News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds. Parent comment

Re:Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath s... by KMag on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @06:19AM (#24130340)
> Writing 2 extra decimal places is assuming the original values also have 2 decimal places with zeros in them.

As long as you have at least one digit of precision, scientific notation is unambiguous as to the number of significant figures.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath s... by lopmotr on Friday August 14, 2020 @08:35PM (#24164878)
Yes, but these figures weren't written in scientific notation so we can't tell. Especially the trailing 0 on 110 is ambiguous because people often write a 0 there where it really is 0 while the convention is that a 0 means it's unknown.
[ Parent | on HN ]