The days in this land are dry in recent times

rystalline blue skies roll by for weeks without pause.

When rain is promised the clouds gather, dance about, coalesce and separate, thicken, darken, then evaporate - usually without precipitation.

I imagine our ethereal void-dwellers playing in the atmosphere, commanding the mannequin clouds to "tease the humans" - with particularly spiteful attention to humiliating the 'meteorologists'.

Yes, meteor - ologist. Descended from several ancestral languages, the word implies they deal with astronomical hardware straying into Earth's path.

These gentle folk, in fact, study atmospheric phenomena and call it 'weather'. Again I find myself containing an explosive mirth. "Whether the weather is nice depends on whether it rains. Wethers Overboard!"

From German 'wetter' to middle English 'weder', the word's genealogy is extensive and worth a trip of its own.

Now, with that out of the way shall we turn full attention to our 'don't really know whether' men?

- They get to play with some of the planet's most sophisticated computer armories.
- Getting it wrong is implicit in their mission statement.
- They don't know it yet (nor any scientist on this gentle wet rock), but as a wether imagines it can sire lambs, our "whether men" believe they can model the weather!

God love them! (Being her esteemed will, of course)

It would be my privilege to tempt a young "meteorologist" - one still unspoiled by industry consensus - outside the paradigm to see if he or she scampers back or (to my delight!) their eyes glaze over in wonder as I lead them, thus:

Stock market modeling for predictive purposes escalated at the birth of the 'personal computer' thirty years ago. Few noticed the random walk, prone to wild delinquent movements, exhibited primitive yet effective sentience. Even today, as such modeling flourishes on cleverly promoted micro-simulators (futility proportional to processing power), most remain blind to the deliberation in the nonrandom walks across their silver screens.

Shrewder pundits joke the trading IS the simulator.

Shall the young 'whether' person agree? His charts differ only in the data source's apparent non-cognizance, so appearing to have momentum and predictability. Sentience in natural phenomena? Absurd, surely.

My arm is part of a chaotic system yet quite predictable into the near future due to its physical inertia, understood mechanisms and perceived purpose (i.e.: my behavior).

But as soon as my brain's other hemisphere gets wind of this, instability appears. It now might as well be another person's arm. Ever tried to second-guess your brain's nonverbal hemisphere? Pit one hand against your other in a random game - and see 'fickle' in action.

The weather is but Gaea's 'arm'. Without invoking mythology or mysticism, try a thought-game, an intellectual what-if, to imagine Gaea - geosphere and biosphere - and, in humans, the planetary ecosphere aware of itself.

Invention and discovery - sides of a coin.

Consequent thoughts rapidly become too open-ended, but the implications are clear. The collateral to simulations is cyber debris.

As the population drives cyber gaming to unimagined sophistication, as people realize they can live in 'nonexistent' worlds created in software (and do so), the consensus dawns that all things possible .. exist .. now..

You conceive, you make. Like a flower, whose pattern 'existed' before the first flower evolved and 'grew into it'. All discoveries and inventions exist, awaiting fulfillment.

Dear wise Parents, shall I tell the excited "whether person" each of her simulations hard-codes another cyber verse? Explain that code fragments litter the physics of countless stillborn worlds, alongside the efforts of gaming and operating system programmers?

Cyber sciences yet unimagined will recoil on the realization that 'programming' - to invoke that tired catchall word - is changing their universe's center of gravity.

Hope they find out before it's too late :-)

With Respect and Love
Your Beloved Son