As I walked home, commuting from the office tonight, I saw what looked like a dark rain cloud rising in the West. One of the joys of living on the edge of a continent is the kinds of dramatic weather events that sweep in from the mighty Pacific.
It's a reminder of how small and powerless we are, little mammals beholding the much greater power in the sky.
An hour later, that cloud seems to have shrunk back into something that looks more like one of more familiar fog banks. According to my handy iPhone weather app, there is only a 7 percent chance of rain tonight, so I'm going with that.
Seven percent is essentially a one in 14 probability. Those are not very good odds for most bets. However, if you had a one in 14 chance to win a car in a drawing, those would be excellent odds.
I've been reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't, which I commend to anyone wanting to think more deeply about probabilities, causation and correlation.
As a former math major who could not handle the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and therefore switched to story-telling, I have nevertheless always remained in love with math in the abstract.
Maybe it is the kind of unrequited love for something or someone who will never notice you, or value you. I'm kinda in love with math but math is most definitely not in love with me -- nor with my brain.
But when numbers cycle in and out, always, everywhere, all the time, I feel beset by the mathematical beauty of the universe. There are, as Silver eloquently demonstrates, mathematical models that quite accurately predict the path of storms nowadays.
So a 7 percent chance of rain is just that -- something unlikely to happen more than once every fourteen times these particular meteorological conditions develop in this micro-climate.
Then again, maybe this will be that night?
That is something even math does not know. Because there is also always magic afoot.
No comments:
Post a Comment