Accuracy and Precision

[davieddy]

One of the first series of lectures I attended at Oxford
was "Errors", and delivered most enjoyably.
He employed a clock which could count microseconds
to determine the period of a pendulum. He mentioned that the clock cost
about the same as an E-type Jaguar, and invited us to guess which
of the two items he would choose. I assume you can date me by that
anecdote.

The point I want to make is that many folk (reasonably) moan
when a quantity is quoted to an unwarranted number of figures.

However, if (as physicists routinely do) you quote a standard deviation
with your result, the greatest sin is to drop the precision of the
calculation prematurely.

David