Ludicrous Precision: Difference between revisions

* David Weber's ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' books are full of this. He often gives ship velocities to 6 significant digits, when those ships are accelerating at rates that make the last three digits change in the time it takes to read the number. On one occasion he had a character verbally give a "time to grav lance range" in hundredths of a second, and almost nobody in the series will say something like "about five minutes" when "two-hundred-ninety-three-point-two seconds" is more accurate.

* Played with in ''[[Sylvie and Bruno]]'', when Bruno estimates that there are "about a thousand and four" pigs in the field outside. When told he can't possibly be sure about the "four" part, he insists that that's the ''only'' part he's sure about--there are four pigs right under the window, but he can't be nearly as precise about how many are in the rest of the field.

{{quote| Many stories are told of Zaphod Beeblebrox's journey to the Frogstar. Ten percent of them are ninety-five percent true, fourteen percent of them are sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent of them are only five percent true, and all the rest of them are told by Zaphod Beeblebrox. }}

* Used for the opposite effect in ''[[To Kill a Mockingbird]]''. When asked by the judge during Tom Robinson's trial, Mayella Ewell gives her age as "nineteen-and-a-half." The fact that a nineteen-year-old still thinks of her age in halves serves to show that she doesn't get out as much as she should.