formula forecasts future prices much more accurately than the current prices of young wines do. This new example of a “Meehl pattern” challenges the abilities of the experts whose opinions help shape the early price. It also challenges economic theory, according to which prices should reflect all the available information, including the weather. Ashenfelter’s formula is extremely accurate—the correlation between his predictions and actual prices is above .90.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
The next day’s call would be vital. Then at 12:02 P.M., the radio came to life. “Bear at camp two, it’s Neil. All okay?” I heard the voice loud and clear. “Hungry for news,” I replied, smiling. He knew exactly what I meant. “Now listen, I’ve got a forecast and an e-mail that’s come through for you from your family. Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?” “Go on, then, let’s get the bad news over with,” I replied. “Well, the weather’s still lousy. The typhoon is now on the move again, and heading this way. If it’s still on course tomorrow you’ve got to get down, and fast. Sorry.” “And the good news?” I asked hopefully. “Your mother sent a message via the weather guys. She says all the animals at home are well.” Click. “Well, go on, that can’t be it. What else?” “Well, they think you’re still at base camp. Probably best that way. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” “Thanks, buddy. Oh, and pray for change. It will be our last chance.” “Roger that, Bear. Don’t start talking to yourself. Out.” I had another twenty-four hours to wait. It was hell. Knowingly feeling my body get weaker and weaker in the vain hope of a shot at the top. I was beginning to doubt both myself and my decision to stay so high. I crept outside long before dawn. It was 4:30 A.M. I sat huddled, waiting for the sun to rise while sitting in the porch of my tent. My mind wandered to being up there--up higher on this unforgiving mountain of attrition. Would I ever get a shot at climbing in that deathly land above camp three? By 10:00 A.M. I was ready on the radio. This time, though, they called early. “Bear, your God is shining on you. It’s come!” Henry’s voice was excited. “The cyclone has spun off to the east. We’ve got a break. A small break. They say the jet-stream winds are lifting again in two days. How do you think you feel? Do you have any strength left?” “We’re rocking, yeah, good, I mean fine. I can’t believe it.” I leapt to my feet, tripped over the tent’s guy ropes, and let out a squeal of sheer joy. These last five days had been the longest of my life.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
mechanisms of weather predictions are very similar to those of climate predictions. So if we’re comfortable trusting local forecasters’ predictions about weather, we should probably think about trusting the predictions coming out of the country’s climate laboratories.
Heidi Cullen (The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet)
Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
The best weather prediction for the present moment is to look out of the window!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The lunchroom is filling fast, the heavy air filled with the smell of oil. Grease, salt, a deep fryer...yup, french fries, again. I feel my face breaking out before I eat a single fry, before I get on the lunch line, before I even stand up. I touch my cheek. No zits yet, but they're coming. I can feel them like an old lady feels the weather in her bones. I don't need to be an old lady to forecast the weather in the lunchroom: it's hot, thick, sticky, and sweaty with a likely chance of cliques and cruelty.
Matt Blackstone (Sorry You're Lost)
In other words, the brightness of the Pleiades in late June indeed correlates with rainfall during the growing season for potatoes the following October through March.8 This climate forecast is one of many that have come to the attention of scientists, and it reinforces the importance and significance of traditional knowledge.
Heidi Cullen (The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet)
Predictions often give us an illusion of control in situations that are inherently out of our control. Nothing exemplifies this better than our relationship to weather forecasts.
Heidi Cullen (The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet)
The goal was to build a model that represented the climate system. This was no small task. Weather models are concerned only about what’s happening in the atmosphere. The atmosphere has a memory of roughly one week. That’s why your local weather forecast goes out only about a week.
Heidi Cullen (The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet)
This is a very important distinction between weather and climate models: for climate forecasts, the initial conditions in the atmosphere are not as important as the external forcings that have the ability to alter the character and types of weather (i.e., the statistics or what scientists would call the “distribution” of the weather) that make up the climate.
