You should remember random numbers
But like, not really
A few weeks ago, I decided that I was going to start remembering some random numbers. Like that the US has ~340m people or that the Earth is ~10^11 meters away from the Sun. At worst, I’d have some fun trivia fact to bust out, and at best… well there really wasn’t an at best. When I decide to do things on a whim, there usually isn’t a best case. I won’t argue that you should do this, but here’s some of the fun I’ve had with random numbers.
CPUS & CELLS
CPU naming schemes are nonsensical. If you’ve ever heard of 2nm, 3nm, 5nm chips, you’ve probably assumed, like any normal human, that the number relates to the size of the transistor or the chip or just some physical attribute about the device. You’d be wrong; it’s just a marketing scheme. So while I was ready to remember that 2nm chips are actually about 45nm as a fact to complain about online, it dawned on me, biological cells have diameters ranging from 10-100 micrometers. For every 2D cross section you take of a cell, you could fit between 200 - 2000 transistors there.1 But if you could fit so many transistors in a cell, well how many transistors would it take to simulate a cell? Seemingly impossible with what we have now.
What’s with this large discrepancy? Although transistors are tiny, they’re far less efficient in terms of computation/m^3 than a cell. What we tradeoff for in terms of space efficiency, we get back in cleanliness. Cells take advantage of every trick they can find in physics, biology, and chemistry to be as efficient as possible. Our transistors simply provide a clean, binary interface of 0s and 1s. Trying to program cells is still a growing field while multiplying bits on a planetary scale is something we’ve learned to do very, very well because of how relatively simple it is. (For fun reading, you can actually write computer code and get out DNA circuits which is insane)
And all of this spawned out of knowing how large a cell was! Given that numbers are a universal language between all fields, I think learning and remembering numbers across disciplines could be a great way to try and make more connections. Or this is all a bad post-hoc justification I’m making after the fact.
WEAPONIZED FLOWERS
A few days before the CPU incident, I was sitting by a riverside watching fireworks, when it occurred to me that there was a really long delay between when I heard and saw the firework go off. Of course, I make some remark about this to my friend to which he goes, “are you stupid?” (in much nicer words) Keep in mind that we are sitting next to the boat launching the fireworks, so we really couldn’t have been any closer.
The natural thing to do was to look at the massive crowd around me and realize that it’s okay, but I really wanted to figure out how far I was from where the fireworks were going off. Luckily, I remembered that the speed of sound at room temperature is ~340m/s. Clock app, stopwatch, 00.45, 00.78, 00.50. Take the average (read this as make a guess), and you get 0.6 seconds or about 204m (669ft away). That’s only the distance from my ears to the fireworks, but how about just the horizontal distance? Level app, tilt, oh boy it’s 60º. If I haven’t mistaken my middle school geometry of cos(60º) = 1/2, then we were only 100m away horizontally. The fireworks were exploding over our heads.
While my friend had watched on with an idle curiosity, now we started panicking. Are the firework powders dropping onto our heads? Is this bad for us? Are we dying faster just to see some pretty light shows? This time common sense actually kicked in, so before either of us could pull out the weather app to check the wind speed, we decided that life was too short to think about all this. Was this a complete waste of time? Probably. Did I spend about 200 fireworks worth of time trying to do the math? Yes. Thank goodness, I’m not trying to convince you that remembering random numbers is good use of your time.
MORE NUMBERS PLEASE :)
You should send me your fun numbers.
Maybe I could forgive the semiconductor industry for their naming crimes since they’re working magic over there