Where Our Live Data Comes From.

Some pages on Rational Times are filled automatically with public data published by scientific and official bodies. We credit the source on every page where its data appears, and we never present this data as our own reporting.

Weather

Forecasts on our weather pages come from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), whose forecast service covers the whole world. Data from MET Norway is licensed under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD) 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Our server asks for each city’s forecast at most about once an hour, never before MET Norway says the last one has expired, and identifies itself in every request, as MET Norway asks. These are computer forecasts, not warnings: for official warnings in India, follow the India Meteorological Department.

Earthquakes

Our earthquake pages use the real-time feeds of the US Geological Survey (USGS), which are in the public domain. We list every earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or more around the world, and 2.5 or more in and around India. The USGS revises its figures as its seismologists review each event, and our pages follow those revisions. Every quake stays in our archive.

Space photo of the day

Our space photo is NASA’s Image of the Day. NASA’s own photographs are generally not protected by copyright in the United States; we show each one with NASA’s credit line and a link to NASA’s page, and we leave out any picture that NASA credits to someone else. NASA does not endorse Rational Times.

Country figures

Population, GDP and inflation on our country pages come from the World Bank’s open data, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Once a month our server adds any newer years; earlier years stay in the history.

Exchange rates

Our currency pages use the euro reference rates of the European Central Bank, published on working days. We work out rupee rates across the euro, so they can differ slightly from the rupee reference rate published in India by Financial Benchmarks India Ltd. They are for information only, not for transactions.

Live news

The live news engine reads the public news feeds of news organisations and official bodies; see how the live news engine works. Every story it has shown is kept in the live news archive, day by day.

Representational photos

Stories from the live news engine are other organisations’ reports, so we do not use their photos. Where we show a picture beside one, it is a free-licence photograph from Wikimedia Commons or a public-domain image, labelled “Representational image”, with the photographer and the licence.

When a source is unavailable

If a source does not answer, our pages show the last data we received and when it arrived. Tell us about a problem through our help centre.