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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.
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
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.
This clip from The West Wing sums up map projection issues nicely: http://youtu.be/n8zBC2dvERM
No, the point is that this map is meant to be useful. It is meant to accurately show what the weather is doing in various places. If someone chooses to make the representation of that 40 times smaller (yes, that really is how much smaller shetland ends up with this projection) for some people, than for others, then it's a very clearly biased map.
The point re independence is that while the weather map is clearly a subtle and tiny issue, these things add up. Every time a decision is made, it's made with first thought to London, and 1/40th of the thought to the north of Scotland. As such, decisions are made that are not in the best interest of Scotland, and hence... We should go independent.
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'
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."