the random oracle

I was up in Boston this past week for some family and work things, and I’d bought my tickets a long while back on the Bolt / Mega bus companies because they give you awesome deals if you buy far enough in advance.  Unfortunately when I got here I kept on seeing talk on the news about some tropical storm that was supposed to hit New England and so I was worried about going home through torrential downpours, especially since I’d be passing through Connecticut, otherwise known as Automotive Death Valley.

But now I’m on the bus back and really it’s just a rainy day, nothing special at all.  Originally there were projecting 2 inches of rainfall but now I think they’re saying 0.5 inches instead.  I have two thoughts about this:

• Is our weather prediction ability really so poor that we can’t even get an accurate picture of what it’ll be like in 1 or 2 days?  I mean some of these Chicken Little predictions were made last night.
• Maybe the predictions are fine and it’s just that the news stations exaggerate in order to get better viewership?  After all a rainy day isn’t so newsworthy, but a tropical storm is.

Which leads to the next thought: maybe I’m not used to such exaggerated predictions because I rarely watch the weather report on the news; wunderground.com is much less sensationalistic.  But maybe the people who do watch these weather reports have gotten so de-sensitized to such reports that they start ignoring them?  Maybe Katrina wouldn’t have been as bad if people really believed that it would be as bad as people said?  And maybe they would believe it more if they weren’t constantly bombarded with alarming weather reports that turn out to be duds?