This is the season when weather gets interesting: first the hurricanes, then the winter storms. The unpredictable cruelty of the weather led our ancestors to assume that it was sent by capricious gods to torment us mere mortals, or perhaps just for their own celestial entertainment. This theory has persisted for thousands of years, and it makes perfect sense to me. Weather forecasting, in spite of satellites, super-computers and sophisticated modeling techniques, remains almost as fallible as stock market forecasting. The weather will do what it will do. Spring turns suddenly into high summer, and a delightful autumn snaps brutally into winter. It makes no difference whether it was forecast or not. Weather is infinitely variable, like life itself. We want to predict it and to understand it, but it always takes us by surprise. On the other hand, weather is just about the only thing we think we can predict at all . So those fanciful forecasts occupy a disproportionate amount of time on