infinite nerd recursion

The situation wherein a small group of nerds will tend to jump from tangent to tangent because each point gives other people new things they want to talk about.

"Okay, so my wizard will cast color spray on the three guards."

"Man, wizards are so overpowered"

"Wait till I get epic level and can teleport you into orbit of the planet. You can't get down unless you have some ability to fly"

"Wouldn't you just explode from the pressure"

"Actually, as long as you breath out, you can stay alive and conscious for a minute or so. And the people at spaceX have training for when this might happen"

"Man, I'm amazed that a privately funded space organization has gotten so far"

"It's what happens when you get a bunch of nerds together"

"And a lot of money"

"You don't need the money, one of my professors built a submarine with his friends"

"It must have been a pain in the ass to organize"

"Yeah, it's like herding cats, where one of them can weld really well!"

... this infinite nerd recursion can continue indefinitely ...

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Error in the Exponent

A number that is given with very large uncertainties, such that it might be ten or a hundred (or more) times larger or smaller than the value given. Astrophysics is famous for having 'errors in the exponent'

..."We estimate the minimum viable population to be somewhere between 100 and 5000" (extremes from the wikipedia article)

... "in our universe protons decay with a time scale in the range 10^33 - 10^45 years"

These quantities don't have an error in the value, they have an error in the exponent.