Shanahan also has some rather prissy academic standards that I do not share, as shown here:
"The paper reports some comparison to a thermocouple was done, but summarizes it down to a single number. This is not acceptable practice for a paper that supposedly will revolutionize physics as we know it." That is telling. In this case a single number *does* represent the entire data set. It is not a summary; it is full resolution loss-free data compression. You add 2 deg C to the IR camera data points and Presto! you get the thermocouple readings. From Table 3, you could say: IR CAMERA, THERMOCOUPLE 641.6 K, ~644 K 670.7 K, ~673 K 644.5 K, ~647 K 546.0 K, ~548 K . . . That's tedious. It is more elegant to say: "take the values from column A, round off, and add 2 to each one." That is what the authors said, and what they meant. I do not understand why Shanahan feels it would be more scientific in some sense to expand the tables and graphs to include all of the thermocouple data when we know the two data sets lie right on top of one another, with a 2 deg C offset. I don't see what this has to do with whether the paper "will revolutionize physics." An important paper should have loads of extraneous data?! I am a programmer. If I can reduce data to single number with no loss of resolution, I *love* it! I am thrilled. We programmers live for things like that, especially those of us from the era of 4 kB RAM memory. - Jed
