On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 01:03:52 -0600, Rick Eversole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>(did you see a 7 on a blue >background followed by a 6 on a red background or was it the >other way around) Years ago CSU Hayward had an open house (I will never forget the sound an HFE detector makes when a muon hits it), and one of the exhibit rooms was all about sensory perception. They had the usual optical illusions, but they had a couple rigs I'd not seen before. One was a color poster with the names of various colors on it. No color name was printed in its own color. The challenge was to read the poster aloud correctly. Well, come on, just focus. Next to the color poster was a tape recorder with a microphone, a headset, and a one second delay playback from the microphone into the headset. Apparently there was some text you were supposed to read without stumbling. Well, again, just focus. I didn't know these were two separate exhibits. So what I do? Guess. I'd finally met a perception challenge I couldn't easily pass. All the focus in the world isn't good enough to read, without error, on the first try, a list of color names printed in the wrong colors while trying not to listen to yourself name a different color than either the color name or the color you're looking at. I was impressed. :-) >which means the observations are suspect (sorry guys). All visual observations are suspect. This is why "if it isn't in writing(*), it doesn't exist." If you see something that might be important later, write down your observations ASAP. Write down what you see, not what you think it might have been. Data reduction comes later, and can yield surprises if you are scrupulously honest in your observations. (This is how I know I saw Sinus Meridianii in a 4" Newtonian without a color filter, something I should not have been able to do. Nothing else fit the sketch made at the eyepiece, and I *knew* the sketch was wrong. It had to be; S. Meridianii was on the other side of the planet when I made the observation! What the -- oh. You *add* 7 hours to PDT to get UT. :-) Well I'll be.) (*) In our case, if it isn't flight hardware, it doesn't exist. "Flying it is just an ego trip," my eye. I wrote up the analysis I did of the Sparks reentry video after the last meeting, and posted it to aRocket. Someone suggested I send it to NASA, so I forwarded it to Gerald, and he asked in turn that I format it as a scientific paper. When I added error bars to the analysis, the locus of the calculated flare position became too big to be useful. Sigh. But, the maxim, "half of art is knowing when to stop" applies to science as well; no sense doing a precise calculation of a position with lousy accuracy... -R -- Every complex, difficult problem has a simple, easy solution - which is wrong. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
