Snow Day

 It snowed in Portland, Oregon. It snowed in Seattle. It snowed in Texas, and all across the South.

It was supposed to snow quite a bit in Columbus, Ohio. We are under a Level 2 Snow Emergency, which means stay home if you possibly can, so my campus director closed the campus, cancelling my lab for today.

I look out my windows, and I see snow. But on Molly, out '97 Toyota Camry in the driveway, I see about two inches of snow. Just from a glance, it doesn't seem like such an emergency. I can drive safely in two inches of snow.

What I can't see is how much ice there is, or what conditions are on streets beyond my own. It was still snowing this morning, as expected. I had said yesterday, during a Zoom meeting, that I figured by the time I had to leave home, the snow plows would have had several hours to work on clearing the roads, so driving conditions shouldn't be too bad. That depended on actual snow fall, of course. But an emergency was declared late yesterday afternoon, and the decision to close the campus was made.

I may not leave my house all day. I may go out to retrieve our bird feeders to refill them, as one looks empty, and the other is maybe a quarter full. They have been busy this morning, so both could be empty soon. But I doubt I will venture beyond our yard. There doesn't seem to be any need.

There is sunshine here now, but at least by tomorrow, another storm is expected. If the worst case scenario plays out, we could have more than a foot of snow by Friday, between what we have now and what is still coming. It seems the forecasters know their business well enough. I don't know how their algorithms interact with the rest of the electronic beings. It seems like a complex interaction is involved, as the models that predict weather must have data from observations of conditions across most of the world, and the ability to create and analyze a wide range of scenarios. That would require connections to places all across the country, and beyond our borders. I know that Ohio is the center of it all, or something like that, but these snow storms formed at some distance, and continue to move. I think our wet winter is influenced by the La Nina conditions in the Pacific, but I haven't checked to see if my memory about that relationship is accurate.

So the algorithms predicting the weather are doing well. Meanwhile, I am getting ads for women's clothes and software I already bought, neither of which I will buy any time soon. I don't know if there are selection forces operating among the algorithms. Evolution has so far been rather hard to predict, even in well-studied environments, and if the algorithms humans have created are truly capable of finding answers in ways the programmers don't understand, it seems unlikely we could predict evolution among them. Another thing to watch, beyond the weather and the birds. Life is full of wonder.

After my lecture, I think I'll take a nap. After all, I won't be holding lab.