DaKardii wrote: Tue Sep 20, 2022 12:09 am
Anyone here watched the Queen's state funeral?
wednesday, September 20th, 2022
Me. it was fascinating, spectacular, and brilliant.
it lasted around 6 hours, including several religious services and processions. there were dozens of sites across london, and they all had to be coordinated and synchronized to the second.
there were tens of thousands of people involved, including politicians, visitors, military, police, and clerics. the boys choirs during the services were particularly impressive. and with dozens of world leaders attending, including kings, queens, presidents, dictators, and prime ministers, all of them serving as targets for a massive terrorist attack, Britain's security services faced the biggest security challenge in its history.
and let's not forget the dozens of vehicles, including the hearse especially designed by the queen herself, and the battalion of horses that took part in the processions.
there must have been hundreds of scripts and speeches, and there must have been hundreds of millions of footsteps that all had to be coordinated and synchronized to the second. I particularly noted that there were five or six different kinds of marches among the eight people carrying the Queen's coffin.
the thing that totally blew me away was that this hugely complex funeral, with hundreds of millions of components, was apparently executed successfully without even a misstep, or at least not a misstep that anyone reported. in particular, each of the thousands of participants had to play his part, at exactly the right time to be synchronized with everybody else.
as a computer programmer, this was incredible to me. if I wanted to write a program to simulate this, it would probably take me weeks. but the British authorities were able to choreograph the entire thing within just a few days after the death of the queen. it's no wonder that many analysts said that authorities had been planning for this event for decades.
another reason why watching the funeral was fascinating because of its historic significance. Queen Elizabeth was no candle in the wind, and so every component of the funeral had a historic significance dating back as far as the 1300s.
the 6-hour funeral was viewed by hundreds of millions of people in dozens of countries around the world. it showed how important Queen Elizabeth has been to britain, and it shows how important England and Britain have been to the world for many centuries.