The Frequency of Humanity

Every day on Earth, an estimated 371,124 people are born and 154,995 people die. When you ask Wolfram Alpha about these rates, the scientifically inclined site returns a curious corresponding quantity: the frequency in hertz. If you subtract the death rate from the birth rate, you get a net rate of 216,129 new people a …

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

A “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” alike answer to estimating how long software development will take. Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. The line is about 400 miles long; we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours …

Paper’s Color Mixer

Paper by 53 (recommended app) now sports an innovative color mixer / color picker. Turns out it was quite a mathematical struggle to implement it too. We learned in elementary school that yellow and blue when mixed turn green. However when you plug in the values to this equation, you get a different result: Gray! …