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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Setting seconds on a digital display
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Aug 24, 04:51 -0700
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Aug 24, 04:51 -0700
There has to be a name for this. Anyone?
"Rounding bias", the computer arithmetic people call it.
When glancing at the watch, it might be possible to remember whether the second changed immediately after the glance or somewhat later, in effect splitting the second with the eye/brain.
Cheers,
Peter
ps: To take this to slightly absurd lengths: the statistics of this kind of error is a little different---the time error is uniformly distributed over one second rather than a more usual, softer, Gaussian-like distribution. A navigation filter might want to take that into account. For example, suppose you have many sights all around the horizon. The LOPs will form a circle around the AP, with some fuzz. But the fuzz will have hard edges (in the longitude direction) because the time error is sharply bounded from 0 to 1 second.