Two students’ lives were put at risk when they were accidentally given a dose of caffeine that was 100 times greater than it should have been. “… the calculation had been done on a mobile phone, the decimal point being put in the wrong place. ” Getting the numbers right can be a matter of life and death.
https://itabn.tumblr.com/post/157611208872/misplaced-decimal-point-endangers-lives
Wonderful tale by Ben Orlin “Math with Bad Drawings”, of a creature exploring the world of numbers, very much in the spirit of “Flatland”.
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/01/20/the-number-line-a-journey/
IsThatABigNumber.com is about extending our number sense. We make comparisons that are (mostly) down-to-earth: populations of people and animals, national budgets, river lengths and so on.
But when we leave behind everyday experience and look at the kind of numbers you find in astronomy and in combinatorics, we come across vastly bigger numbers.
One strategy to grasp these numbers is to break them down into a series of levels, to see them as stupidly big aggregations of things that are themselves stupidly big aggregations of … Here are some good clips illustrating this:
From Atlas Obscura, a sampling of infographics from the 19th century. All with the aim in mind of putting information into a format where it can easily be understood and compared.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-stunning-early-infographics-and-maps-of-the-1800s
How many tennis balls does it take to fill St Paul’s?