Ludicrous Precision: Difference between revisions

* In Scientific Fields and especially Physics the use of Significant Figures is a necessary item to understand how science works in general, based off the variations between measuring devices and understanding margin of error. If you are measuring something to the thousandth decimal place, having a reading that just goes to the tenth decimal place is an incongruity (if you are using the same device you can't have both .005 and .05 as measurements, the second number has to be .050 or something with that added decimal place). All that said, unless you are going into something like particle physics there is almost no real world need to be that precise (i.e. a house isn't going to collapse if you are .5 cm off on the span of a beam). This is also part of the reason a lot of old-line engineers miss slide rules—taking calculator results too literally frequently leads to false precision when it isn't needed.

* Football (soccer) suffers a bit from this as the rules were originally written in Imperial measurements but are now administered in Metric units. For example the goals are specified as being 7.32m x 2.34m that being the equivalent of the old eight yards wide by eight foot high.

 

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