Hi-tech

Our new car clock being five or six minutes slow has been irritating BH for weeks. Today, in the absence of children or grandchildren being about to take the task on, I finally got around to having a go myself. Associating to the time and trouble it took me to change the clock on our C-Max to and from summer time, all the more tricky for the clock function being mapped onto the radio function, with the radio being something that I never used.

Off to a shaky start, finding no entry for 'clock' or 'time' in the index to our slimline print manual. Reduced to finding my way around the 'infotainment' system (VW © and ®) above what is left of the gear stick.

Poked around for perhaps five minutes and then thought to try 'settings' - which had the same symbol as settings on my telephone. Bingo, there was setting the time, and there were buttons for moving hours, minutes and seconds up and down. Easy peasy - once I had worked my way through to the right place.

After which I retired to the front room indoors for a well-earned glass of Tesco's finest apple juice - the label of which told me that they got a litre of apple juice by pressing just eight apples. They must press very hard.

Hopefully the new time will stick for long enough for BH to see it when she next uses the car.

PS 1: the snap above, turned up by Bing, is not quite right, but it is near enough. Far too complicated for the older driver.

PS 2: later on, I came across the piece in the Financial Times at reference 2, from which I offer two snippets, First, it seems that the enclosed Mediterranean basin is getting hotter faster than other places and that this is, inter alia, making it more prone to violent and unpredictable events. At least hard to predict with the current generation of weather models. Perhaps their computers should be given some of the huge amount of power being poured into ChatGPT and his friends. Perhaps ChatGPT and his friends should be paying some kind of eco-tax. Second, I was a bit startled by the bit which said: '... Two months after the Bayesian disaster, flash floods triggered by torrential rain ripped through the Mediterranean coastal regions of southern and eastern Spain, killing more than 200 people in one of the worst weather disasters in the country’s modern history...'. A far more serious matter than the sinking of a yacht, albeit tragic enough - but I can barely remember the floods although I do remember all about the yacht. A not very edifying capriciousness which I suppose that the people filling our media channels know all about.

PS 3: it occurs to me that being able to predict is not the whole story. One also needs to be able to predict in time and, when necessary, to get that prediction out to the people on the ground, or on the sea. In the case of a storm at sea, would an hour be enough for yachts to make ready? How many yachts would be tooled-up to receive and process such predictions, which might come in at any time of day or night?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-new-car-series-2-episode-2.html.

Reference 2: Why a hotter Mediterranean is a problem for sailors: Bayesian yacht sinking highlights the dangers of increasingly volatile weather in the region - Victor Mallet, Financial Times - 2025.