Guess why I’m up early today
Reading an animated weather map is one of the most abstract tasks we humans are able to perform.
First there is the concept of a map, an impressive abstraction in itself. From a few scratchy lines on a 2D field, we can figure out where we are and where other places are relative to our current position, even though most maps have few natural landmarks, the scale difference is tremendous, and the map’s directions are rarely aligned with the real ones (unless your computer or TV screen is lying face-up on the floor). We can do this even if we have never been to those other places, and in fact we’re quite good (some of us, anyway) at using maps to navigate unfamiliar landscapes.
On top of this we add blotches representing rainfall, color-coded by severity. From this mass of information we pick out “cells” and “bands,” and a meteorologist (or a regular TV-news watcher) can see indications of the motion of a storm, even in a still image.
When all these blotches are set into motion, we are still able, amazingly, to track these changing, amorphous, abstract patterns and to extract useful information from this. I can look at six quick frames of colored pixels superimposed on a barebones map and say, within seconds, “By golly, that red line of severe weather is coming straight toward us, end-on, so there’s no use in trying to go back to sleep for the next half-hour or so.”
I think computers will be able to clean my house, cook me breakfast, and drive me to work long before they’ll be able to glean more relevant information from an animated weather map than I can.
Whether we’ll ever be able to teach Radar the Weather Dog to do any of this, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess.
Tags: miscellany