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From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: net.med,net.math
Subject: Re: The Perils of Nutrasweet: digits of precision
Message-ID: <402@phri.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 10:49:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: phri.402
Posted: Wed Aug 14 10:49:22 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 01:19:53 EDT
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Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
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> The usual method of writing numbers (e.g. 10, .007) carries no information
> about accuracy.  .007 could be accurate to one, two or three decimal places.

	This is getting rather off the point, but some of you might like
this.  During one of my interviews for college, I was asked a typical
stupid interview question: "What's the area of a table 3 meters wide by 4
meters long?"  I poked around with various counter-probes like, "Do you
mean the area of just the top surface, or the top and bottom combined?" and
then came up with the obvious answer; 12 meters^2.

	Anyway, it turns out the "correct" answer is 1 * 10^1 meters^2;
since the initial data only had 1 digit of accuracy, that's all the final
answer can have.
-- 
Roy Smith 
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016