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Re: [LUG] Annual Budgets: Freedom of Information Act

 

[shifting the topic slightly]

On Oct 13, 2007, Simon Waters was like:
> Of course most people don't care about the 12th decimal
> place of anything

A few years ago a user (University of Reading) came to me to say that
there must be something wrong with the Fortran compiler because it
said that the soil moisture content in the Sudan was 3% when he knew
it was 5%.  Turned out that data input was making an error in the 7th
decimal place. Noone noticed until he tried presenting numbers in a
format like 0.0000003456 (and why not?) and things were going wrong.
I had a hard job convincing the owners of the compiler (Rothamsted IIRC).

Tony Sumner


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