Strangely Proud

My mother was made the Mayor of Broxbourne last night.  She's been on the council, on and off, since 1987 - mostly on.  But while practically every other councillor has had a spell as Mayor she's not.  Part of this is her natural delight in making life difficult for pompous people - something a small local borough council is packed full of.  However, finally her "camp" got its act together and she got too gold chain at the council meeting last night.  M  and I attended and it was quite goood fun.  I'll load up some of my photo's later. Although here is one of my Mum as deputy mayor last year. Weird to find your parent's online...

So she's a year of fetes, ceremonies and the like ahead of her.  Good luck to you Mum.

Dear Sir...

I've had to do it. I had to complain about the new weather displays.

When I were a young lad, fresh from university and getting into engineering there were these new fangled digital displays and engineers fell in love with them. We also fell in love with electronic calculators. How we loved answers to a dozen decimal places.

The trouble is, we didn't need them. If the answer is in the region of 5,634 KiloPascals, believe me, knowing the decimal places is probably irrelvent for most practical uses. So we started to annoy our lecturers by getting into too much precision.

The digital displays had a similar problem, which is why we now have digital "analogue" displays all over the place. Keeping a needle on "400" is far easier for the human brain than trying to work out what to do at 399.3 or 400.65 and so forth - we're actually pretty good at smoothing out information and for most real world purposes that's all you need. A needle around 70mph on a speedometre is easier than a display bouncing around 70.

So... the new weather. Apparently it is more accurate because the weather fronts are accurately mapped on the display. Great. But could we have a quick hands up of everybody (living outside a major city) who can accurately point out their home location on an isometric featureless map of the United Kingdom? Ah, now we see who among my LJ readers is a walker with their own GPS system ;)

Sorry, but the old display may not have been super accurate, but at least you'd know roughly where the weather was happening and you could take in the information in simple pictorial data form very quickly without necessarily concentrating.