marycatelli: (Default)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote2025-03-23 11:21 am
Entry tags:

vignettes

This week's prompt is:
listen 😮

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

[identity profile] starshipcat.livejournal.com 2025-03-24 12:40 am (UTC)(link)
"We often speak of optical telescopes as 'the big eyes' and radio telescopes as 'the big ears,' but today we seldom look through eyepieces or listen through headphones. Modern telescopes at any wavelength are primarily data collectors." Dr. Doorne paused to look from one to another of us. "That means that modern astronomy is almost entirely data-driven, to the point that it is essential to have a thorough understanding of statistics. Not just the basics that an administrator or business owner might need for running a statistics package to analyze the operations of various units under one's authority, but a deep understanding of how statistical analysis works, its limits and its blind spots. If you don't have a good idea of what you should be seeing, you can easily follow an error, perhaps a problem with your equipment, down a very unpleasant garden path."

Yep, she was going to launch into the story of AXIL, the Advanced X-Ray Interferometry Laboratory, and how a slight imprecision in the stationkeeping of the two satellites led to massive errors in the data it produced, to the embarrassment of a number of scientists. Academic papers that had to be withdrawn, masters' theses and doctoral dissertations derailed -- a trauma that haunted astronomy and astrophysics even today.