In a nutshell:
This website is but a list of numerical values everyone claiming a good educational background should know.
This list can either be accessed en bloc or explored randomly. In addition, there is a very basic voting
mechanism that allows visitors to up- or downvote records to rate their importance (for a brief account on
my personal notion of "importance" see my note on record suggestions below).
Ok. But why?
Basically, there are three points to tell, namely
- I am a theoretical physicist and therefore fond of numbers by profession.
- However, I am especially ungifted when it comes to memorizing them.
- As I write this, I am on summer holiday and feeling awkwardly unproductive.
The combination of 1 and 2 led to a growing list of important numbers I compiled for my personal use,
to the end that I eventually might remember them for good.
The 3rd point gave rise to this website – a public beautification of this very list.
You stumbled upon this website and ...
- ... found an error in one of the records?
- ... are missing a number you deem relevant for a non-scientific audience?
- ... found a bug on one of the webpages?
- ... have a suggestion to improve this website?
In any case, I appreciate constructive criticism and ask you
to send your contributions to
Note on record suggestions:
It is not always easy to gauge the "relevance" of a number.
One mechanism to separate the
records relevant for a broad audience from less important ones is given by the voting mechanism.
That would be the "wisdom of crowds" approach.
However, my humble self had a particular kind of "importance" in mind when starting my list of numbers to memorize.
Let me try to characterize my (vague) notion of "importance" by an example:
Consider the facts that
(1) Earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old,
(2) Life on Earth emerged about 3.5 billion years ago,
and (3) modern human beings stroll this very Earth for about 100 thousand years.
Knowing merely the orders of magnitude (not even the exact values, in most cases they are under debate anyway)
allows one to get a feeling about the relevant timescales governing evolution, about the (rather short) time it takes for
life to emerge on a cozy chunk of rock such as ours, and about the irrelevance of the timescales we call history.
Such numbers provide benchmarks to gauge our place in this universe, to get a feeling about what surrounds us.
For me, this qualifies these numbers as part of general education, hence they are "important".
In stark contrast, consider the party-knowledge that the number of hairs on your average head is of the order of 100 thousand as well.
This might be a number of relevance for shampoo scientists – however, I find it hard to come up with numbers to compare it with
in a meaningful fashion, to give the fact impact beyond its mere numerical value.
That is why I preselect suggestions before adding them to the database; to keep the list concise with only records worth memorizing.
To compensate for any bias due to my physics background, records with a very low importance rating are occasionally removed from the database.
Planned features (to-do list):
This is a list of missing features I had as yet no time to implement. They will follow in due time.
- Mobile version of the website (optimized for smartphones)
- Switchable languages
- Classification of records via tags
- Search for descriptions/dimensions/tags
- Various "Top" lists (Top 25, 50, 100)
- Form for record suggestions
