More shit that doesn't merit its own thread (septic tank overflow alert)

One of my favourite Penguin Cafe tracks - I think it was on the first album.

Simon Jeffes was a genius - such a shame he’s no longer with us :disappointed_relieved:

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/4c74bb82-3159-440d-9bd1-755dde877e5a
Like the Primal Scream and OMD ones.

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FFS, since when has IGD been desirable. Fucking FT numpties.

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I liked the New Order, Primal Scream, Belle and Sebastian, Daft Punk, Manics and Led Zep (so, most of them… :roll_eyes:) ones. They didn’t have to try too hard with the U2 one.

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I just received an email titled, “Dear : [High end Type Slit…] Something special for your inbox”

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Massive IMAX screen, over 300 capacity, and the only other people in there were sitting in my seat.

I made them move. I fucking enjoyed it too.

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It’s Friday, it’s 5 to 5 it’s…

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Is it particularly good? Appreciably better than the Met Office?

Would happily pay for it 5 times over.

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For the short time that I’ve been playing with it, it seems remarkably accurate.

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Ok good to know! I seem to spend a fair bit of time trying to second-guess the weather, so if there’s something that’s appreciably better, I’ll have it.

It displays the rain radar. So you can actually see where the actual rain actually is. If you know which way the wind is blowing (it shows that too) then you can work out reliably where the rain’s going to be over the next 1-2 hours. That’s infinitely better than a guess made by some weatherperson on the basis of out-of-date measurements fed into a computer model with a 50km cell size (or whatever it is).

To get beyond 1-2 hours you need to know how quickly the clouds are drying up and/or whether the wind direction’s going to change. Often both are quite stable, in which case you might be able to predict the rain for half a day or more.

Apart from that, I think they use the same insufficient-data-feeding-too-coarse-model approach that everyone else does. So it’s hard to see how they can tell me today what the walk from here to The Plough in W Hanney and back will be like on Friday any more accurately than the competition.

But if we fancy comparing them here’s the BBC’s guess

basically it’ll be summer by the end of the week - take factor 50 and dark glasses. And here’s Dark Sky’s

Sunny, er, nope. And the wind will get up to 13mph in the middle of the day. But you will stay dry. I’ll tell you how it turned out when I get home.

VB

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Dark Sky also uses crowd-sourced barometric readings from smartphones to improve accuracy.

Interesting. When I used to worry about climbing while walking (not really an issue in the Thames valley) I used to keep an eye on the barometric altimeter readings in my GPS unit. That has quite a sophisticated real-time calibration system based on the facts i) that the barometry can measure relatively rapid (timescale of less than a minute) changes in height but tends to wander about in an absolute sense as the local air pressure, density and temperature evolve through the day and ii) the GPS can determine altitude exactly but needs time to do it, so to get a reliable absolute altitude it has to average over maybe 5-10 minutes, using the barometer’s relative values to correct for the fact that I am actually walking up hill and down dale. I imagine Dark Sky also uses the GPS in the phone to correct the barometric readings, assuming that you are close to known ground level at whatever lat and long the GPS returns.

VB