Tuesday, 29 January 2008

The prize for the most hideous Formula 1 car of all time goes to ...

... Honda.

Heaven knows how it was possible to make something worse-looking than last season's offering, but somehow they've managed it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that front-end even aerodynamically logical?

Newmania said...

Anyway...I have just spent half an hour trying to understand STV and I have no idea what it is supposed to do or how it works.

It must be a pawn because it will quite clearly never be adopted. I would suggest an element of PR for the House Of Lords which would stop tactical voting and remove power from the executive whilst allowing government.

What you cannot have is the most unprincipled zero getting a nonentity dividend by offending people somewhat less...as if that wasn`t bad enough.

Jonny Wright said...

Sam - I haven't a clue. Presumably it's had thousands of hours in a wind tunnel. Far be it from me to second-guess the professional aerodynamicists! I hope it goes faster than it looks, anyway.

Newmania - STV is a little complicated, mathematically, but it makes a lot of sense. It's used by pretty much every student union in the country, and most student clubs and societies to. It's also used as the electoral system in the Republic of Ireland.

You can still get an overall majority in the Commons with STV, but you need a good 40% or 45% of the vote. I think that's pretty fair. Currently you have a sizeable Labour majority on the basis of just over a third of the popular vote, which is outrageous. If you can't get into the low 40s at least, I don't think you have the moral mandate to railroad your policies through parliament.

STV makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Have you ever seen a set of results, in a council election for a 3-seat ward, that looks a bit like this?

Labour candidate A - 1015
Labour candidate B - 1012
Labour candidate C - 1002
Conservative candidate A - 982
Conservative candidate B - 975
Conservative candidate C - 971

You end up with 3 Labour councillors for 3 seats, despite the Tories having almost half the vote. With STV, you'd almost certainly get 2 Labour councillors and 1 Tory. Work through a couple of real-life examples - you'll find that it's much more representative of how people actually voted.

Sorry to go on such a long rant about STV. It's one of those geeky subjects ...