Recently I’ve installed a new weather station on top of my house. I’ve done it partly because my inner geek wants to know everything about everything, partly because I need it for some software development I’m doing.
I’ve always suspected that the weather was really interesting, now I’m sure of it. Perhaps this innate fascination with the weather is part of being British, but whatever the reason, I’m loving all the data and statistics that my weather station gives me (some of which you can see in the screen shot). What is fascinating me right now is the forecast you can see at the bottom, which is actually truncated. The full version reads:
Mostly cloudy and colder. Precipitation possible heavy at times and ending within 12 hours. Windy with possible wind shift to W, NW or N.
That's an impressive level of insight from a one-location snapshot. The Met Office has sensors all over the world and a massive super-computer and I get less detail from them. This forecast is done by a little microprocessor hanging on my wall using a small cluster of sensors on my roof, yet it gives me a detailed forecast that’s accurate for my location. That’s extremely cool!
In case you’re interested, it is a Davis Vantage Pro 2 (left) with Integrated Sensor Suite (right, not my actual installation). The sensor suite has a tipping bucket rain guage (under the black cover), humidity, pressure and temperature sensors inside the white radiation shield, plus wind speed and direction measured by the anemometer and wind vane. The little white pos on the side has photovoltaic cells (solar panels) for power and all the data is transmitted wirelessly every 2 seconds back to the console, which is indoors wired up to my computer.
The console provides more readings including indoor temperature and humidity and calculates a plethora of derived readings and statistics from the raw data. So for example, I can see the Wind Chill Factor and the Dew Point and how heavily it is raining in mm/hour. The console has quite useful graphing capabilities built in, too, and the amazingly detailed forecast, it even shows the Moon phase, useful for an astronomer such as myself. All in all, a very impressive little system
But there’s more! It’s also a data logger, buffering up data until it is downloaded into the PC. That data can then be used to generate all manner of reports and charts, fed into national monitoring systems, exported to Excel or to published to a web site like this one.
You heard it here first. Dr. Who eat your heart out. Every night around midnight, for a few seconds, Outlook 2010 lets me see into the future. Here’s the proof:
I never would have predicted a Conservative / Liberal Democrat alliance. Does that mean we are a Con-Dem-Nation? Well, what interesting times we live in – a Liberal Democrat as deputy prime minister! I feel positive about the outcome and I think we have a golden opportunity now for a new era in politics, with more openness, more cooperation and putting the needs of the country before party political agendas. The new coalition government has required compromise on all sides, many people from all the parties have grown in stature over the last few days. Let’s help them refloat this sinking country and rebuild our trust in politicians.
Oh, and I hope Mr. Clegg remembers his pledge to repeal the Digital Economy bill.
This is the voting position taken from the BBC web site as at 12:45am, Friday 7th May 2010. Not all counts had been declared, there were still 25 to go.
Look at the number of seats vs. percentage of the popular vote:
| Party | Votes | % Popular Vote | Seats (out of 650) | % seats |
| Conservative | 10,303,669 | 36.1% | 294 | 45.2% |
| Labour | 8,357,095 | 29.3% | 252 | 38.8% |
| Liberal Democrat | 6,529,180 | 22.9% | 53 | 8.2% |
The disproportionate allocation of seats compared to the popular vote is why the Liberal Democrats want to change the electoral system, which is unfairly stacked against them. The Conservatives win with the support of only 36.1% of those voting, far less than half the country. At least now that we almost certainly have a hung parliament, the other two parties are able to defeat them in the house.