[Krimel] >Weather forecasting is enormously more accurate to today than it was even >20years ago. I live in the path of storms I attend to such things. As I >have told you before insurance, polling, market analysis, casinos, sports, >advertising, hell think of any area of human endeavor that is not actively >involved in formalizing its intuitions to improve its probability of >success. Name anything that we do that is not about manipulating >probabilities and patterns to remove uncertainty from our future.
[Matt] While weather forecasting has improved, among other things, this is not due to Chaos Theory. Science (or typical science) assumes, contrary to Chaos theory, that if we knew everything there was to know about weather we would predict the outcome 100% of the time. Weather forecasting is not just about manipulating probabilities and patterns; it comes from knowledge about how weather works, and using that knowledge to predict outcomes. Our increased accuracy on weather is due to increased knowledge about weather, and is completely unrelated to Chaos theory. [Krimel] Chaos Theory is not the only cause of improved forecasting but it is a factor. It provides a theoretically framework for what kind of limits we can expect in accuracy and over what range of time we can expect forecasts to deteriorate. It also can help forecasters tweak their computer models and help establish the range of variation in predictions. It suggests which factors are likely to have a greater impact under differing conditions and helps forecasters decide what to look for with their radar and satellites. The theory itself received a major boost from Meteorologist Edward Lorenz' discovery of the strange attractor that bears his name. He demonstrated that stable patterns (static quality) can arise and persist under chaotic conditions (DQ). Prigogine gives other examples of similar order arising spontaneously in nature. The point for Ham and Platt should be that there are many demonstrations of SQ arising spontaneously out of DQ in nature. These dynamically driven chaotic patterns are often all the more static because they emerge from and can adapt to change. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
