PREDICTING THE UNPREDICTABLE

The Mambila people, who live across Cameroon and Nigeria in West Africa, like to watch the movements of crabs and spiders. As part of a practice called Nggam, a stick and a stone representing a binary choice are offered to the multi-legged creatures, along with some cards placed between them. This is all part of a plan to tell the future.

The wisdom-seekers leave the cards intact for up to 15 minutes, during which time the crab or spider may have come out of its hole and disturbed the cards, producing a pattern that can be interpreted. If particular cards have been moved toward the stick or the stone, then that choice is bound to become reality.

Elsewhere, some people still believe to this day that the position of the stars and planets at the time of their birth has an effect on their future. While in ancient Rome, a haruspex consulted the entrails of sacrificed animals to gain insight into what was about to happen.

In Victorian England, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn played a four-player variant of chess in an attempt to predict future events, while the Ancient Greeks practiced dracomancy (predicting the future by way of dragons), though it’s not clear where they found them.

Of course, another way to predict the future is to use computers.

Weather forecasting

Knowing what the weather is going to do is often a case of simply looking out of the window, but being able to predict weather conditions several days in advance is another matter. Being able to predict the future is more useful than knowing whether you’ll need a light jacket or waist-high rubber waders this afternoon.

But predicting the weather is a difficult science because there’s a lot going on in our atmosphere. There’s a lot of data to be processed from orbiting satellites, airplanes, ships at sea, land-based weather stations, and more. But weather forecasting had more humble origins.

It takes us back 170 years, to Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, a celebrated sailor in the British Navy who had been on the second voyage of the HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin, would become governor of New Zealand, and a man who thought the weather ought to be predictable. It generally wasn’t of course, and at the time was considered to be completely chaotic. Indeed, when the idea of forecasting the weather a mere 24 hours in advance was floated in the British Parliament in 1854, the whole place rocked with laughter.

In the 1800s, weather forecasting’s cutting-edge technology was a frog. Having caught