[m i a o w] the cat

Great. I get to hang around with a meteorologist. If my blogger posts had imported correctly, you would know that my recent exposure to meteorologists has left me considerably underwelmed. Shall I just throw a few words around? Lets try: scientific, uncharismatic, obsessed with attaining accuracy but not concerned about how to translate the information to the end user (read: Joe Bloggs) um….quite nice but not the kind of people you would want to be trapped by at a party.

I am sick of probability and ‘how to convey it to the public’. It’s not worth a case study, a focus group, major research and me hanging at the Bureau. It’s simple. Introduce it to weather forecasts. Add it to the information that is already there (because people don’t actually understand that either, everyone interprets ‘fine’ a different way) and then when the forecaster/weather girl/Edwin Marr says ‘there will is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow’ they follow on by saying….’and that means that there is a %70 chance that it will rain tomorrow in Melbourne’ (and ideally they would continue…..’this means that you should probably carry an umberella, 70% percent chance of rain means that there is a 30% chance that it won’t rain and this does not mean that as Cloud gathers over Melbourne it does not yell at Cloud No. 16 over in the far left corner pocket,
‘Hey! Come a bit closer in will you? We have to rain today, but only over 70% of metropolitan Melbourne - so move over a bit, because if we rain while we’re in this formation, we’ll probably hit about 85% of the city and that would just be wrong.’
*Sigh*
You can see I’m reaching meltdown.
hmmmm…what is the probability of that?
argh!!
[strangles self]