Thursday, March 21, 2013

Magnitude of Error

Yesterday I was reading a Scientific American article that said there were 1089 neutrinos in the universe. I was pretty sure that figure was low, so had a look at their HTML code. Sure enough, they had used <super> instead of <sup> as the tag to indicate a superscript. I sent them an e-mail suggesting the correction. They sent a message back thanking me and telling me they had made the correction. The article now tells us there are 1089 neutrinos in the universe. I feel that the magnitude of this correction more than makes up for my lousy chemistry lab results when the lab teaching assistant told me I had produced the largest error in the history of the lab.