Words and expressions that grind your gears

[Gavin Chipper]

People who don't suffer fools gladly. Translation - intolerant arsehole who is generally oblivious to all of their own failings as a human being.

Mostly their failings are personality based rather than ability based.

Not necessarily. There are loads of people who quite openly act annoyed and as if the other person is an idiot if they didn't get what they were saying, but if they don't understand someone else the other person just wasn't being clear enough!

[Christy Cooper]

The phrase 'the ick'...

[Marc Meakin]

When someone in their 40 s or 50s ask you if there are 31 days this month.

Though I still ask every March do the clocks go back so I'm probably worse

[Conor]

‘Forever home’

[Marc Meakin]

‘Forever home’

If it relates to a pet I'm OK with it but similar to calling a player the GOAT only works if the world is about to end

[Gavin Chipper]

When someone gets accused of something and the news says they were "forced to deny" it. What? They denied it. That's a weird spin.

[Gavin Chipper]

The edge of space. People use this to mean the near edge of space, so just when you first reach space. But it's name sounds like the outer edge, like some sort of extreme boundary. You even sometimes hear people refer to it as the very edge of space, which is obviously nonsense because it implies some sort of superlativeness to it, when in fact it's the opposite.

On a separate note, I sometimes wonder how aware most people are about relative distances in space, and how unimpressively close the International Space Station is compared to, you know, proper space.

The International Space Station is only about 250 miles from Earth. I think that would surprise a lot of people.
The Moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth (so x 1000).
The Sun is about 93 million miles from Earth (so another x 400ish)
Neptune at its closest is about 2.7 billion miles from the Earth (another x 30, so about x 10 million from the ISS)

And that's just scratching the surface.

On this subject, I thought it was a bit ridiculous how much publicity that trip to the edge of the atmosphere got yesterday, and for the purposes of this thread, "crew" to mean "passengers".

[David Williams]

The term "astronaut" (star sailor) always bugs me a little. They don't really get any closer to our own star, let alone visit any others.

[Gavin Chipper]

But at least they sail.

[Gavin Chipper]

When people measure stuff in terms of number of standard deviations from the mean, they might as well be measuring mass in number of elephants or double decker buses. Anything other than exactly one standard deviation seems to me to be essentially meaningless. I was reminded of this when reading about aliens today:

Firstly, this latest detection is not at the standard required to claim a discovery.

For that, the researchers need to be about 99.99999% sure that their results are correct and not a fluke reading. In scientific jargon, that is a five sigma result.

These latest results are only three sigma, or 99.7%. Which sounds like a lot, but it is not enough to convince the scientific community. However, it is much more than the one sigma result of 68% the team obtained 18 months ago, which was greeted with much scepticism at the time.

Sigma being standard deviations. It would be much more logical to simply cite the significance level itself rather than measuring it in elephants but then having to say what it means in addition to that.

[Callum Todd]

I read that exact article and remember being confused the accuracy % only because I've read about six sigma before and had the figure 99.99997% stuck in my head for that. So not sure if I've misremembered that, if five sigma is somehow more accurate than six sigma, or if that article has just got its figures wrong.

[Gavin Chipper]

I read that exact article and remember being confused the accuracy % only because I've read about six sigma before and had the figure 99.99997% stuck in my head for that. So not sure if I've misremembered that, if five sigma is somehow more accurate than six sigma, or if that article has just got its figures wrong.

I think five is the standard method, but the higher the better. It's just to get more significance you have to do more stuff which costs more money.

But the other thing is that not everything fits the normal distribution, so talk of sigmas becomes even less meaningful.

[Gavin Chipper]

By the way if you had a statistical population with 2% at -1, 96% at 0 and 2% at 1 then the mean would be 0 and the standard deviation 0.2. So 4% of the population would be 5 standard deviations away from the mean!