Great Western Coffee Shop

Speech by the SoS for Transport; 21 September 2017:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/government-invests-in-northern-transport-infrastructure

.....and announces first 'Digital Railway': https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-invests-in-northern-digital-railway-plans-to-improve-trans-pennine-journeys

So: millions in the North, billions in London. All sounds the same if you've got a cold.

.....I thought the GWML in the Thames Valley was the first 'Digital Railway'.  Digital meaning two state.  The GWML often operates in two states; all on go or all on stop..... ::) ::)

You're thinking of binary. Digital just means it's all fingers.

Yeah, Binary is two states. Digital, I think, is 'a finite number of defined states', so binary is digital but a system that could be in four states (eg. 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1) would also be digital. Analouge on the other hand has an infinite number of possible states (eg. an analouge sound recording can capture sound at any pitch, a digital one would presumably round the pitch to the nearest value the format supports). I think that's right.

On the content of Grayling's speech, I note the long list of road schemes at the begining and ask, as I have done elsewhere, whether the North-South transport funding divide is not actually about total government expendature but rather how it is spent. Is it the case that both London and the north have, to pick a figure out of the air at random, £10bn per anum spent on them but in London it is spent sensibly (on public transport) and in the north it is mostly wasted on roads leaving rail in the north under-funded?

I would agree with that.  Trains are inherently analogue, as (example) they can come to a stop in an infinite number of overlapping places at a station.  If I give you two possible stopping places, no matter how close they are together, you can always find another one in between.

Shades of Zeno's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise)

...I give up.  I was just trying to make a joke out of it... ::) :P :D