I seem to recall a Nova special I watched many moons ago about "strange attractors" and "fractal behavior" that seemed to indicate that for a large class of complex-valued iterative functions there was a weird phenomenon called the "Butterfly Effect". Apparently... according to this show I saw 20 years ago (and I think that Mandelbrot mentioned it in a lecture I attended a few years later), initial variables which are as intertwined as the rational and irrational numbers can have drastically divergent outcomes in these situations.

It seems that the reason that this was called the Butterfly Effect was actually because the disturbance caused by a butterfly could be enough to change the track of a massive storm some days later. ( Reference)

The fact is that the weather forecasters on the local broadcast channel are less accurate than if they always predicted sun in one study:

"The graph above shows that stations get their precipitation predictions correct about 85 percent of the time one day out and decline to about 73 percent seven days out.

"On the surface, that would not seem too bad. But consider that if a meteorologist always predicted that it would never rain, they would be right 86.3 percent of the time. So if a viewer was looking for more certainty than just assuming it will not rain, a successful meteorologist would have to be better than 86.3 percent. Three of the forecasters were about 87 percent at one day out â" a hair over the threshold for success."

(ref: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/how-valid-are-tv-weather-forecasts/)

It's a wonderful idea that we can model the incredibly complex climate of our huge planet, but I'll believe it once I can trust the weekend forecast before Friday.

Any other ideas about useful purposes to put these huge computers to? Perhaps accounting and auditing for the new Emergency Financial Legislation?