{"id":1994,"date":"2015-08-17T01:25:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T06:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1994"},"modified":"2015-08-08T12:36:17","modified_gmt":"2015-08-08T17:36:17","slug":"remote-sensing-and-not-so-remote-sensing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2015\/08\/remote-sensing-and-not-so-remote-sensing\/","title":{"rendered":"Remote Sensing and not-so-Remote Sensing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>Recent experience with Pluto shows us once again that all the expert ideas about remote things are usually wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sensing something from a distance, a.k.a., remote sensing is difficult. <a href=\"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2014\/09\/remote-sensing-is-difficult\/\">I&#8217;ve written about this before<\/a>. Everyone seems to know this, but that doesn&#8217;t stop people from acting as if they are exceptional. I mean, all you have to do when sensing from a distance is start by saying something like,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We are basing our statements on distant measurements <strong>and<\/strong> we believe&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>(Note the use of &#8220;and&#8221; instead of &#8220;but&#8221;)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now we have a close fly by of Pluto. Up close, <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2015\/07\/first-pluto-data-reveals-lots-of-terrain-that-is-not-easy-to-explain\/\">Pluto has some features that it shouldn&#8217;t have<\/a>. Gosh, how could the experts have been so wrong? Another example of the difficulty of remote sensing.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry, but now I go back to one of my least favorite topics\u2014climate change. Experts are stating the temperature of the earth 10,000 (did I put the correct number of zeros there?) ago based on data sensed from afar (this time the distance is years, not miles). They don&#8217;t preface their statements with the recommended preface. Instead, they speak with enough certainty to cause well-intentioned to legislate legislation and proclaim proclamations that eliminate jobs and generally disrupt the lives of other people, while not altering their own well-guided lives.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, just perhaps, one day we will learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips Recent experience with Pluto shows us once again that all the expert ideas about remote things are usually wrong. Sensing something from a distance, a.k.a., remote sensing is difficult. I&#8217;ve written about this before. Everyone seems to know this, but that doesn&#8217;t stop people from acting as if they are exceptional. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,48,20,109],"tags":[176,170,142,223],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-estimation","category-general-systems-thinking","category-learning","category-science","tag-estimation","tag-general-systems-thinking","tag-learning","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1995,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}