Cant we weaken hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina ?

oh, watching what a category 4 hurricane like Katrina can do is very very shocking... some of the aerial photographs just look the same as those taken during the Asian Tsunami - just miles of wooden and concrete rubble... looking at the catastrophy that Katrina has left behind, i started wondering if there had been any attempts to study about weakening these cat 4 of cat 5 hurricanes that easily cause around $20-$25 billion in damages like Andrew or Katrina and as you can guess, there had been some attempts but in vain :-( the major obstacle seems to be that, "these hurricanes cover tens of thousands of square miles even when they are just beginning and they draw their energy from air over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean." So, whatever technique we adopt needs to cover such a huge area of the ocean, which is impossible. Next problem seems to be the intensity of the hurricane a hurricane releases heat energy equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding about every 20 minutes!

From 1962-1982, the US government led a research project called Project STORMFURY [2], which tried some silver iodide seeding technique to weaken hurricanes in their eye, but soon it turned out to be a failure due to lack of understanding of hurricane internals and so, the project was terminated concluding that we (little humans) need to study the nature of hurricanes more and that manipulating hurricanes without much understanding might also affect the heat distribution of our planet itself...

so, before reading these things, i was under the impression that, out of all the major natural disasters like volcanoes, quakes, tsunami (recent addition to my memory), and hurricanes, i thought hurricanes were the ones which had the best prospect of manipulation - but, may be not, for now... :-(

Weakening Hurricanes FAQ
Project Stormfury FAQ

why is the sky dark at night ? (aka Olbers' paradox)

as i was reading stephen hawking's "universe in a nutshell" (in small bursts, while waiting for perusu in juniper's parking lot), i came across this seemingly simple question, which is also known as the olbers' paradox! and intially, i was stupid enough to think that this is very easily explainable, like its because we are in the side of the earth not facing the sun and that the stars are "sort of" :-) far away and light scatters/disperses due to distance/cosmic dust... :-( but then, it was amzing to read that the answer to this question gives raise to some clues to the origin and age of our universe...

the paradox: If the universe is assumed to be infinite, containing an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then every line of sight should terminate eventually on the surface of a star. The brightness of a surface is independent of its distance, so every point in the sky should be as bright as the surface of a star.

and here's a very brief answer :

1. the universe is young - we haven't had enough time for all the lights from the all the stars to reach us...
2. the universe is expanding - and so stars are moving away reducing the intensity as well as the amount of light that reaches us, as time increases...

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/phonedrmarc/2002_december.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

and this one is for the geeks...
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/123/lecture-5/olbers.html