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Scottish Independence Campaign Battles Over BBC Weather Forecast
00_NOP writes "The political battle over Scotland's independence ballot — to take place in September this year — has now moved on to how the BBC project the UK on their national weather forecast. The BBC use a projection based on the view of Britain from geostationary weather satellites and so there is naturally some foreshortening at the northern end of Britain (Scotland, in other words). But nationalist campaigners say this means Scottish viewers are constantly being shown a distorted image of their country which makes it look smaller and hence (in their view) less able to support independence. In response others have suggested that the nationalists are truly 'flat earthers.'"
Jings, crivens and helpmaboab!
Will there be a referendum about beta, d'ye ken?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take OUR MERCATOR PROJECTION!"
Yes, they changed the projection in around 2005. The new format did indeed suck - take a look at the 'this is how weather maps look now' image on this page. It was a triumph of 3D prettiness over usability and produced wonderfully unhelpful graphics like this and there was a lot of sulking over it, not so much because of nationalist fervour, but more because it was crap. The BBC themselves claim they had 16,000 complaints. So they tweaked it, significantly.
It's a shame that the BBC's obsession with shiny things produced a weather forecast that sucked, and it is indeed quite possible that they didn't recognise how much it sucked because of inner-M25 London myopia, although if so the joke's on them because a significant proportion of BBC staff were moved to Manchester fairly shortly thereafter. Since the BBC produces a lot of things that are shiny but happen to suck it doesn't seem necessary to attribute the weather forecast to a subconscious urge to portray Scotland as negligible. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation might be that whoever outsourced the weather forecasting isn't half as smart as they think they are.
Just goes to show how British the whole affair is. *sips tea*
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
This is the Scottish version of "black holes are racist" and the illogic of it makes my skin crawl.
I just have a hard time taking Ireland seriously because the Irish have one of the silliest sounding accents in Europe. However, you make damned good whiskey, so I support you.
I picture it being like our hillbillies of the south,wanting to secede @ civil war
Most hillbillies did NOT want to secede. Mountainous regions did not have plantations, so had few slaves, and the people there saw little benefit in secession. The hillbillies of Virginia seceded from their state, and rejoined the Union as West Virgina. The hillbillies of the other states raised regiments to fight in the Union Army. The only state that didn't raise at least a regiment for the Union was South Carolina, which has few mountains.
Time and economy say its right to let Scotland and Ireland go.
It seems the opposite to me. Economics says stay in the UK, and the independence movement is most driven by emotion. Which is why I predict the independence vote will fail. People will follow their heart when answering pollsters, but are more hard headed when casting ballots.
England should let them go and concentrate their efforts instead, on making a beer thats worth a fuck.
Or they could do what Americans do: chill it down so cold that you can no longer taste how horrible it is.
"England" (or more correctly the rest of the UK, or "rUK" as it's become known - there's Wales and Northern Ireland as well) don't have a say in the decision. The decision either to become an independent country (or not) will be made by the voters of Scotland, and the voters of Scotland alone.
As someone in the rUK all I can do is sit back and accept whatever they decide. That said, I cannot help feeling that if the decision for independence will somehow be influenced on how Scotland looks in the BBC weather map, somewhere the plot has been lost!
As to beer, try Theakston's Old Peculier. Ace!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Well, let Bono know! That prick has been hanging around the rest of the world whining how fucking bad it is living in Ireland and then offering political solutions to fix other countries. Would you please keep him home and give him his shots, tag him and make him wear a shock collar so he doesnt get outside your borders again, like responsible dog owners should !?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Och, Alex, I've got it at last! We can win this thing. Those English bastards think we're a wee bit nuts right? So all we need to do is make them thing we're as mad as a nessie with a haggis on its head, and they'll pop over the border from Carlisle to Gretna Green to vote us independent. Och, we're Scotland after all; where the men wear nothing under their kilts and the fields are thick with thistles. They'll fall for it in no time.
But if you have a map, which tries a compromise between angle preservation and area preservation, and which does not show North- and Southpole, you will always have the areas of the northern and southern regions displayed larger than they are compared to those near the Equator. This is a pure mathematical necessity and not limited to the Mercator projection. The only way to not have this distortion is not to have the Equator being horizontal on your map.
G.B., England, its all the same viewed from our east coast.
Maybe, but it really pisses off the Scots!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
This clip from The West Wing sums up map projection issues nicely: http://youtu.be/n8zBC2dvERM
I think that this best describes how the people of Scotland feel about the BBC and their weather map. http://www.youtube.com/watch?f...
The problem is that any projection of a map onto a flat surface is distorted. There are no un-distorted maps. A map contains serveral classes of important data on a map, and projections mainly affect distances, areas and angles. It is mathematically impossible to have a plane projection of the Earth's surface which correctly displays distances, but you can have a map that preserves angles and a map that preserves areas.
