Cloudy with a Chance of War

Forecast Factory: In his seminal 1922 book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, Richardson imagined a large theater with 64,000 human “computers.” Each would work on weather in one region, while their leader, “like a conductor of an orchestra” blended their work into a global forecast. Decades before “parallel processing” in computing, Richardson had hit on the concept. Image courtesy of L. Bengtsson / NOAA.gov.

An interesting article on the work of Lewis Fry Richardson: Cloudy with a Chance of War

... the English physicist and mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, for whom doing science came as naturally as breathing. “It was just the way he looked at the world,” recalls his great-nephew, Lord Julian Hunt. “He was always questioning. Everything was an experiment.” Even at the age of 4, recounts his biographer Oliver Ashford in Prophet or Professor? Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson, the young Lewis had been prone to empiricism: Told that putting money in the bank would “make it grow,” he’d buried some coins in a bank of dirt. (Results: Negative.) In 1912, the now-grown Richardson had reacted to news of the Titanic’s sinking by setting out in a rowboat with a horn and an umbrella to test how ships might use directed blasts of noise to detect icebergs in fog.