Orders of Magnitude
summary
Claims that human number sense ends at four and that naming large magnitudes doesn't confer understanding, demonstrations of scale from a meter baseline to 14 nm in 2014 and 5 nm gate lengths and to the Pillars of Creation at 4 light years, concrete history (microscopes 1590, telescopes 1608) and practical takeaways for software: expect edge cases (weird legal names and email formats), use metrics, transactions and background jobs, and design for the millionth user, billion requests and trillion events.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Start
- 1:04Orders of Magnitude
- 3:00Born with Number Sense
- 3:53Eight :
- 5:53Lie: Counting things is easy
- 6:09Counting takes mental energy
- 6:24Roman
- 12:21Human Hair E-4
- 14:02Nimrud Lens 750 BC
- 15:44Microprocessor memory cell E-8
- 15:54Gate length
- 18:09Bristlecone Pine
- 18:25Dinosaurs E12
- 18:47Estimating the Odds
- 24:31The edge case is a certainty
