The Daily Nerd (January 16th, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (January 16th, 2014) #

Stunning Footage from SpaceShipTwo’s Third Rocket-Powered Flight

Virgin Galactic released video from SpaceShipTwo’s flight test last Friday, January 10, 2014. This was the third supersonic, rocket-powered test of the Virgin Galactic system after dozens of successful subsonic test flights. The pilots Dave Mackay and Mark Stucky tested the spaceship’s Reaction Control System, the newly installed thermal protection coating on the vehicle’s tail booms, and the “feather” re-entry system, all with great success.

Why the world needs OpenStreetMap

Who decides what gets displayed on a Google Map? The answer is, of course, that Google does. I heard this concern in a meeting with a local government in 2009: they were concerned about using Google Maps on their website because Google makes choices about which businesses to display. The people in the meeting were right to be concerned about this issue, as a government needs to remain impartial; by outsourcing their maps, they would hand the control over to a third party.

2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?

The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good — particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems.