Originally Posted by
blacknbluebikes
Well, let's chime in with this angle...
The units being measured (miles, km, feet, whatever) are actually pretty arbitrary. Cubits? why not. The higher order question is "what are you doing with it and what precision is required?"
So this thread gets into precision, which I do find interesting. But IRL, I find that most situations rarely benefit from more than 4 significant digits, usually 3 will do and 2 is often good enough for decision making.
If I had ridden 36 miles, does 36.4 matter?
If I did a season of 3000 miles, would 30 matter? would 3?
I can find you both cases in finance, where the way we need to work sometimes says "need it to the penny," other times we round to the nearest million.
So, what I'm asking this thread is : "what level of precision is _useful_?" and when does a lack of precision become troublesome?
You’re absolutely right on, although another high-order question which could be asked is which info is most important: distance traveled or distance and location?
Only the GPS can record where one has traveled, and as such is a much richer data source than a $20 cyclometer. It’s hard for me to imagine the point of this “accuracy exercise” in 2021; GPS data can be analyzed more easily and in a more consequential manner than the simple data from the cyclometer.