explain xkcd:Museum
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| 182.8 Meters |
 Title text: They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect. |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created recently by a 1.8288 meter high individual. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This is a comic in the My Hobby series — the hobby here being reverse-engineering original units from oddly specific measurements in another unit. Unlike many of the My Hobby comics, where Cueball's hobby is something eccentric, prankish or dangerous, in this situation he uses his hobby simply to understand the origin of someone else's unusual phrasing.
When presenting measurements where perfect accuracy is not required, such as in casual conversation or when giving simple presentations to the public, speakers will often use approximations, such as rounding to the nearest whole number, or the nearest ten, or using only the most significant digit. When translating these approximations into other measurement systems, however, people will often treat them as precise, and use the standard conversion formulae to get an exact value. This leads to examples of false precision, where the presentation of a measurement implies more information than is actually contained in it. In this case, a fathom is a unit of measurement used to measure how deep water is. One fathom is equal to six feet, or 1.8288 metres. The depth of the bay has been measured as being greater than 100 fathoms, and someone has converted that to 182.8 meters.
In most cases, 182.88 would round to 182.9. As the title text explains, in this case they rounded down in order to prevent a possibly incorrect statement. This is a comical attempt at mitigating the false precision; it retains the overly-precise 2.8 meters that the initial statement was too approximate to imply. It suggests they were worried that they were worried that the maximum depth may be between 182.88 meters and 182.9 meters — a margin of just 2 centimeters, which is beyond the precision with which anyone is likely to be measuring such things. Moreover, in most areas of seawater it would be within the daily variance due to tidal activity, and the seabed is typically a dynamic environment in which the depth profile could be changing by this much over very short periods anyway. A more reasonable attempt to translate 'the bay is more than 100 fathoms deep' might be 'the bay is more than 180 meters deep;' this stays close to the initial measurement while rounding to the nearest ten, to convey that the measure is approximate.
False precision may also sometimes be used in product labelling to present things as "more than a" precise number, to make the product sound more enticing, cheap or worthwhile (for example, saying "now with more than 28.4% more water", when the product only has 28.5% more water.
Transcript
- [Hairbun stands at a podium to the left, gesturing toward a sign, with an oval (likely representing the bay) and some illegible text on it. Four visitors stand nearby observing: Ponytail, Cueball, Megan, and White Hat (in that order). Cueball has a thought bubble.]
- Hairbun: In some places, the bay is more than 182.8 meters deep.
- Cueball: (thinking) "More than"? Why would they use that for such a precise...
- Cueball: (thinking) ...Aha! 100 fathoms!
- [Caption below the panel:]
- My Hobby: Reverse-engineering original units
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Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
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