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Peter-
 I agree with you about digital information not always being the best. Among
the tidbits...I'm sure you've seen and used guages on various cars or other
instrument panels. Supposedly some British powerplant study in the 60's
determined that the most effective way to set up banks of power gauges was
in vertical format, i.e.

9
8
7
6
5 (needle)
4
3
2
1

with the needle floating up and down across the guage, like an elevator cab.
The reason for this? The human eye/mind are set up to perceive DIFFERENCES
and changes. So when you've got fifty gauges set up side by side, and they
all should be on "5", the eye immediately picks up on anything that is
literally out-of-line. Numbers are nice but they aren't the best way to
present the picture all the time, especially when they are flashing and
changing and presenting too much information. Rate of change is still
easier to read from an analog gauge, even if an additional digital
rate-of-change meter would be more accurate.

Racing cars do something similar, they will rotate the round gauges so that
all needles point to 12 or 1 o'clock when they are in the normal
range--regardless of what number that is. Same purpose, you can scan them
all with peripheral vision and the "odd man out" pops up quickly.

After our Indian Point powerplant debacle, caused by some operator grabbing
the wrong "they all look alike, isn't that nice?" handle, the nuke plants
here LITERALLY used handles from bar taps! It's hard to mistake two
different color/shape/size handles for each other.

   

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