Jose had been the talk of coffee shops and offices around the Island since last week. By Wednesday morning, most Islanders knew that the leading edge of a cool front extending up the East Coast would direct the storm well out to sea. There's something reassuring about watching a storm at a safe distance — almost too reassuring. There's a false sense of mastery in the mountains of data. But all our technology cannot change the fact that a hurricane is a profoundly humbling, almost incomprehensibly powerful weather event. We've come a long way toward understanding hurricanes, and we're all much better informed of their progress and probabilities, but in the end, all our forecasts are still so much whistling on a midnight walk through the graveyard.