Comments on: Oooh Lambert

By: pietercolpaert

pietercolpaert — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 21:15:34 +0000

Ha! Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe I should turn my blog into a wiki where everyone can add their spelling notes and grammar suggestions

(for the record: I’ve asked Emelie to do this. She won’t correct you this rude in real life. I hope. )

By: Emelie

Emelie — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:06:16 +0000

Told you I could be wrong (: (I blame it on my inexperience and the fact that I am human) nice to know the truth though

By: trouble

trouble — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:37:25 +0000

Emelie: I’m glad that I’m not the only (part-time) English language pedant reading along.

Your belief regarding “any comment” is wrong though. I checked in the OED to be sure.

“Any” can be either singular or plural. In the singular it refers to “a something, no matter which” or “whatever quantity of something” and in the plural to “some somethings, no matter how many somethings”.

I agree that it is probably more common to write “any comments” than “any comment” however.

By: Emelie

Emelie — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:05:58 +0000

If you want comments you can get them: don’t start a sentence with ‘which’. Besides you should make up your mind if you want to use ‘railway company’ or ‘railwaycompany’, personally I’d suggest the former (same for bus and subway companies). To conclude I would like mention that I prefer to use/read/hear ‘any comments’instead of ‘any comment’ and though I don’t have the proof (so I might as well be wrong) I believe the latter is grammatically incorrect. Happy?

By: pietercolpaert

pietercolpaert — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 07:33:15 +0000

Haha, thanks for your comment Philip

Now it makes a little bit more sense to me

By: trouble

trouble — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:29:57 +0000

Oh – on the GRS80 ellipsoid bit: that just means that Lambert2008 coordinates can be directly converted to GPS coordinates with a simple “projection” (yes indeed) instead of a complicated transformation.

If you wanted to convert GPS coordinates to Lambert1972 or vice versa, as you discovered, you had to do a really annoying transformation (the NGI site links to the maths for you). This is computationally un-fun.

Also note that if you study Lambert1972 and Lambert2008 for a bit, you’ll find that it’s trivial to distinguish between them. Exercise for the reader…

By: trouble

trouble — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:20:18 +0000

When I briefly spent some time at an unnamed public transport company in Brussels (it wasn’t the NMBS – and I wasn’t involved with “data”) I also had some fun with Lambert projections.

They’re quite interesting mathematically in fact. Projections in general are. And they all have benefits and drawbacks.

The main benefit of Lambert projections is that they preserve areas (at the cost of angles), which makes a lot of sense if you’re trying to calculate distances (the maths are a lot easier). Since most calculations involving maps tend to be most interested ultimately in distances, having a projection that preserves them is very handy.

Note that Belgium isn’t alone in using Lambert projections. It’s a widely accepted projection.

I agree with you that the not-quite-spherical nature of the Earth can be inconvenient. But projections are lots of fun, trust me. If you get bored with them, you should look at immersions.