The BBC weathermap is not a true planar projection, though. It's a 3D projection rendered onto 2D, emulating the view of the UK from orbit. Neither ground-level angles, nor latitudinal distance, nor longitudinal distance, nor surface area are preserved. All distances and all areas are reduced. This is because the projection is seemingly taken from somewhere above France, so the south of England is close to the camera, and the north of Scotland is not only further away (hence smaller) but also reduced in height due to the curvature of the Earth included in the projection.
When this first came in (years ago now), the justification of this was that it is more "natural" to look at, and easier to understand... but only a handful of people have ever had the opportunity to see the UK from such an angle, so I can't see what's so natural about it. Furthermore, the BBC initially refused to allow any regional opt-out from the standard projection, so the Scottish weather was on a zoomed subsection of the map, which had practically zero north/south resolution compared to exaggerated east/west.
After a lot of complaints, the BBC tweaked the angles slightly, but the problem still remains. It is particularly irritating that the Gaelic weather forecasts, half of whose target audience are in the Highlands and Islands, is forced to use the same map, where their part of Scotland is so drastically shrunken that a single weather symbol blocks out over a hundred miles on the map.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Actually wealthy plantation slaveholders and their allies in the American colonies (Washington, Jefferson, even Franklin profited from slaves) broke away when it became obvious the British government was going to abolish slavery in the near future. I understand American history books take a different view but since they were written by the slaveholders, for the slaveholders that's not surprising.
Their constant harping on the British crown and George III as the Bad Guy because he wanted to abolish slavery is further evidence of their propagandistic efforts since the Crown had possessed little or no political power in Britain since the mid-1600s when Parliament explained the facts of life to Charles I with the edge of an axe. It was Parliament that sent troops to put down the treasonous rebellion of the slaveholders, not George.
While that's true for maps of large areas of the Earth, the distortions become near-zero for small swaths like the UK. All you need to do is pick a viewpoint directly overhead and at a sufficient distance, which is what the Scottish Independence group is advocating.
This whole thing probably stems from the geometry of geostationary weather satellites. To always generate the same viewpoint from orbit, the satellites have to be located over the equator at 35,786 km in altitude. That means countries further north in latitude are distorted in the weather photos. From the 1960s to 1990s, this was just the way it was. You couldn't do anything about it. So everyone who lived in extreme northern (or southern) latitudes had to live with distorted satellite weather photos of their country.
Starting around the mid 1990s, computers became fast enough to correct this distortion in photos in a reasonable amount of time. You could now generate undistorted weather maps of reasonably small countries like the UK. But over the previous 3 decades, people had gotten used to the distorted view from geostationary satellites. When you see a flat undistorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's just a graphic someone drew." When you see a distorted map of your country with weather on it, you think "Oh, that's satellite imagery."
People innately trust satellite imagery more. It's a picture, taken from space. No manipulation, no airburshing (photoshopping for those of you too young to know what airbrushing is), right? Of course not; you can manipulate satellite photos as easily as you can manipulate photos from your phone camera. But that's not people's instinctive reaction. It's a satellite picture, so that must be what the weather really looks like from space. I think that's what the BBC was trying to go for with their perspective-foreshortened view of the UK for their weather forecasts. It gives it a greater sense of authenticity.
Eventually, as people lose this pro-satellite viewpoint bias, the overhead viewpoint maps are going to become the norm. But for the time being, it's a quick and silent way to tell the viewer "this is satellite imagery" vs "this is radar or an animated graphic."
Other factors not often mentioned, Roman Catholics being allowed into government (Americans still hate the French) and the big one, King George recognizing the Native Americans as equal subjects and stopping the theft of land which is why so many land speculators were pro-independence and America went on to steal a huge amount of land as well as purchasing some.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Roman Catholics [not?] being allowed into government
The US Constitution forbade any religious test for office from the outset. Catholics weren't allowed into Parliament until the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. Moreover the House of Lords, which didn't really lose its power until the 20th century, includes bishops of the CoE.
Err, the Quebec Act (1774) removed the Protestant Faith part of the Oath of Supremacy therefore allowing Roman Catholics to be involved in (colonial?) government. America didn't enact a bill of rights (or illegalize letters of attainment) until after they'd purged most the undesirables from the 13 colonies.
Americans still hate the French
You think we hated our allies in the Revolution?
No you hated the French to the north of you, especially when they beat Washington again.
King George recognizing the Native Americans as equal subjects
You're kidding, right? As for trying to temporarily stop westward expansion, the UK's concern was money. It's expensive to keep armies in the field, and they were still paying off debts from the French and Indian War. Remember those taxes the colonists complained about - what did you think they were paying for?
Protecting the colonists who were expanding into the natives land. Even back then some Americans believed in their right to a free lunch.
As for George's oh so progressive attitude towards the Native Americans, it's odd that he would take that stance while simultaneously expanding the British Empire in India.
It was a private business that was expanding into India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism