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Take The Weather Channel, for instance. How reliable is it? Well, it correctly predicts rainfall and temperatures about three out of four times.** All the other major weather companies and the National Weather Service are about as accurate for forecasts predicting rainfall and temperatures roughly 24 to 48 hours in advance. The statistic comes from Eric Floehr. He should know, because his company, ForecastWatch, calculates how accurate forecasts are and sells the data to meteorologists and other companies. In your hometown, meteorologists may be more or less accurate than the national average, given the stability of your local conditions. You can use ForecastAdvisor.com, a website for consumers instead of companies, to plug in your Zip Code and see how accurate the top weather companies and the National Weather Service are at predicting your local weather. **According to an e-mail exchange with Eric Floehr, "Obviously there are a lot of caveats to that statement. For example, what exactly does "correctly" mean? But I think that's more detail than your readers really care about." Photo by Nicholas T. See more of his photos on his Flickr profile page.

Yesterday, the Venetian became the latest transplant to open in Macau, which has rapidly morphed into a glitzy, much-hyped gambling haven. Casinos in this former Portuguese colony--a tiny peninsula connected to mainland China and about 40 miles from Hong Kong--already rake in more money than their Vegas counterparts. American billionaire Sheldon Adelson was on hand for the obligatory smashing of a champagne bottle, in this case, against the side of a gondola, one of many floating down the gaudy casino's canals. Touted as the world's largest gambling space, the Venetian Macao-Resort-Hotel has 400 slot machines, 800 gambling tables, 3,000 rooms, and 1.2 million square feet of convention space, according to the AP. The Venetian joins a market recently crowded by casinos like the Sands, also developed by Adelson, and the Wynn Macau, yet the demand seems almost insatiable. (I happened to be in Macau in July 2005, about a year after the Sands opened, and had to wait in line just to enter the jam-packed casino on a weekday afternoon!) Gamblers have long flocked to Macau, but until 2001 they were at the mercy of Stanley Ho and his 40-year monopoly on the local casino industry. For a taste of the old-school gambling scene, make a beeline for Ho's Casino Lisboa--you can't miss it, the roof is shaped like a giant roulette wheel. Photo: Venetian Macao Related: Trip Coach: Hong Kong and Macau.

The airfare prediction website Farecast is taking on hotels, offering rate advice for major properties in 30 U.S. cities. Rather than predict rates, the site tells you if the rate at any given hotel is a good value when compared with the hotel's rate history and other factors. You plug in your dates and preferred neighborhoods to stay at your destination, and then you add your wish list of preferred amenities. The site maps hotels that meet your criteria, along with the lowest rates available and advice on whether to book one or keep looking. As explained to us by Farecast CEO Hugh Crean: If a hotel rate is highlighted in red, it means that the rate is a relatively good deal when compared with the hotel's past history, local demand, and other factors. The buying tip, called a Rate Key, tells you if a hotel's rate is unusually low given its past pricing history and other factors, such as the demand for rooms in the city on particular dates. Farecast crunches the numbers on hotel rate data that it receives from Orbitz and other sources. The site doesn't sell hotel rooms but sends you to these sources for booking. Currently, the buying tips for hotel rates are only available for 5,000 hotels in 30 U.S. cities. Also, Farecast does not collect rates directly from major hotel chains, which often guarantee the lowest rates by booking on their websites. Farecast has made its name as a website that predicts whether fares on a route will rise or fall within the next week. In July, Farecast had more than 500,000 users, according to the Boston Globe. It's the first company to bring data-mining techniques to hotel rates, giving it a head start on its competition. Earlier: A new website lets you tour European hotels from home.

Imagine toting your Chateau Petrus Pomerol on a weekend trip without ever popping its cork. You might do this if you were visiting the Crystal Springs resort in Vernon, N.J., 47 miles from New York City. The resort owns a unique device that can test if a wine is pristine. Since 2006, guests have brought wines for free testing. Chemists at the University of California at Davis--the Harvard of enology--invented the machine with funding from the resort. The machine can test if oxygen has leaked past the cork and allowed the wine to become vinegary. The machine uses nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy--the technology behind MRI scans at hospitals--to test the level of acetic acids in your wine. It's a bad sign when the machine finds a lot of acetic acid. Guests staying at the resort can test one bottle for free, says a spokeswoman for the hotel. To test more than one bottle, guests pay a fee of 10 percent of the value of the wine, with a minimum $50 charge. That's the same fee you'll pay if you're not a guest of the resort but you drop by anyway and request that one of your bottles be tested. Some studies estimate that one in eight bottles of premium wines (meaning wines costing $8 or more) are spoiled. The machine has not been subjected to rigorous independent testing, and it may not be foolproof. High levels of acetic acid or only one of the many possible signs and causes of damage to wine. Learn more about the machine and the resort by calling Crystal Springs at 973/827-5996. Photograph by Linda B. (the Wine Diva), titled "Corkhenge", via Flickr & Creative Commons Related: Check out these articles on wine and travel.