Talk:2170: Coordinate Precision

The coordinates seem to show a NASA building, so in the end you're still soing something space related. 172.69.55.196 19:47, 1 July 2019 (UTC)Some random European.

The more precise coordinates are actually in the middle of the Rocket Garden at the Visitor's Center of the Kennedy Space Center complex. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 19:58, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

The atom-level coordinates are obtained by appending digits of e and pi to the Rocket Garden coordinates. Ichoran (talk) 20:21, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

I always find it very funny to see all those decimals. Regular GPS devices have an uncertainty of 3 meters if there is no interference from trees, buildings or whatever. That puts you at about 4 to 5 decimals I guess. Palmpje (talk) 20:26, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

A Google Maps webpage URL includes coordinates to seven decimal places. EmuSam (talk) 20:48, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Sure but out there with your handheld GPS or normal consumer device that includes a GPS receiver you won't get more precision than about 3 meters. And when your at the higher latitudes you're probably not getting that. Palmpje (talk) 20:52, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

So combining this comic with #2169, is Randal suggesting he'll be at the Rocket Garden on July 28th (much as he did in #240)? 108.162.216.208 20:47, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

It says June 28th. --162.158.126.22 20:52, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

No, the date of that comic is June 28, but the title text says: [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING] --Kynde (talk) 21:51, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. For some reason my app only showed the first part of the tirle text --162.158.126.94 23:04, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

The COMIC says "June 28th." The TITLE TEXT says "July 28th." Apparently the government computer predictive text was trained from different input. mwburden (talk) 15:26, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Regrettably, there are two dimensions missing, Z and T. Without Z (elevation)+/- you could be in space or in a neutrino detector. T is only relevant for dynamic objects, but there again, the Americas are going West at a measurable rate! RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 21:30, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

The seventh row is likely a reference to comic number 1358 where two stick figures try to find waldo via satellite. 172.69.226.125 21:44, 1 July 2019 (UTC) kisara, 21:42, 1 July 2019 (utc)

10^-40 degrees on the surface of the earth translates to about 0.7 planck lengths. 162.158.106.234 21:50, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Do the coordinates 28.5234°N, 80.6830°W really correspond to the tip of the Delta rocket? I checked and it was pointing to a small patch of ground next to the rocket, not the tip of the rocket itself. Herobrine (talk) 00:20, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

No, you need to go to five decimal places to get the rocket. In that respect, I think he might be off by one digit of precision in his descriptions. Jeremyp (talk) 12:04, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I would like to mention that neither number seems to fit into a standard double float value. I made a fiddle showing this. [1] Ansarya (talk) 01:48, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Floats are stored base 2, so representing them exactly as decimal often requires many more digits than is actually necessary (for complicated number theory reasons, a float can always be represented exactly as decimal, which would not be true if floats were stored in base 3). For this reason, programming languages that can format floats round them, usually to a number of digits where it will be possible to reconstruct the original float (though C# apparently takes off a couple extra digits, since those digits are almost never significant). To illustrate this, I used Rust to print many more digits of a float than would be shown normally [2]. The latitude coordinate in the comic could be the result of printing a double precision float, but the longitude coordinate could not be. Also note that it takes almost 50 digits to reach an exact base 10 representation, even though only 14 or 15 of those digits are actually needed to reconstruct the original float. Probably not Douglas Hofstadter (talk) 18:01, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

May be my pet peeve... ...but adding an additional error to every piece of input data [and maybe every intermediate result] in order to show that either the precision the original measurement ends here or that all further digits of the measurement read "0" often introduces an error that can add up surprisingly quickly => I personally prefer raw floats that indicate there probably was no error analysis to rounded data and won't get tired on telling people to explicitely state what precision they can expect.162.158.114.70

If the smallest subnormal 32 bit float is a Planck length, then the largest 32 bit float is 10 sextillion times the diameter of the observable universe. If the value 1.0 of a 64 bit float is a cubic Planck length, then the largest float is 100 sextillion googol times the volume of the observable universe. Probably not Douglas Hofstadter (talk) 17:21, 2 July 2019 (UTC)