Weather modification for fun and pleasure...

Admittedly, this is not really bookish...but it is amazing *and* I promise that at least on book *will be* published about it, so it is "proto-bookish":

MIT Review has a short, yet amazing, article on China's plans for weather modification to see that no rain falls on their 91,000 seat open air stadium. Last year China purchased an IBM p575 supercomputer. This wee bit of hardware is capable of executing 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. They are using it to model an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 sq. miles) and it is apparently accurate enough to generate hourly forecasts for *each kilometer*. They then use silver iodide, dry ice and a liquid nitrogen based coolant shot/dropped from field artillery and planes. From the article:

Unsurprisingly, therefore, China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers--mostly peasant farmers--who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

Personally, I find the very idea of "controlling" weather intellectually pleasing...admittedly, it will likely lead to some catastrophic disaster...but, after all, a civilization can only last so long. Really, mixing supercomputers, interesting chemicals, anti-aircraft artillery and rocket launchers...I challenge you name something more fun than that.

On the bookish front, it is worth noting that the origin of weather control began in 1946 in the labs of General Electric discovered that silver iodide could create crystals around which cloud moisture would condense and form rain...on of the lead scientists in this work was Bernard Vonnegut, the brother of the late Kurt Vonnegut). Work hard enough, and there is always a book angle...