Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:She has a point. (Score 1) 628

by dreamchaser (#49602233) Attached to: My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold

Right. Because helping further the Victorian Era sexual repression that's ingrained in our culture is a good thing. Hint: it's not. No, we don't need to go overboard with it. That being said, not so long ago 14 year olds were getting married and having children. Get over your sexual repression and just grow the fuck up.

Submission + - 40-50% jobs to be automated: PWC, CoPS@Vic Uni & Oxford Uni: big economics (blogspot.co.uk)

Submitted by Matt Hurd
Matt Hurd writes: 44% of Australian jobs at risk. 47% of US jobs at risk.

Report says doctors, teachers and nurses least at risk. Accountants, cashiers and admin workers most at risk.
Strangely, DBAs reported not at risk. Let's hope they're wrong. Thankfully, real estate sales are at risk.

It's a new economic revolution similar in scale to the industrial revolution. It is happening now thanks to all those nice computer folk allowing computers to make sense out of senses after failing for the previous sixty or seventy years. The Age of Perception, if you like.

Submission + - The Pioneer Who Invented the Weather Forecast

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Peter Moore has a fascinating article on BBC about how Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the man who invented the weather forecast in the 1860s faced skepticism and even mockery in his time but whose vision of a public forecasting service, funded by government for the benefit of all, is fundamental to our way of life. Chiefly remembered today as Charles Darwin's taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s, in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention — "forecasts". There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when FitzRoy established what would later be called the Met Office. With no forecasts, fishermen, farmers and others who worked in the open had to rely on weather wisdom — the appearance of clouds or the behavior of animals — to tell them what was coming as the belief persisted among many that weather was completely chaotic. But FitzRoy was troubled by the massive loss of life at sea around the coasts of Victorian Britain where from 1855 to 1860, 7,402 ships were wrecked off the coasts with a total of 7,201 lost lives. With the telegraph network expanding quickly, FitzRoy was able to start gathering real-time weather data from the coasts at his London office. If he thought a storm was imminent, he could telegraph a port where a drum was raised in the harbor. It was, he said, "a race to warn the outpost before the gale reaches them".

For FitzRoy the forecasts were a by-product of his storm warnings. As he was analyzing atmospheric data anyway, he reasoned that he might as well forward his conclusions — fine, fair, rainy or stormy — on to the newspapers for publication. "Prophecies and predictions they are not," he wrote, "the term forecast is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of scientific combination and calculation." The forecasts soon became a quirk of this brave new Victorian society. FitzRoy's forecasts had a particular appeal for the horseracing classes who used the predictions to help them pick their outfits or lay their bets.

But FitzRoy soon faced serious difficulties. Some politicians complained about the cost of the telegraphing back and forth. The response to FitzRoy's work was the beginning of an attitude that we reserve for our weather forecasters today. The papers enjoyed nothing more than conflating the role of the forecaster with that of God and the scientific community were skeptical of his methods. While the majority of fishermen were supportive, others begrudged a day's lost catch to a mistaken signal. FitzRoy retired from his west London home to Norwood, south of the capital, for a period of rest but he struggled to recover and on 30 April 1865 FitzRoy cut his throat at his residence, Lyndhurst-house, Norwood, on Sunday morning. "In time, the revolutionary nature of FitzRoy's work would be recognised," says Moore. "FitzRoy's vision of a weather-prediction service funded by government for the benefit of its citizens would not die. In 1871, the United States would start issuing its own weather "probabilities", and by the end of the decade what was now being called the Met Office would resume its own forecasts in Britain."

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Close