I'm looking at Error analysis and still stumped.

[Soontir C'boath]

At the beginning of the year, my physics class' first PDF was about Error analysis that we had to read about. To this day, I still have no clue what the heck to do with this thing. I reread this thing and I do it but it doesn't seem right at all.

Such as this lab I had this tuesday, I am doing the standard deviation of this lab as according to the equations and it looks sooo wrong. I got something to the tune of .24 +/- .11

Then my next problem is how to do the error bars on a graph. It said something in accordance to place the delta x and y on the plotted points which then confuses me as it shows that it's all over.

I am just dumbstrucked by this.
What I have been looking at is this. Warning: It's a PDF

Until then, I'm just going to write some of the lab report that doesn't need the graph.

[Kuroneko]

Assuming you calculated .24±0.11 correctly, the error bar would run from 0.13 to 0.35. It sounds as if the lab would require you to do so for both the x and y direction (obviously, each would have their own error terms), effectively making a little cross (or a rectangle). If both x and y have a significant error term, this is a natural thing to do. I'm not very clear as to the nature of your difficulty.

[Ariphaos]

Well the error bar for any given point he took would be + or - .11, so if it was .4 (say) he'd draw a bar along y from .29 to .51 at that point on the x axis, and it seems like this is what he's doing but his numbers are all over the map when he tries to draw a best fit line?

Perhaps you could run through the math you did and it'd be easier to see if you made a mistake calculating the standard deviation.

[Soontir C'boath]

I felt it was so huge to have an error that far.

Thank you, both.