Heidi Cullen (The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet)
When there are patches of clouds in the sky and you can see the sun, it is not going to storm.
Angela Khristin Brown (Poetry Collection)
I will have to pay more attention to Russian weather forecasts in future, to check that Kiev, Warsaw, Riga and Vilnius are not included in their maps.
Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine Diaries)
Wisdom of the Ages "Assault and Battery" Weather forecast for the St. Louis Rams next Sunday in Seattle.
Matthew D. Heines
Evangelista Torricelli, the Italian physicist who invented the barometer, the instrument used to forecast storms by registering fluctuations in air pressure, was an infant in mid-1609. The instrument he invented would not be in common use at sea for another hundred years. Without science to guide them, Somers and Newport and the other Sea Venture mariners were forced to rely largely on signs and portents to warn of bad weather.
Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
Thus, a person can believe in the existence of Jesus or the existence of God all that he or she wants.  But without those important elements of commitment and of trust, there is no salvation.  James 2:19 says, "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble."  A simple example of that occurs with the weather.  If the forecaster says a chance of rain, then the person may or may not carry an umbrella.  But if the forecaster says that it will rain then the person that truly believes in the forecast will carry an umbrella.  In the same way, the person that truly believes in Jesus in the correct biblical context will commit to Him and will also trust in Him.  That is what it means to be saved.   Solomon said above to trust in the Lord with all of one's heart and to not lean unto one's own understanding.  For the person that has not come to Him by faith, that admonition says to come to Him by faith.  For the person that has come to Him by faith, it encourages trusting Him in all the important areas of life.  A godly person trusting in the Lord should commit his or her life to Him and trust in Him.  That commitment and trust pertain to decisions about education, career, finances, and anything else that can go wrong with a bad decision.  When a person must choose between one's own path and the Lord's path, always go in the way of His leading.
James Thomas Lee Jr. (Daily Devotions from the Book of Proverbs)
steered his four-wheel drive up the windy road leading to the Castle Mountain Lodge. His tires crunched on the freshly fallen snow. The plows couldn’t keep up with the thick white stuff covering the roads and Colin was pretty sure they’d given up on trying to keep the roads clear. He hadn’t seen one in over an hour. The weather forecast had said it would
Elena Aitken (Unexpected Gifts (Castle Mountain Lodge, #1))
We’ve all experienced times when other people see the same event we see but remember it differently. (Typically, we think our view is the correct one.) The differences arise because of the ways our separate mental models shape what we see. I’ll say it again: Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
Accountants study math, doctors and nurses study medicine, and weather forecasters study meteorology, so why don't tacticians study tactical science?
Charles "Sid" Heal (Field Command)
It was eleven forty-five, overcast, fourteen degrees above zero, and damp. Cold for any month of the year, even January. The forecast called for a major snowstorm. They said it was moving in from Chicago. Ten to fifteen inches by nightfall. It was not the best day to be standing outside, but the congressman from Arizona was oblivious to the weather.
Eric Rill (Pinnacle Of Deceit)
As the ancients tried to understand the forces they encountered in the natural world, they invented personal names for them, much as weather forecasters still do with hurricanes. Further, they unconsciously projected their own consciousness into these storms and other natural phenomena. This is how the human mind first came to create the idea of personal spirits and gods; they were a class of unseen beings that were thought to be responsible for everything that happened in the natural world. We can easily understand how and why the ancients arrived at their polytheistic world-view, because even today we might find a two-year-old who hits his head on the table corner turning round to address the offending object by saying, ‘You naughty table!
Lloyd Geering (Reimagining God: The Faith Journey of a Modern Heretic)
Please tell me it's going to rain today, Francois.' 'Ah!' he smiled. (This was obviously familiar territory.) 'I regret to inform you that the forecast calls for nothing but sunshine.' 'Relentless sunshine,' she corrected him.
Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector)
Saranyu Hiaku Saranyu, Goddess of the Clouds; weather forecast: Eight shit months of rain.
Beryl Dov