Some thoughts upon being chased from a Starbucks outdoor patio during a light drizzle.

I used to be the kind of person who enjoyed being out in the rain, but since I’ve started carrying around large amounts of electronics, I’ve become as sensitized to precipitation as the Wicked Witch of the West. A little rain never hurt those of us wrapped in epidermes, but my flat buddy with the big monitor can’t say the same.

So while the rain was pitter-pattering on my left arm (my right arm and laptop safely under the Starbucks umbrella), I pulled up the NOAA forecast for my zip code. 20% chance of rain today, going up to 70% around 9 PM tonight. This kind of forecasting made sense when most people checked the weather on their way to work in the morning, but is this really the best we can do now that most of us have access to this data all day long?

I’m guessing that a qualified meteorologist could look at a satellite map and tell me at 3 PM that I’m 95% likely to get shpritzed on at 3:30 PM within the square block I intend to be. Heck, I can pull up those same maps on my computer, I just don’t know how to read them. I realize that we’re still unable to do much better than that hours ahead of time (chaotic systems being what they are), but I’ve got this here Internet which I can use to ask, “hey, is it going to rain in the next hour on the 3000 block of Connecticut? Should I go sit outside or am I better off staying home?”

For all I know, what I’m asking for would require a supercluster. Or maybe Google will provide it for free in six months. Or an upstart Ph.D. with a smart hacker nephew could toss it together. Seems to me, there’s data I want that I can’t have; there’s data out there that can be used to determine this with high precision; someone should bring that together.