I remember someone in a newsgroup saying the average person is about one metre tall and weighs about 100 kilos, and when asked whether maybe they were approximately a bit too roughly, they answered “I’m an astronomer, not a jeweller.”
(And physicists sometimes use π ≈ 1 too—that’s called dimensional analysis. :-) The problem is when the constant factor dimensional analysis can’t tell you turns out to be 1/(2π)^4 ≈ 6.4e-4 or stuff like that.)
1.3 + 1.4 = 2.7, which when reported to one significant figure...
As the “old” computer science joke goes, 2 + 2 = 5 (for extremely large values of 2).
The physicist-typical version is that 3=4, if you take lim(3->4).
This reminds me that the difference between a physicist and astronomer is that a physicist uses π ≈ 3 while an astronomer uses π ≈ 1.
I remember someone in a newsgroup saying the average person is about one metre tall and weighs about 100 kilos, and when asked whether maybe they were approximately a bit too roughly, they answered “I’m an astronomer, not a jeweller.”
(And physicists sometimes use π ≈ 1 too—that’s called dimensional analysis. :-) The problem is when the constant factor dimensional analysis can’t tell you turns out to be 1/(2π)^4 ≈ 6.4e-4 or stuff like that.)