^ found the astronomer

I (Electrical + Software Engineer) once worked for a physicist who believed that anything less than an order of magnitude was merely an engineering problem. He was usually correct.

I was taught the same. To not care a lot about things under an order of magnitude. Over the years when planning large software projects or assessing incidents and so on, the 1 order of magnitude threshold helped me often.

Bingo, I studied Physics!

As a physicist, I think this is correct too :). You don't start to see problems with things under that, unless they are deviation from standard model predictions.

Variance in accuracy of this statement also safely within one order of magnitude

An order of magnitude isn't a defined quantity, it depends on what base you're working in.

The difference between log 2, ln, and log 10 is less than an order of magnitude, so to a physicist it's all the same :)

A factor of six is a very long way off, pretty much universally.

Yeah but with magic wormholes you see, there could be other universes where that's not the case and 160mbps is close to 1024mbps or 1000mbps whatever the cool kids call a gigabit now adays.

Not as far off as the casual reader might think 20MB vs 1Gb sounds way more than the actuall 160Mb vs 1Gb - one shouldn't use Bytes and bits in a direct comparison together. One or the other, otherwise it's misleading/confusing.

In this case transferring the data at the slow rate would have taken more than a week, so it's no small difference. Actually one side had a 10 Gbps line, so if the other side had had faster networking I could easily have exceeded the limit and gotten the transfer done more than 6x faster.

I used the term "1 Gbps line" just because it's a well known quantity - the limitation of Gigabit Ethernet. The point wasn't that multiplexing TCP can get you 6x better speeds, it's that it improved the speed so much that the TCP bandwidth-delay product was no longer the limiting factor in the transfer.

If you sit down and need to wait one hour for one and 6 hours for the other to do the same thing I doubt you would say they are 'not that far off'