Hacker News Reader

Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

This article is confusingly written to obscure the fact that there's no story.

Some field tests showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected, but the TSA has determined it's because some field testers, who were conducting 10 tests at a time, reported the sum of the individual radiation levels instead of the average.

Apparently this is due to a confusing field test form. So the TSA has fixed the form.

I mean, I hate the TSA too, but come on...

View on HN

Averaging the results? They probably discard outliers too. Unusually high output is something you'd want to be aware of rather than hiding it in an averaged result.

Definitely. For safety concerns, we don't care so much what the "average" victim is getting. Much more important is what the machines do to people at the worst.

Is it OK to give extremely high doses to, say, 1 in 100 people, if the other 99 are normal?

That doesn't even make sense. If they forgot to divide by 10, the results are actually 10 times too large, meaning the actual radiation is 1/10 of the previously reported result.

Correct. These new tests produced abnormally large results. If these results were true, then this would be front-page news. But the results are faulty. So the actual radiation is ... the same as what we thought before these new tests were conducted.

It's confusing because, once you understand it, you ask why they wrote a story about it.

Oh now I see. I thought they forgot to divide by 10 in the old results. But the story is that they did new measurements which were too large because they screwed up. So the story is that nothing's changed. Yeah, I agree with you...

I think it's called fan service, though at this point it's almost indistinguishable from picking on the retarded kid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com