Also the University of Washington affiliate that is providing the data has a site of some interest. I tried to get info on their model but to no avail. Again to do real estimates one must have real data, to the micro scale and must adapt the data as more facts come in. Otherwise we are back to Three Card Monty.
The biggest problem in all these models reminds me of something I did while in grad school. I worked designing the third back up guidance system for Apollo. There was a guy who worked alongside me who did the error analysis. Each element in the system had some error associated with it. he would determine them then add all these errors up. One day I asked how accurate the system was to get to the moon. He said that the average trajectory got them there perfectly but the standard deviation was somewhere between Jupiter and Alpha Centauri. I then asked how do we prevent this? He said: simple, make measurements along the way and course correct on what you see. he then said, no one sends a ship from Plymouth harbor to New York ballistically, never looking through a sextant. Then he said: "I hope that thing of yours works". Well it did, on Apollo 13! You see, as they say, I had "skin in the game". These models are models of averages, uncorrected by the ongoing new facts and devoid of the detailed error analysis we used a half century ago.
Posts
