Significant figures are the digits that carry information.

Significant Figures is a documentary channel about measurement error in engineering. Not about carelessness. The cases here all have the same shape: two groups of skilled people, each measuring accurately, each using a different unit, and a finished object that fails anyway.

That shape is more interesting than incompetence, and it is much more common. A spacecraft whose onboard software was correct. A bridge whose drawings were correct. A ship built by four carpenters who were each right. A telescope that was tested, with an instrument that was wrong.

What the site is for

The videos carry the narrative. The articles carry the apparatus: every source named, every figure attributed, and a register of the figures that were cut. A video can show a citation on screen for four seconds. A page can hold the link.

If you only read one page here, read the method. It is what separates this from the thousand other retellings of the Mars Climate Orbiter, most of which repeat an altitude figure that is not in the investigation report.

How it is made

Sources are retrieved and read before a sentence is written. Claims are mapped one by one and given a state. Anything that survives with two independent organisations behind it is stated flatly. Anything resting on one organisation is attributed to it by name. Anything else is cut, and the cut is published rather than hidden.

There is no host and no face. The subject is the documents, and the documents are more interesting than a presenter would be.

Start here

The first video runs nine minutes and covers five cases: Everyone Measured Correctly. It All Broke Anyway. Each chapter has a written version under cases, with its sources attached.

None of these are stories about people who failed to measure. Every one of them measured. Closer, first video