Interesting consequence of improperly programming GPS route

AES wrote:
In article ,
Jose wrote:


It's like working a calculator without doing a rough calculation in your
head at the same time. Press one wrong button and the calculator will
tell you that you have 143,226.21079 gallons left in your 152. I'm
amazed at how many people would just put that down as the answer these
days, because the calculator said so.



Heard a tale once of a physics prof who allowed use of programmable
calculators during the final exam, but only ones supplied by him, "so
that no one could program in any unauthorized stuff in advance".

The instructor however had supposedly bugged the calculators so that on
certain problems they gave impossible answers, off by orders of
magnitude; and in the grading gave lots of bonus points to those
students who noticed and said something about it.

Probably an urban legend -- but an instructive idea nonetheless.

The college I went to (Colorado School of Mines) has a top-rate
geophysics program. One of the lab courses in the program supposedly
(I wasn't in the program) starts out by having you use sound
transducers and an oscilliscope to determine the length of a steel
bar. If you don't get the right answer, you have to redo the experiment.

The thing students aren't told is that the oscilliscope has had a 2-3%
error built into it. The purpose of the lab is not to learn any
geophysical facts, but to learn that you always need to calibrate
your instruments.