Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,

Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and lost

  • Ook the Librarian@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The proportion is about 0.998, and the parent post had it at 0.9998. You move the decimal point by adding 9s. There was one too many. It was off by a decimal place.

    Whether you would call that “off by decimal place” or not, it is certainly larger than being off by “a tenth of a percent”. That would mean the error bars of number 0.9998 ± 10% [edit: oops, did i miss a decimal place there. i’ll leave it] would just close the gap.

    I like the proportion of the smear, aka, the whole point of your post. I never heard it in those terms. It reminds me of the one where if the earth were a basketball, the moon would be a tennis ball about 9 feet away. I’ll calc out the percent errors if anyone cares.