In article <[email protected]>, Chris Angelico <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 11:38 PM, Roy Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm trying to intuit, from the values I've been given, which coordinates > > are likely to be accurate to within a few miles. I'm willing to accept > > a few false negatives. If the number is float("38"), I'm willing to > > accept that it might actually be float("38.0000"), and I might be > > throwing out a good data point that I don't need to. > > You have one chance in ten, repeatably, of losing a digit. That is, > roughly 10% of your four-decimal figures will appear to be > three-decimal, and 1% of them will appear to be two-decimal, and so > on. Is that "a few" false negatives? You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the glass is 10% empty, it's that it's 90% full, and 90% is a lot of good data :-) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
