Tuesday, May 07, 2019

Sandpit: The Measure Of Things – search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.— William Inge, born in 1913



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Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

The Measure Of Things – search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities 
“Wondering how big, small, tall, long, fast, heavy, or old something is? The Measure of Things is a tool to help you understand physical quantities in terms of things you (or your audience) are already familiar with. Need a metaphor to emphasize a written measurement? Try including a comparison to the size of a whale, or the height of the Empire State Building, or the speed of a bullet train. Need to understand how big a metric or English unit really is? Try comparing them to real, tangible objects that you see everyday. Here are a few examples:
Vox – Job software like Teams, Slack, and Workplace were supposed to make us more productive. They haven’t. “If you’ve spent any time with Slack, you’ve likely seen this message float below the text field of your company’s communications software. It can mean a few things: A vibrant discussion is taking place in which you and your colleagues are excitedly collaborating around a central topic. Important news is breaking and everyone wants to know. Or, more often, a nonlinear argument is unfurling as everyone tries to get the last word in first, and chaos envelops the very system meant to keep you organized. “Slack is where work happens,” reads the company’s website copy. “Imagine what you’ll accomplish together.”

    • Through adopting these measures, we can reduce our total on-hand inventory by 230 units and save approximately 12,000 cubic feet of space in the warehouse, which will free up about 200 linear feet of shelf space.
    • A colony of brown bats can eat more than 3,360 fl oz of insects in a single evening.
    • The winning horse stood ran at 0.099 miles per second.





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    ENVIRONMENT: Around one million animal and plant species across the world face extinction, many within the next few decades.