this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
765 points (94.0% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
5695 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My grandpa once published an article where he turned a tree circumference (obtained using a tape measure) into a "diameter estimate" with 6 significant figures. Turns out, he was wrong on the 4^th^ digit because he used π=3.14...
My high-school chemistry teacher would dock a point for each extra digit past the calculation's actual precision. We learned quickly not to overstate our sig figs.
An answer written as "3" means that the true value is somewhere between 2½ and 3½. If you write "3.19142" when what you actually know is "3", you're incorrectly excluding the vast majority of the possible true values.
Our physics teacher taught measurements and uncertainties as the very first thing in our multi-year syllabus. All answers thereafter needed to be in the precision implied from the number of significant figures in the given figures and error propagation.
The difference between accuracy and precision.