Did you know that common kitchen knives can also be used by Billy Joe Bob to blind someone, or worse kill them? Just wait until you manage to tick Billy Joe Bob off. This cannot end well.

Clearly, kitchen knives should not be made, either.

Look, if people are going to attack, maim, or murder someone, they've got plenty of options already. Adding one to the potential arsenal, especially one that would take significant technical know-how to be able to turn into an actual weapon, isn't really going to change things.

You can turn off screaming children?

Guess you should be looking for a new job. No point in sticking around to work for such a terrible boss.

Seems as though the police should actually want people to know about the speed traps. I mean, the ultimate goal for the police is to have everyone follow the law. If people know about an upcoming speed trap, then they'll slow down to the speed limit. If they don't know about the speed trap, then they'll continue to endanger those around them by driving too fast. </delightfully naive> Of course, we all know that what the police really want is ticket revenue. The more law breakers there are, the more revenue they get, and hence they will try to stop people from warning others to obey the law. This system is rather broken.

Quit shouting. Calm down.

Clarification. Chebyshev's inequality is not going to help you with distributions that have no mean or standard deviation. Note also that the standard deviation mentioned in Chebyshev's inequality is the *population* standard deviation, and NOT the *sample* standard deviation.

Careful. Chebyshev's inequality doesn't help you if you are sampling from a physical process with a Cauchy distribution. Be careful not to confuse the *sample* standard deviation with the *population* standard deviation. The former always exists. The latter is what you use with Chebyshev's inequality... *if* it exists. In the case of a Cauchy distribution, your sample standard deviation would mislead you into thinking that the probability to fall outside N sample standard deviations had some particular bound that it did not have.

You might be interested in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev's_inequality The standard deviation tells you something important about *any* distribution.

I hope he has more examples than just the temperature (no, I didn't RTFA). For the temperature in a day, most people are satisfied with the minimum and maximum, and don't need any more complicated measure. The MAD would actually be LESS informative for temperatures within a day...

He's rather requesting the people start using a different statistical measure of spread, the mean *absolute* deviation, rather than the square root of the mean *squared* deviation (the standard deviation). I'm not familiar enough with it's particular characteristics to say whether or not this would be an improvement in any rigorous sense, but I'd be surprised if it were. So "Get bent." is probably still the right attitude.

I know several people who have left high energy physics to become data scientists. Nobody in HEP calls themselves a "data scientist", but that's (some of) what we do anyway. It's just analysis of very large data sets. Unlike in the life sciences, both HEP and many commercial / industrial environments have sufficiently large data sets that very complex questions can be asked and answered. You can never have "enough data" -- if you think you have "enough data", then you aren't asking hard enough questions.

Means for a government to systemtically supress or harass certain people or groups of people are worrisome to me.

Wasn't 3 Mbps "high-speed" ten years ago?

The interplanetary medium can carry sound waves. Of course, it is moving faster than the local speed of sound outward from the sun (the solar wind). So if you shouted really loud from the ISS, someone in the asteroid belt might be able to hear you. But not the other way around.

It was pretty much one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator