Pioneer Anomaly Solved By 1970s Computer Graphics Technique
This is a classic example of how the physics community has been failing for the last 30 years.<p>First of all,  there's an extreme focus on papers that have come out in the last 1.5 years,  so that a lot of very interesting older work is invisible.<p>Secondly,  physicists don't look outside the discipline,  despite the fact that we often use inferior techniques.  Back in the 1990's,  Mark Newman and I were both working at Cornell and both of us were aware that the techniques physicists were using to evaluate power law distributions were bogus.  Well,  I was a timid grad student and,  despite being one of the best physicists of his generation who already had written half of an excellent textbook and had a stellar research record,  Mark was a postdoc who spent most of his two years in absolute anguish about how he was going to find his next job.<p>Mark wrote a paper about this ten years later,  after physicists had published thousands of bogus papers using bogus statistics.  It's a tragedy that neither Mark, myself or some other young turk didn't write it earlier -- and it wouldn't have been hard to do it all because it would mainly be a review paper of what was already in the statistics literature.