Google Earth, and other thoughts

I was flipping through Google Earth today, looking at various things.  I remember reading about Chiba from William Gibson, but the images didn’t strike me as what I thought it would be.  I guess street view provides a way at looking at things far away that you normally wouldn’t ever see.  For some reason, Tokyo didn’t strike me as what I thought Tokyo would be.  I don’t know why. 

After not seeing what I wanted to see there, I went and looked at Hong Kong.  I think my mental picture of Japan has always been tied to Hong Kong and Kowloon Walled City.  I think that is what I expected to see.  I’ve been obsessed with urban density for a while, but I don’t think I’ve ever looked at Google Earth and examined areas that seem to be densely populated. 

It makes me think about old wives tales, and other things that we supposedly “know” but aren’t based on any sort of fact.  The tale this year said the winter was supposed to be a “hard” winter.  Thinking about the verbage, I don’t know what that even means.  Maybe a “hard” winter is a long, cold winter?  I don’t know.  It’s hard to describe.  But what we’ve experienced so far does not jive with conventional wisdom.  Short-sleeve weather in December just isn’t normal in this part of the country.  I really expected to be wearing my thermal underwear every day last week, but that wasn’t the case. 

The other thing that I think of is the effectiveness of predictions.  You can predict anything you want, but if you aren’t accurate, then your predictions are worthless. If the predictions don’t match reality, then there’s no point in the prediction.  I’ve often thought of that in regards to global warming, but then I’ve also never seen anyone check the efficacy of predictions made 5, 10, 15, and 20 years ago.  Surely people made predictions back then.  I’m inclined to think (based on the equations being chaotic equations) that 5 years is just about the upper maximum of accurate predictions.  But I have no scientific evidence to back that up. 

Jurassic Park talked about chaos theory a lot, without ever accurately defining it.  In chaos theory, the outputs of one equation become the inputs of the next equation.  Because of the nature of the inputs and the possibilities of slight variations, the outputs can vary widely.  For weather, it’s generally accurate to 5 days.  If the time period is any longer, variation causes the predictions to be negatively correlated to accuracy.  In layman’s terms, don’t believe a forecast more than 5 days out.