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Title text:
They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3248/
100 phantoms
Seems silly to me, if it's a bay, there's silt flowing into it, time itself could pile 10cm of detritus into the deepest parts and make it more shallow.
Or currents might deepen a hole too. Putting silt in one place can cause other places to change too.
And if it were more shallow, shipping would have a big impact too.
That's the whole point. 100 phatoms is really imprecise. But on translation, they didn't bother keeping the significant digit count equal, and since 182.8 m= 100 f , they just left it like that. I mean, it's the only reason he could guess there was a unit change...