Re: [asa] Cosmologists questioning the Copernican principle?

At the risk of appearing humorless I'll point out that the correction to my
earlier slip (the result of first intending to express an error as a percent
& then changing it to a factor) was "small" in the sense that it didn't take
much space.

As far as records are concerned, a factor of 10^133 is trivial compared with
an error on an exam by a student who evaluated a determinant in the
denominator of an expression incorrectly and had it come out zero. Thus his
answer for a current in a circuit was infinite. At least he realized his
mistake (!) and, apparently having run out of time, scribbled "Darn!"

Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
To: "Murray Hogg" <muzhogg@netspace.net.au>
Cc: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] Cosmologists questioning the Copernican principle?

> Not the largest "small correction" I've ever seen.
>
> When at University, my tutorial partner once got a physics calculation
> wrong by a massive factor of 10^133. This was achieved by
> inadvertently putting the square of Planck's constant on the
> denominator of a fraction instead of the numerator!
>
> Iain
>
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Murray Hogg <muzhogg@netspace.net.au>
> wrote:
>> Hi George,
>>
>> You wrote:
>>>
>>> A small correction to my earlier post - the last figure should be
>>> 10^120,
>>> not 120%.
>>
>> Ah!
>>
>> So THAT'S what a physicist means by a "small correction" :)
>>
>> Blessings,
>> Murray
>>
>>
>>
>> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> -----------
> Non timeo sed caveo
>
> -----------
>
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Received on Tue Nov 25 16:52:47 2008