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A comment on A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture. Parent comment

Re:A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs ... by nullc on Sunday April 04, 2021 @03:14PM (#26692037)
Yep. The weird thing is that their sigfig rules of thumb aren't particularly accurate and after any non-trivial operations (or more than a few operations) just give wrong results.

Tracking precision through calculations requires interval arithmetic, which is a pretty big PITA and not frequently used.

I think the sig figs cult comes out of mistaking a simplified lesson on precision for a useful practice.

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Re:A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs ... by LasEspuelas on Sunday April 04, 2021 @06:13PM (#26693292)
Not sure exactly what you mean. It is well known that you should keep additional digits throughout the calculation and then drop non-significant ones for final results.
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Re:A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs ... by nullc on Monday April 05, 2021 @12:44AM (#26695432)
The number of digits out is only a simple function of the digits in if you're doing fairly trivial calculations.

Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic for what it takes to monitor precision through complex calculations (in particular, see the bits about using the taylor expansions of non-trivial functions).

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