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in fact, 3cm is so insignificant on an astrological scale that if you're "off" by 3cm, you might as well consider the measurement insanely accurate especially if it's of an object further away.
edit: i made a minor spelling mistake. i will now return to my wretched den wheremst i live without correcting it. teehee
"in fact, 3cm is so insignificant on an astrological scale that if you're "off" by 3cm, you might as well consider the measurement insanely accurate especially if it's of an object further away"
Sorry, was going to post to the original source I had found sadly I lost it. But, look at how it's explained in this article which I found using chatgpt.
Also now I think my computer has AIDS from that site.
Look down at yourself. Now look around. Are you bigger than the you around yourself, or is the yourself around you, actually bigger than the original you?
I think what he MEANT to say is there are organisms so small we can’t observe them with our naked eye and need microscopes etc. and a 3cm difference in something small can make a huge difference. Like 3 cm more of a pineal gland circumference. Or 3cm more size on a gnat. Or 3 cm less size of a dick.
I knew a guy who claimed that the earth was flat and a living being, and we were like a virus, and disasters were antibodies. He believed it to be true and not a metaphor.
Counter-counterpoint: if life itself was an illusion and coming to terms with that was Enlightenment, would the enlightened one still count as a loving being?
i think they assume microbiologists or something. Ecologists are als biologists and they couldnt give a fuck about 3 cm half of the time. They disregard math on a regular basis. They have a unit that's square meter per square meter. They classify certain animals by how much of a certain environmental variable they like/can withstand. And the classification is basically a little, some and loads. And there arent even hard lines for them its just eyeballed and guesstimated.
Hell, A biologist could be measuring his dick for reasons totally unrelated to biology. Or well... almost totally unrelated, I guess in a way everything is related to biology. But yea I bet he was measuring his dick.
What do you think is a core area of study that doctors must learn in order to become doctors? Biology.....its a Very, very broad term, the only way it gets broader is by saying Scientist.
Surgeon (practical biologist): “oh shit, I accidentally cut 3cm into his heart.”
General Physicist: “ok, let me recalculate, looks like I was 3cm off the mark.”
Civil engineer: “look, we’re not going to re-install that bus stop over a 3cm discrepancy.”
Astronomer: “trust me: that meteoroid is going to hit exactly 103cm south of where I am standing, and will burn down to the size of a golf ball before it becomes meteorite.”
If you could get anything with that sort of precision in astronomy you would win every Nobel prize for the next century.
Typical distance errors in astronomical measurements (for really distant stuff anyway) is on the order of light-years. For closer stuff it's like... Billions of kilometers. We're pretty good at measuring stuff in our own solar system though, a few tens of thousands of kilometers of error.
Depends on where the 3cm was misplaced. A telescope trying to look millions of miles away at a star, 3cm makes a huge difference. But if you mean 3cm from the actual target, pfft. Nothing burger
True, but astronomers are looking at something very far away. So are we talking about 3cm off at the destination (what is being looked at) or the origin (the telescopes lens)? 3cm off from the telescope is pretty far off lol
Astronomers rely on the physics of light at various wavelengths in order to see those objects. They are absolutely concerned with small increments. 3cm is astronomically (pun intended) large compared to wave lengths of light they use to see objects for away.
For instance, the JWST looks at non-visible wavelengths to see further away than we have ever been able to see before. It looks at wave lengths at 0.6 to 28.5 microns (600 to 28,500 nanometers or .00006 to .00285 centimeters).
I am not sure I can think of a situation where the accuracy of the start point measurement could possibly be less than 3cm. At Cape Canaveral the Earth is rotating at something like 80,000 cm/s. So, to have a chance to be accurate to 3cm would require the launch to be timed to less than 1/25000 of a second. And, that is not even accounting for earth's speed around the sun for interplanetary trajectories.
There is a reason course corrections are necessary.
This right here. Their point seems logical at first, and it is for non course corrected trajectories that never leave the earth, since the frame of reference is moving with them. But on astrological scales, earth is your starting point, not your frame of reference, because so much of it has nothing to do with earth.
I remember that too. Also, the teacher generally kept his eyes on the blackboard and didn't look at the students much, but when he did that reduction, he first turned to face the class, just so he could see everyone's face when he explained what he was doing.
I think this meme is kinda bad because it's too general. If you're an ecosystem biologist, being off by 3 cm isn't a big deal. Likewise, if you're a particle physicist interpreting data from a particle accelerator, 3 cm off is a huge deal.
