Daily Archives:January 25th, 2014

It’s raining again…

…and so I turn to one of the most useful sites for British dog-walkers (cyclists, etc), which can help you answer the questions, “Is it about to rain?” and “How long will this rain last?” At the moment, the former question is largely rhetorical, but the answer to the latter can be very useful.

It was Richard who first pointed me at raintoday.co.uk, which gives you a rough animation of the radar precipitation map over the last couple of hours, so you can get a feeling for how fast the clouds are moving.

Screen Shot 2014-01-25 at 16.15.47

Very very handy. And very British.

It’s also worth knowing that if you put ‘/mobile’ on the end of the URL, you lose some features, but you also don’t get any ads. I have it bookmarked on one of the home screens of my iPhone.

A small rant

Sorry, people, but I had to write something, having read no less than three posts today by writers who didn’t know the difference between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’. You can see how that would rankle.

The majority of the time, you probably want ‘uninterested’. That means not paying attention to something because you don’t find it stimulating enough. ‘Disinterested’, on the other hand, means ‘impartial’: having, say, no financial interest in the outcome of a deal. (For anyone even more pedantic than me, I realise that this distinction only became clear in the early 18th century. But I think that should have given most bloggers enough time to catch on by now.)

Anyway, it’s very easy: all you need to do is to remember the phrase my English teacher told me, many moons ago… Are you ready?

“A good judge is disinterested.”

There. Isn’t that easy? Thank you for your attention, everyone. Now I can go to bed with a weight off my mind.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser