Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Bow Tie Statistics

There are a lot of things you can say about the tall tales being told to Norm's 475 nm Ribbon Panel this week, but one presentation stood out among all the rest today. Despite all of the fancy vu-graphs put together by the Italian Waiter's support team, despite all of the videos running on just about every page (the award for most obscure video used in a vu-graph presentation goes to Jabba the Hutt for a Saturn V lifting off the pad when discussing Ares 1's propensity to fly back into the launch tower), and despite the EVM award going to the Ares team for "hitting all the milestones" (hmmmm, did we miss an Ares 1X launch in April?), the biggest truth stretching came from Bow Tie Joe.

You'll get it right away. Just like the panel did.

Statistics are a wonderful thing. You can prove just about anything with them. For those of us who took the course in school, statistics depend on taking many samples of a thing or process and drawing conclusions from the many performances to predict what the next sample will do. But for Bow Tie Joe it is a gift when the sample size is small...or nonexistent. Because with such limited data, you can "prove" just about anything you want to.

Even that a paper rocket is safer than one that has flown several times already.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A bad lie is the worse lie of all. A lie to people who know better (like have flown on a rocket discussed - is stupid).

Kind of neat watching people on the 6th floor of 4203 scramble to make data match the charts already presented.

Check the run dates folks…

Joe "Fudge" and Hutt may have dealt a final death blows to Ares 1.