Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Want: Weather Prognostication

In honor of New England’s Never-Ending Winter from Hell, today’s want covers the foibles of predicting the weather in the 1870s.

A few years ago I read somewhere that predicting the weather was once seen as a form of magic. This really baked my noodle—Willard Scott? A magician? But of course, before the modern era of science and technology our (reasonably) accurate ten-day forecast was unthinkable; instead weather was the realm of anecdote and observation. Which, it seems, is where cats’ toilet habits came into the equation.



(click to enlarge)

If we took the Deloreon 139 years into the future, I wonder what everyday things would seem like magic to us?