John,

Here is another comment on the errors of optical devices;

There is a teaching film showing wave crests moving to the right while the 
envelopes of group pulses simultaneously move to the left; demonstrating the 
potential for errors in laser surveying devices.  The configuration for this 
demonstration is a chain of discrete capacitors and inductors.  I leave it to 
our readers to discover which of these are connected in series and which, are 
connected in parallel.

I showed this film to my students of "Transmission Lines, Fields, and Waves" in
a routine undergraduate course at the University of Illinois (in Urbana, IL).

Gene.
...
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:00:50 -0800 (PST)
>>From: "John M. Steele" <[email protected]>  
>>Subject: [USMA:49700] Re: [SI] A mole hill into Himalayas  
>>To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
>>
>>   I did further checking, including looking at Leica
>>   specs.  Those numbers like 1.5 mm + 2 mm/km are not
>>   worst case specs, they are standard deviations. 
>>   Statistically, we know there is reasonable chance of
>>   individual measurements having errors out to 2 or 3
>>   standard deviations, rarely even more.
>> ...   

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