alt Hacker NewsI love astronomy simply for things like "17±8 times the mass". That's ~50% acceptable variance. I wish I could apply that logic to my creditors.
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kulahan • yesterday at 10:02 PM
I worked for a financial org with over a trillion in assets, and they had a 100% acceptable variance on project length predictions. Made for a laid-back atmosphere at work but boy. How they ever swung that is beyond me.
“We predict a year, so it’ll take anywhere between 8 seconds and 24 months!” AND IT WORKED???
Yeah, Physics (and particularly astronomy/cosmology) often have huge variances, some of which are even greater.
An example being the number of stars in the (observable) universe which ranges from 10^22 to 10^24 stars...a variance of 100x (or ~10,000%)!!! https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/How_ma...