Your Index Has Told Me Nothing For Nine Years

To the Editor:

I have read Mr Pell's dispersal index every morning since 2017. I am writing to tell him it has never once told me anything, and that I am going to keep reading it, and that I think this is his fault.

Here is my objection, and I have checked it, because I am retired and I have a spreadsheet.

Over 2,190 consecutive days I recorded the index and then recorded whether anything I would call unusual happened to me. Headaches. Bad sleep. A row with my sister. I am not proposing a mechanism; I am checking a correlation, which is what your own science correspondent says one should do first.

There is none. The correlation coefficient is 0.03, which as I understand it is another way of writing "no".

So the index does not predict anything about my life. Mr Pell says as much himself, in small type, every day, and I want to be fair to him about that: the disclaimer is right there and it is honest and most newspapers would not print it.

But here is the thing he has not reckoned with. I still check it. Every morning, before the actual forecast, which is the part that affects whether I take a coat.

A number published every day, in a box, next to real numbers, in a newspaper I trust, becomes a real number in my head no matter what the small type says. That is not a failure of my reading. That is what publishing does. You cannot put a thing in the weather box and then disclaim it out of the weather box.

I do not want him to stop. I would miss it, which rather proves my point. I want him to move it, or to print my coefficient next to it, or to do something that makes the box look less like the box beside it.

Nine years is a long time to be told nothing very carefully.

Wilhelmina Oduya-Fletcher Binghamton, New York

Ray Pell replies: She is right and I have been dreading this letter for nine years. From Monday the dispersal index moves out of the forecast box and into its own panel, under its own heading, with her coefficient printed beneath it and her name on it. I have asked her permission for the name. She has given it, on condition I keep calculating the coefficient annually, which I will, and which I expect to keep being 0.03.