Rambling Thoughts of an Insomniac

I am not one to fall asleep easily. My wife is just the opposite. I will ask her a question after she has gone to bed and she will answer. I will ask a follow up not 10 seconds later and.....out cold.

I am envious. Give me a cold night with howling winds and I will fall asleep quickly. Otherwise...

Next week is the annual AMS Broadcast conference. It is Washington D.C. and is being held jointly with the weather and forecasting conference and the numerical weather prediction conference. Now those numerical weather prediction folks are something. NWP people are computer nerds on steroids! (And they call me a nerd at work!)

A good friend of mine at OU is one of them. Genius you have to be and thank goodness for them. They have brought forecasting to levels that even 20 years ago were thought impossible to attain in my lifetime.

I myself love forecasting.(even more so when I am right!)

A Meteorologist who works in TV has to be the equivalent of the old country Doctor. You have to know a little bit of everything..cloud physics..optics..Climatology and NWP. Not to mention a little seismology and astronomy. I realize that I'm probably the only scientist that the average person comes into contact with on a daily basis.

I do get a kick out of calls asking if their australis sinsemilus will survive 25 degrees. I'm not a botanist! I do my best to answer though and usually learn something in the process.

I have noticed with some people, a phobia of learning something new. They seem to be afraid of anything that might be difficult to learn. Young kids do not have this phobia. It develops somehow. My science and math education at OU taught me to avoid this. It has come in handy working on my Masters. Still it rears it's ugly head with all of us from time to time.

I've got a darn VCR and CD player that Einstein himself could not get to stop flashing
12:00
12:00
12:00

Later,
Dan