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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."

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  1. Re:everything is known by Demonoid-Penguin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. Also, the idiotic potential isn't even on par with phenomenology or anything philosophical to my knowledge, the phrase is so to speak similar to Sokrates' saying that "I know that I know nothing".

    Stop this idiocy please and stop using the phrase "unknown unknowns".

    Much simpler to say "you don't know what you don't know", right? That Socrates was a bit over-rated, don't you think?