"Parts of the gorge are almost 2297 feet deep"

By -
This was displayed on my exercise bicycle on my cruise ship, as I was biking some Tour de France course on the bike's display.

My first thought was "What a weirdly specific number they chose to follow the vague word 'almost.'"

My second thought was, "Oh, they made the same mistake as the people who stated that the average human body temperature is '98.6.'"

What is the mistake?

Comments

  1. rob1:49 PM

    700 meters rounds to 2297 feet so I'm guessing this part of the bike's display program was written based on a metric value and has a converter if the display is set to use imperial.

    ReplyDelete
  2. rob1:54 PM

    and as 98.6F= 37C perhaps we ended up with a too specific value for body temperature along the same lines ?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andy10:08 AM

    The body is not at one uniform temperature, and also varies with time of day, activity, etc.

    The depth of an underwater gorge, even if it could be precisely measured, varies with the tides and season.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Andy6:28 PM

    Rob, that sounds likely. Interesting. I come across this stuff at work, too. "Calibrate the pressure transducer from 0 to 344.7 kPa."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more