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Preserving Radio Silence At the Square Kilometer Array
johnslater writes: The Guardian has a story on the radio silence requirements at the Square Kilometer Array in Australia. The RF requirements for the SKA are far more stringent than at the US National Radio Quiet Zone at Greenbank, to such an extent that the specialized supercomputers to control the array have specially shielded data centers, and the as-yet-unbuilt supercomputer to process the data will be located hundreds of miles away in Perth. To quote Dr John Morgan in the article: "You can guarantee that the thing that SKA will be remembered for ... is going to be the thing you have not thought of. It's the unknown unknown."
since a supercomputer does not presently exist that can deal with the volume of data the SKA will produce.
The formula for human advancement: Christmas trees, spiders, cows, and eternal optimism.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Please stop using the phrase or variants of the phrase "unknown unknowns", such a phrase so to speak lack poignancy, coherence and it doesn't have any resemblence of meaning. The very notion of unknown unknowns is ultimately something purely idiotic and thus isn't useful as knowledge.
I disagree with this notion.
I've often been asked to plan projects there there have been several known unknowns.
Typically this leads to a list of unknowns that has to be resolved before a meaningful plan can be realized. Apart from those there sometimes are unforeseen unknowns. Either because things that were considered known turned out to misinformation or simply because the customer had needs that they forgot to tell us.
This naturally leads to a report of previously unknown unknowns.
While it can be argued that it isn't useful knowledge it is needed to have an expression for those occurrences to inform investors why the old project plan doesn't work and a new one has to be made.
"Unknown unknowns" might be a vague expression, but without suggesting a better one to distinguish it from known unknowns it is a bit rude to call it idiocy.
Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about "unknown unknowns." It goes something like this: "There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don't know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don't know that we don't know." He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, "That's the smartest and most modest thing I've heard in a year."
-- David Dunning, author of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!