Editing 1985: Meteorologist

While the all but the last question of the first part of the second panel can be answered by looking up their definitions, the last one is "What if you have two locations you are worried about?" This is an extremely complex question. Because there is no chance at all to answer this question from the answers of the previous questions or even from most other data a forecast might usually produce. To answer this you'd most likely need to do all the weather modeling and super computer runs of the forecast again with a different algorithm that looks at those two locations. (And for any other two locations you'd need to do the same thing again). This is a common effect in mathematics: While for example a classification of one linear function between two vector spaces is a solved problem (which everyone will learn if they study mathematics), the classification of pairs of linear functions is something no one has yet any idea how to even start.

When they get back on air gain a new meteorologist, [[Blondie]], steps in. The management enquires (on air) to make sure she is not also a mathematician. She states no, but tells that she has a linguistics degree, which the management thinks is fine, and thus believes they have prevented the problem with Cueball. However, this proves to be in vain, as Blondie goes into a tangent once more but from a linguistics standpoint, rather than a mathematical one, detailing the true meaning of the word "it" as referring to the weather. After one panel of this the management calls for security again.

While, at the most basic level, human speech is broken into subject, object, and verb; for some reason we are capable of producing and comprehending speech without both objects or verbs, but in English there is a certain "resistance" to speech without a subject. Thus if you are in the passenger seat of a car going down the highway and happened to see some deer in the trees nearby, you could simply say "Deer.", rather than "there is a deer over there", deer being the subject of the sentence. However, if you noticed that it had begun to rain, you could not simply say "Raining." on it's own. Feel how that sentence just seems weird? Hence we have developed the tendency to use the filler word "it" despite the fact that when we say "It's raining." the "it" is not a reference to the clouds producing the rain, but the general state of the rainfall around us. (McWhorter, John. Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-linguistics-the-science-of-language.html )

This is again a common occurrence with informal speech: From a grammatical point of view, it is pure non-sense. But it still has meaning people understand. So if you want a proper descriptive grammar, it needs to cope with those cases. But then most such informal sentences would be special cases. (Case of point: What is the grammatical function of the "out" in that sentence?)

In the title text, the news station has made the same error again, this time by hiring a software developer as the third meteorologist. This last person is stating concerns about the feasibility of the time system used to correlate to the weather patterns. Because it appears simple, many people would simply assume they understand what is being said when a meteorologist talks about "12pm" or "1pm".  This is a common mistake because [https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/times-day-faqs#noon noon is neither post meridiem (pm) nor ante meridiem], and should be stated as "noon" or "12 noon" instead of "12 pm.". However, because software developers frequently have to deal with things such as specifying exactly what time-label means what, the new meteorologist begins to wonder what time period is actually meant on a per-hour forecast. On such an hour forecast does 12pm refer to the hour from 12 to 1pm, from 11:30 to 12:30 or is it actually only to the weather precisely at 12:00 that is referred to? The software developer also worries about an {{w|off-by-one error}}, which is a common error in software development occurring when boundary conditions include one element too few or too many: when counting by 24 once every set period (for example), it is common to forget whether the count should stop at 23 or at 24, especially if the number 0 (midnight) is included. In the 24-hour forecast, that means there's 25 hours represented every day, and the software developer worries that these 25 hours might add up and, every progressive day, the forecast is one more hour off. (If the news station's meteorology department had been around for a while, worrying about this would be absurd because if the new station tried to predict the weather one hour further into the future each day, it would eventually ask for the weather further into the future than the forecast models could supply, resulting in an error that someone would definitely notice (and it would likely be the case that long before that happened, someone would perceive the weather forecasts as being inaccurate or early). However, based on how quickly the linguist was fired, this was likely either the mathematician's first day or second day on the job, so if we assume that the mathematician was the first meteorologist (or that all previous meteorologists were fired quickly enough that the mathematician started within a few days of when the meteorology department started), there wouldn't have been enough time for the effects of an off-by-one error to stack up enough to be noticed, so the software developer's concern about an off-by-one error would not have been ruled out yet.) In theory these are valid concerns and notably less inane than his predecessors, but they are all things he should have asked ''before'' he went on the air.

* "How likely is it to rain this afternoon?" We don't know, you need to show the 12 noon to 4pm forecast, not the hourly.