Talk:Flinders Island (Tasmania)

The use of points

I find it hard to understand why anyone would find the expression (example) "19.4 degrees" confusing, and change it to "19 degrees". Meteorological sites such as that used here always have points used.

Admittedly weather forecasters never use points - but that is because their predictions are never specific. They will say that the temperature tomorrow may be around 23 degrees, but historical information - which is recorded by government agencies - should be reflected in any information based upon them.

The usage of points in recording historical temperatures is confirmed at least buy the practice of this website

One Salient Oversight 03:09, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

For some purposes, meteorologists might want to carry those tenths (though I question that they are really useful even to them).

However, this is an encyclopedia article. It has to do with what useful information people can extract from this.

If you go outside and try to guess the temperature without a thermometer, you might get wiwithin a couple of degrees Celsius. You won't guess it to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius at any particular moment. In other words, knowing the temperature to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius, even at any particular instant of time, is of no utility whatsoever to any of the readers of this encyclopedia. Knowing a monthly or yearly to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius is even more ludicrous.

Not having to wade through all those extraneous decimal points, making the information hard to read, leaves the readers with something comprehensible--something useful to them if they are planning a trip to the area, for example. But if they have to sort through a bunch of temperatures given to the nearest tenth, most of them will say to hell with it, it isn't worth the bother, there are a lot more useful sources of information available.

I'm also being very lenient in not rounding an average annual rainfall from 753.8 mm to 750 mm rather than 754. That 750 mm would be much more understandable, and more accurate in any real sense, than 754. Let's just assume that the 753.8 was a 20 year moving average. Now we need to update it, throwing out a year with 920 mm of rainfall, and adding in a year with 600 mm of rainfall. Now the new moving 20-year average becomes 737.8 mm rather than 753.8 mm a reduction of 16 mm/yr. Does knowing the tenths do you any good whatsoever? No, it doesn't. Gene Nygaard 04:28, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Whoops—sorry, hit "save" too soon. I should, of course, said that that would be a reduction of 16.0 mm/yr. Gene Nygaard 04:35, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I honestly can't see how quoting official Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology figures as they have been recorded is somehow confusing for people. If you go here you will see them recorded with decimal points. The BOM does not dumb its information down so that people can understand it better - there is no special website it runs so that "ordinary" people can be less confused.

Look - I totally agree that tenths of a millimetre are neither here nor there - but what I am after is accuracy. The information recorded here must be truthful and verifiable. I do not think that adding the decimal points is going to confuse anyone.

My assertion is:

• Adding decimal points is not hard to read for anyone.
• Keeping the decimal points reflects upon the accuracy of the article, especially in relation with the external link.

I would be willing to think more from your point of view if you can provide me with further evidence that having decimal points is confusing, and that encyclopedia articles should "round-off" temperature and rainfall amounts as a matter of course. Any external links would be helpful here. One Salient Oversight 02:27, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

All you need is a modicum of common sense. How are these figures calculated? If you settle for a daily midrange figure (average of just the high and the low for the day) as the "average" for that day, it isn't really the average, is it? What if 23 hours were steady temperatures close to the maximum, then it cooled off dramatically in the 24th hour? Then when you average 30 or 31 of those to get a monthly average, do those tenths really have any significance whatsoever?

But then on top of it, you have a range of averages for each month. What in the world does that mean?

It is indeed much, much harder to read when those tenths are included--especially when for your one monthly average, you had four different numbers all given to tenths of a degree.

I'm starting to think it's time to go back in and average your range of averages for each month, and only give one whole-number figure for degrees Celsius and one whole-number figure for degrees Fahrenheit. Gene Nygaard 02:56, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Before we go any further. Please answer this question: Have you looked at the website that I got the information from? One Salient Oversight 08:34, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually - it would be good if you answered another question. I just checked your editing history and you seem very preoccupied with putting in metric and non-metric stuff side by side. I actually think this is a good thing and I have myself done a very small amount of it (hence the inclusion of Farenheit in this article). It would be interesting to understand why you do this... do you have some background in statistics? One Salient Oversight 08:45, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The use of dashes

• Troposphere says This layer extends to an altitude of 16-18 km over tropical regions...
• Scientific notation says Usually a is chosen in the range 1–10 (excluding 10 itself).

One Salient Oversight 03:41, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What in the world are you talking about. I don't see any numbers expressed in "scientific notation." Have you read that article? Do you know what "scientific notation" is?

Then once you figure that out, go read engineering notation. Then report back to us about what you have learned. Gene Nygaard 04:32, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Gene. I'm not wishing to get into a flame war here. The Troposphere and Scientific notation article contain sentences that use dashes insead of "to". I quoted them above. The article on Troposphere has a sentence that does not say This layer extends to an altitude of 16 to 18 km over tropical regions... but This layer extends to an altitude of 16-18 km over tropical regions.... The scientific notation article does not say Usually a is chosen in the range 1 to 10, but Usually a is chosen in the range 1–10. All I'm pointing out here is that the use of dashes rather than "of" is used in many other articles. Surely that is an argument for keeping it the way I wrote it? One Salient Oversight 02:14, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sure, dashes are sometimes used. That doesn't mean they are the best choice even when they are used, but I don't go around removing all of them; I even use them myself at times. However, any time you are dealing with temperatures, they are rarely a good choice. Can you figure out why? It's because temperatures are often expressed in negative numbers. So it is confusing, and you need to look carefully, to see if you have negative numbres involved here. It's easiest to avoid that by not using dashes for ranges of temperatures.

I just went back and looked. You will notice that I left the dashes in the wind speed ranges. I don't know if they were en dashes at the time, or if I changed hyphens to en dashes; you can go look at the history if that matters to you. Gene Nygaard 02:29, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yeah that argument makes sense - being from Australia means I rarely experience temperatures below freezing so I'll put that one down to plain inexperience! One Salient Oversight 08:33, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)