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Ludicrous Precision: Difference between revisions
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'''Data:''' 0.68 seconds sir. ([[Beat|long pause]]) For an android, that is nearly an eternity.|''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]''}}
For whatever reason, very intelligent people in fiction are incapable of summarizing anything. No matter what you ask them, you'll get [[Literal Genie|exactly what you asked for]], with ''way'' more detail than is necessary. No robot will ever say "it's pretty darned likely"; they say "There is a 99.9875653 percent chance of success".
Common in [[Spock Speak]] and [[Robo Speak]]. Spock often estimated time in tenths (and later hundredths) of a second, which is of course useless as the sentence takes several seconds and there is no understood convention of exactly what instant that would refer to, even if one were capable of tracking time with this precision.
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* In the ''[[Sky Girls]]'' OVA, Karen uses this to show that she is the team's [[Smart Guy]].
* In ''[[Onidere]]'', Tadashi has calculated how long he can hug his easily excitable girlfriend so that she stops crying, but doesn't pass out (7 seconds).
* At one point in ''[[Durarara!!]]'' [[Badass|Shizuo Heiwajima]] tells someone that there's a 0.0000000000000000000675% chance that you can kill someone with a glare before beating the shit out of him.
* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' manages to ''reconstruct'' this trope. They announce there are 32768 possible causes for the accident. Then, you realizes it was a [[Genius Bonus]]: exactly 2 to the 15th power. And then, because the estimation comes from Magi, you understand it's what computers (which use binary) will say instead of "thirty thousand".
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* In dialogue (internal or with other characters), [[Keith Laumer]]'s [[Bolo|Bolos]] always measure things down to hundredths of a second or less.
* In ''[[Discworld/Going Postal|Going Postal]]'', Mr. Pump the golem berates conman Moist von Lipwig for his criminal lifestyle, citing that although he's never used violence, the deprivation of his victims has cumulatively killed 2.338 people. Later, Moist [[Lampshade Hanging|questions the accuracy of this]].
* Chapter 85 of ''[[Moby Dick]]'' deals with the question of whether the whale's spout is water or vapour, a question which has lasted from the beginning history until
{{quote|this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851)}}
== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': K-9 is prone to this, even needing to be snapped out of infinite repetition when a percentage goes into "three... three... three... three..."
* In the new ''[[Knight Rider]]'', Michael is poisoned. KITT has a countdown to his death that goes into the hundreths of seconds.
** KITT would do this in the original too (though rather less ludicrously), by giving distances to the tenths place, correcting times if they were a minute off, etc.
* ''[[Star Trek]]''
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== Sports ==
* Sprint times in professional sports are frequently measured to thousandths of a second by stopwatches operated by human hands--which are not precise to such small degrees. Worse, differences of a few thousandths or even hundredths of a second in dash times are often touted as being very significant, when, practically, differences of less than a tenth of a second in distance dashes are close to no difference at all.
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== Western Animation ==
* Dnerd in ''[[The BOTS Master]]'' often spouted off really precise statistics, though this took a backseat to his being completely incapable of carrying a standard conversation.
{{quote|"Calm down, Dnerd, it's just playacting."
"Playacting? Playacting is a compound intransitive verb..." }}
* In one episode of ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', Homer hears that the average man lives to be 76.2 years old, exclaiming that he's 38.1 years old. The best part is that he's wrong -- he's 39.
* This is J. Jonah Jameson's gimmick in ''[[The Spectacular Spider-Man|The Spectacular Spider Man]]''. "I want that report in 18 seconds!"
* Exploited in an episode of ''[[The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius|The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius]]'', when Jimmy came up with an idea to get rid of his robotic servants made mainly to help him with bullies, since they did their job so well, he became hugely unpopular. When Jimmy said that pi equaled to 3, the robots tried to [[Mouthful of Pi|correct him]], exploding before they achieved [[Ludicrous Precision]].
* ''[[The Angry Beavers]]'': Daggett achieves this while hiding under the floorboards.
{{quote|'''Daggett:''' A bug... two bugs... four bugs... ''(explodes out through the floor)'' AAAAH! 4023 BUGS!}}
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* In the ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' episode "Fall Weather Friends", Pinkie Pie is commentating on the Running of the Leaves, and at one point she tries to figure out exactly how far ahead of Applejack Rainbow Dash is:
{{quote|'''Pinkie Pie:''' She's ahead by half a nose! Or maybe three-quarters of a nose! No, about 63.7% of a nose! ''(sees Spike staring at her)'' ...Roughly speaking.}}
* The ''Star Trek TOS'' example above is spoofed in ''[[Muppet Babies]]'', where Gonzo (as Spock) takes so long to say the fractions on the odds that he has to be cut off by someone.
== Real Life ==
* The "normal" body temperature of humans is often given as 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This is due to an adjustment to the original scale to a more precise division. It was originally based the freezing point of water (30 degrees by the previous scale he was basing his on) and human normal body temperature (90 degrees by the older scale). He adjusted it to 32/96 to make 64 intervals between the two. It was later adjusted again to make the freezing and boiling points more precisely 32 and 212, respectively, making body temperature 'about' 98.
* [[wikipedia:List of highest-grossing films#Worldwide highest-grossing films|Film box office figures]] (specially for recent productions) only lack cents to be more precise.
* John Stossel (Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity) reported in one of his books how the average weight of a bird was given in grams to one decimal place. This was done by converting the real estimate from Imperial to Metric and adding "drama digits." The real estimate was "about half a pound." It just goes to show what significant digits are for.
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