Keep searching, you're bound to find something!

The New York Times reports that the space shuttle Discovery had:

" cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission."

Ordinarily, more data are better. If you study a "Black Box" you want to probe it with as many inputs as you can, measure the outputs, and try to discern what's inside. The more data you have, the better you can tell something. Not so with Discovery.

As the Times article notes, more data on the shuttle could lead to more worries, more investigations, and more tests. However, such data, while true, may not be cause for any concerns. The fact that a camera discovers something does not imply that there's a problem. Moreover, there may be nothing you can do in any case. And, as if that's not enough, fixing the problem may cause other problems that were not there before the fix!

As the article notes, in medicine a physician can do lots of tests. But oftentimes the tests pick-up items that are irrelevant to patient health, or wouldn't develop into problems until well after the patient is dead. Knowing about them doesn't help the patient. In fact, it may prompt the patient to seek treatment where the treatment side effects are worse then the may-never-to-appear disease.

We have to remember what we learned in school: Sometimes,

Less really is more!