Weather has been on my mind lately. We had to dodge about and modify our route to get from Texas to home without being trapped by flooded or icy roads. I saw that Firefox, my favorite browser for its privacy settings, was not available in version 4.0 RC. Those last two letters stand for "release candidate", or "nearly ready for everyone." I like to try new things and switched to 4.0 but I found that my favorite add-on (from the Weather Channel, the one that keeps me informed more or less steadily about the weather) is not available in that version of Firefox. So, I removed it and re-installed the latest full release.
Now, another winter storm threatens to interrupt our plans even though we don't want it to do that. Mark Twain, like the Greeks, has a word about the subject. He said that everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. In the sense of causation and control, I guess that is true. I haven't heard of much starting or stopping of weather by people. However, there are other ways to do something about the weather and one of them is prediction and warning.
Most of my life, disparaging jokes about the uselessly inaccurate weather forecasts have been ongoing, something that most of us can agree on and chuckle over. I was just told recently that some expert or other had stated that weather predictions more than a day or two into the future are very chancy. Of course, the movement is complicated so that a storm over there may or may not get over here. However, knowing that there is a storm over there at least gives me a warning of the possibility of it reaching me. Doppler radar and visual predictions of changes of the national weather pattern certainly give me something to think about while I am waiting for the sun to come out.
