I used that term while replying to the utterly preposterous notion that scientists need to know what every drop of water is doing and why.
if you think about how ridiculous MY comment was (100000%) and compare it to the comment I was answering (EVERY drop of water... presumably on the planet since that's the system we're talking about), you'll surely agree that mine comes a distant second in the ridiculous stakes.... consider ALL the oceans.
"Scientists change raw data all the time. No"
Fair point. You're correct.
I should have said,
Scientists process raw data all the time. I know, because I do it daily.
Also, the raw data should always be accessible. In fact, I recently signed an online petition making it obligatory to provide all raw (unprocessed) data with every journal article submission... I'm worried about the overhead in archiving all this data (my experiments routinely give me terabytes of data) but this is an technical/engineering problem.
Irreversibly changing raw data is MASSIVELY concerning! I would never disagree with this.
Can you provide a source that "proves" that BoM has permanently changed raw data? ... Note the implication here is that the original data has been lost. We can never get the raw numbers back.
A couple of time I've made the mistake of deleting some raw data. rm -rf * is a high risk command!!
It just means all the other data (processed and otherwise) is useless. I then spend nights re-taking the data.
In a system where you CAN'T do experiments and must rely solely on observations this would be very bad.
