I didn’t post an entry yesterday because my evening was full of three ethics classes, followed by me very quickly heading to bed so that I could get as much sleep as possible before getting up at 3:50am for the beginning of my ISO Standards meeting this morning.
First up though, I mentioned a while ago about how the Bureau of Meteorology recently changed the way they quote rain forecasts. The new example I gave there was the mathematically bizarre/useless forecast:
50% chance of at least 0 mm of rain.
Well, that’s not all of the mathematical weirdness. A few days back I saw this in my official BoM app and took a screenshot:
In text, that says:
75% (high) chance of no rain.
50% (medium) chance of at least 1 mm.
25% (low) chance of at least 2 mm.
Now… if there’s 75% chance of no rain, but 50% chance of at least 1 mm… that’s 125%, right. Probabilities do not work that way! Then a few days later my friends and I had this discussion on our Discord chat, where one of my friends attempted to explain – to the best of his understanding – what the actual heck the BoM is trying to say:
We are smart people, with degrees in maths and science, and we can barely figure out what the BoM is actually trying to say with their new style of rainfall forecasts. The old style was perfectly fine, yet they gave the reason for changing to the new style that the old one was “too confusing”. Yeeesh. 🙄
Anyway, on to today’s activities. Got up at 3:50am as I mentioned, and fired up Webex for my Photography Standards meeting. The first part was administrative stuff, and in future meeting planning I talked about the possibility of hosting a meeting here in Sydney in October 2024. I’d really love it if I can get that organised and happening, as the previously planned meeting for Sydney in 2019 was shifted to Germany at the last minute due to a travel clash with another conference that many of the delegates wanted to attend in Europe (they didn’t want to have to fly from Australia directly to Europe for some reason – I dunno… it’s only 24-25 hours travel time. Wimps.).
Then we discussed technical projects, including the adoption of Adobe’s DNG image file format as an ISO standard (which was reported publicly back in 2018 – these things move slowly sometimes); measuring performance of non-optical image stabilisation methods; and defining high dynamic range and wide colour gamut still image file formats.
After the meeting ended at 11:30am my time, I walked to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, as she’d taken her to work this morning so everyone in her (wife’s) new office could meet her (Scully). I had some lunch nearby and then Scully and I walked home via a roundabout route to get some extra steps in.
For dinner tonight I made mushroom and spinach omelettes. My wife’s turned out perfectly, but I didn’t get a photo of it before she ate it. Mine folded a little messily:
New content yesterday:
New content today: