A scaling menagerie: world records in running and swimming for people, fastest speeds for organisms of all sizes (swimming, running, flying), an argument for why big things are slower than their body size would predict, the very interesting scaling of city properties (wealth, crime, disease, infrastructure, energy use), times between terror attacks, turbulence, top secret nuclear testing information revealed in a magazine image (decoded with the back of an envelope), and a touch of scaling in language with past tense regularization. In the middle, we talk our way through the Buckingham π Theorem using the entirely natural example of a platypus pendulum.

2017/09/05

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