Talk:Physics Calculator

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Revision as of 20:08, 18 May 2007 by MitchellNCharity (talk | contribs) (→‎Ideas: Fermi question infrastructure.)
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Ideas

  • Order-of-magnitude sliders. Years ago I did a web demo presenting F=ma as three linked vertical order-of-magnitude scales. Or was it Fmavt? My fuzzy recollection is the scales were annotated. So you could do imaginary perfect "hand crank" driving "single cell" to splatter relativistically. I found, even having done oom games with the units before, that playing yielded fun surprises. It looks like the demo dropped off the web sometime over the years. I can dig it up if there is interest. But it's quite straightforward. MitchellNCharity 15:59, 18 May 2007 (EDT)
    I'm biased, but it might be very neat to have an integrated framework for approximate quantitative reasoning and Fermi questions. Reference, calculation, simulation, graphing, enrichment, etc. And yes, people are doing Fermi questions early primary school ("how many cats on the block? 1,10,100,1000?") :). MitchellNCharity 16:08, 18 May 2007 (EDT)