Links for 2012-02-13

Alright, so how do we go about quantifying how "good" a watch is? Well, there seem to be two main things we can test. The first of these is accuracy. That is, how close does this watch come to the actual time (according to some time system)? If the official time is 3:00 pm and my watch claims it is 5:00 am, then it is not very accurate. The second measure of "good-ness" is precision or, in watch parlance, stability. This is essentially a measure of the consistency of the watch. If I have a watch that is consistently off by 5 minutes from the official time, then it is not accurate but it is still stable. In essence, a very consistent watch would be just as good as an accurate one, because we can always just subtract off the known offset.

I don't have anything to add about the content of the post, but these graphs look like they came from a website spoofing confusing academic presentations, not an actual social-science paper. I'm not sure which I like more, the fade-to-invisibility technique used to distinguish some of the data series, or the way the legend implies they've done nine-parameter fits to (effectively) single data points.

If you have a gun that runs on compressed air, it would be nice to know how much air you have left wouldn't it? I'm not sure the design was fully thought through. I don't know the story of the gun, but I do know that you shouldn't need to point the barrel toward your face to read a gauge.