On Fri, 30 Nov 2001 10:14:36 -0500, Rich Ulrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> - whereas, by contrast, we scientists can right it out with
>"scientific notation" with its powers of ten, and have something
>concrete, not abstract, because it is additive in the exponents....
>or am I just making another complete abstraction of it?
I'm sure you meant "write" it out, right? :-)))
My point is that for many beginning students, a given probability with
16 zeros from the decimal is abstruse even if couched in sci.
notation. IMHO, sci. notation is a symbolic representation of the
real probablilty and is a handy tool for computation tasks as you
point out. I agree with the original post that we don't have a good
feel for the really large and really small numbers.
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