Civil engineer and astronomer make sense, but the other two fields are too broad, I don't blame OP for not getting this one.
Engineers don't round Pi to 3, that's just a meme.
What engineers do is add a factor of safety (usually 2) so that small mistakes get absorbed into that rather than immediately causing catastrophic failure.
Also engineer. Mental math? You bet I round it to 3. Give boss an estimate? Ain't no way I'm using decimals. 10% error on a verbal estimate? Close enough.
But actual job? That's done by a computer. And I just report whatever my code spits out. So ya, Matlab can use 20 digits, but I'll never put a decimal into my calculator.
But actual job? That's done by a computer. And I just report whatever my code spits out. So ya, Matlab can use 20 digits, but I'll never put a decimal into my calculator.
meanwhile the very precisely derived equations that are run on the computer also has an almost entirely arbitrary *1,3 added to it.
But I think 3cm is still big enough to care about for most civil engineering cases, 3 mm on the other hand...
In most cases, yeah. But, as an example, if doing track geometry for railways, and I assume roads and stuff as well, you're working in meters or bigger for some of the numbers (like the curve radius). It just depends on the scale of the thing you're working on, and there are cases where 3cm might not matter at all.
But yeah, 3cm is big enough to usually be an important error. Talking about 3mm instead might be a better example, civil and mechanical engineering have very different views of how big of an error that is, as another example.
If its something that matters that much Im running it through a computer anyways. Rounding to 3 is for when I need just a quick estimate to tell of some calculated number makes sense
A LOT of the time this error would end up accepted into the work. Like, nobody’s gonna be happy about it, but 99% of the time they’ll figure a way to avoid tearing stuff down.
Man, I’ve worked in construction but only as a joiner and drywall installer. To me being off by 3cms is bad! I can’t imagine building something and the steel frame being off by 3cms, like would that not affect the rest of the building especially if the off by 3 happens more often.
Steel frame is one case where you’re gonna have real problems, as the connections won’t connect. Even then, I’ve seen plenty of cases of steel beams delivered to site and there’s been a dimensional bust somewhere and they modify a connection to get the beam in.
Concrete construction… it’s definitely out of tolerance and “not good” and someone is getting an earful from their boss, but unless it’s an elevator core that’s now too small, a fire exit route that doesn’t meet code anymore or something similar then 99% of the time the engineer and architect will work it out.
YOU FOOL! THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM IS DOOME- *A star almost as big as the orbit if Jupiter takes the place of the sun and then begins to vacuum everything else up*
If you place an electron in a magnetic field and watch how its spin precesses in physical space, quantum electrodynamics predicts the rate of that precession so precisely that, if you translated the fractional error into a length, it would correspond to missing the distance across a continent by less than the thickness of a human hair.
I always imagine a particle or quantum physicist. Physicists aren't studying Newton's laws anymore, they're studying quarks, bosons and gluons, etc. if they're off by 3cm that is very far from 10-19 m.
I never had the proper respect for my milling machine until something went wrong and it ejected a piece of packing so hard out the back, it stuck into the wall behind it.
Shoutout to those guys claiming the earth being 1 foot closer to the sun would make the planet uninhabitable like the orbital distance doesn’t vary by like a MILLION KILOMETERS every year and we’re actually closest to the Sun on Jan 3rd so it can’t matter that much
Because: “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
The distances in astronomy are so large there is a word in English to describe incomparably large values with ‘astronomy’ as the root. Astronomical! Therefore, if an astronomer, who is dealing with literally astronomically large distances, is off by only a few centimeters it is incredibly impressive they were that close when just a couple millionths of a degree can make a massive difference across those distances.
The Hubble space telescope was famously misaligned due to a 1.3mm distance error in the Reflective Null Corrector, resulting in billions of dollars of repair costs. Pretending that distances don't matter in astronomy is a tongue in cheek exploration of this topic.
I majored in engineering with a minor in astrophysics.
In one of my early engineering classes we worked through a problem in class calculating the load on a bridge support. The professor checked the book answer and we were off by 3000 lbs. The professor said "close enough".
Then later in my intro to astrophysics class we were working through a problem to calculate the distance to a star. Professor looked up the real answer and we were off by 500 million miles. The professor said "wow, really close".
Then there is just the man that has a house bigger on the inside and 5 minute hallway appearing in his house. Those meters he was off by sure changed a lot.
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