The team behind QI presents without a hint of awareness values such as "a distance of 16093 metres from A to B", "a distance of 62 miles from C to D", "about 6.56 feet tall"...
(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)
(To the skimmers: when something is 1000 units long, you have to check the underlying precision - whether it is a very rough estimate or the rounding of something like 1000.0862 - and you cannot translate the former retaining fake precision. The distance between London and New York is not 3,417.541 miles, nor 5,632.704 kilometers.)
The standard way to solve this nowadays is to report error measurements, which introductory university physics textbooks teach.
>"(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)"
The best way to report the precision is with an error measurement (e.g. ±2 feet). This isn't an academic source, but a news article supports this:
From LiveScience [0]:
"Legend has it that when the team took the average of all of those measurements, they found the mountain was exactly 29,000 feet (8,839 m) tall, Molnar said.
"They didn't expect anybody to believe it, so the story is they added 2 feet [0.6 m], just to make it look more believable," Molnar said.
[...]
"Despite sophisticated gravimeters, complicated equations and fancy tools like global positioning systems, the elevation of Mount Everest is only precise to within a foot or two.
"All of our elevations have an error," Molnar said."
(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)
(To the skimmers: when something is 1000 units long, you have to check the underlying precision - whether it is a very rough estimate or the rounding of something like 1000.0862 - and you cannot translate the former retaining fake precision. The distance between London and New York is not 3,417.541 miles, nor 5,632.704 kilometers.)