How many elephants? | Hacker News Reader

How many elephants?

howmanyelephants.co.uk

34 pointstagawa19 comments

I thought at first it would represent everything in elephants; elephant volumes, elephant hides, elephant-years &c.

Me too. That was the reason I clicked. Now I’m disappointed to not know how many elephants.

I have added a note at the bottom of the page.

Author here. I did consider doing that. But ended up using elephants for height and mass. I didn't think the volume or area of an elephant was a very useful comparison!

But I have added elephant comparisons for speed (charging), time (average lifespan) and energy (food consumption).

I entered 4e10 for Energy | Kilocalories, and got:

=> 0.914x the recommended daily food consumption for a male human adult (1.09x smaller)

Is this a bug, or am I not eating nearly enough?? ;)

It looks like they defined that stat internally as "1.046e7", which would be a reasonable number assuming Joules. Elsewhere it defines Kilocalories as "0.000239006"... but I'm guessing they meant it the other way around (i.e. "4184" not "1/4184") based on how they use the data in the functions.

Sure enough, if you do 4e10/4184^2 you get right on target. I think other things in the energy category may have the same "wrong conversion direction" bug as well.

Oops. The energy values were indeed inverted. Now fixed. Thanks.

Also fixed a few other rogue values. We had the mass of a great white shark as 8.9e20 Kg, rather than 8.9e2 Kg. That would be quite some shark.

> We had the mass of a great white shark as 8.9e20 Kg, rather than 8.9e2 Kg

We're going to need a bigger boat.

>the height of a Greg Davies

I think (little) Alex Horne made this

1 Electron volts = 29.8 x the energy released Tsar bomba 69.5 x the energy released by convert 1 Kg of mass to energy. Something is way off, and it's not just the singular/plural of "volt"

Yes, the x -> Joule values were inverted. <blush> . Now fixed.

I was surprised it didn’t have a good 1:1 for certain units.

Like a meter, is really easily imagined as the height of a doorknob on a door.

first i thought the website would say how many elephants left in the world (like white rhinos)

It does now.

Should not 1440 minutes just be a day not 12 movies lol.

There are plenty of other ways to translate between standard units (e.g. minutes -> days).

oh I get you, that's not the purpose of this, it's for non standard. Makes sense.

It is for helping people visualize/comprehend what 12,345 meters or 12,345 tons means.

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