What are the Chances?

I am a radio announcer. More exactly, I am the Operations/Production Manager at WJYO and WBIY (91.5 fm and 88.3 fm) in Fort Myers, Florida.

One of my responsibilities is to announce the weather forcast each day.

The weather forecast comes to me each day from several sources: AOL's daily forecast; Weatherbug.com; nbc-2.com and others.

Each of them talks about the "chance of rain."

Science and technology are great, but there are some things they (science and technology) just can't get right. One of those things is the weather forecast.

There is never a "chance" of rain. That is superstition. There is a "probability" of rain. That is mathematics.

The word "chance" is used whenever we don't have enough information to draw a scientific conclusion.

Flip a coin. What are the "chances" it will come up heads? You might answer 50/50. You would be wrong. (I know, you've heard it all of your life...but it is still wrong.)

By using the same amount of pressure in my thumb, at the right point on the coin, I can greatly increase my "chances" of the coin coming up heads. Practice makes perfect. In fact, I can flip a quarter and make it come up heads almost every time.

If I knew the atmospheric pressure exerted on the coin at the time of its flippancy, the influence of the wind, where its center of gravity was, its mass and the energy exerted at the flipping point, I could theoretically predict with 100% accuracy how the coin would land.

Lack of information (read: data) reduces our ability to correctly predict weather.

"So what?" you may impatiently ask.

I don't know...it just seems that we draw many conclusions and make many predictions about things for which we have inadequate information.

There are people who make outlandish statements about the Bible, having never even read it. How inadequate is their information?

As I write this, it is raining.

There was an 80% chance.