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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Still on LOP's
From: Rodney Myrvaagnes
Date: 2002 Apr 22, 13:00 -0500
From: Rodney Myrvaagnes
Date: 2002 Apr 22, 13:00 -0500
On Mon, 22 Apr 2002 09:48:45 -0300, Trevor J. Kenchington wrote: >point would be a very small circle. But those are only estimates. Your >logic leads to the conclusion that, even when a cocked hat is very small >because of chance effects, there is exactly a 0.25 probability of the >true position lying inside it. And that doesn't make any sense to me at all. > THis is an area where intuition may well fail us. But, the simulation Chuck Taylor proposed could help us here as well. Assuming the simulation to be carried out in a spreadsheet program, we could select out all cocked hats below some chosen size, and sum the distribution of their centers about the true. My intuition says it would be a very sharply-peaked distribution. My intuition says that an unusually small cocked hat may come from smoother water more often than pure accident. If that is the case, one reasonably puts more confidence in it. Rodney Myrvaagnes J36 Gjo/a "Curse thee, thou quadrant. No longer will I guide my earthly way by thee." Capt. Ahab