On 5/2/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
On Wed, 2 May 2007, George Herbert wrote:
I think that the number is of questionable
notability. 99.9999% of
the people who see it aren't going to go code up a DVD player. For
anyone else, it's purely a trivial point.
99.999% of people who are told the aphelion distance of Mars to eight
significant digits aren't going to use it in any fashion whatsoever, let
alone use the eighth decimal place. So?
That can't possibly be true. At least 5% of the people I know closely
do or have done interplanetary trajectory work.
(of course, the aphelion is a single point in time; we need the whole
orbital parameters set to do anything useful...but ...).
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com