Thursday, September 30, 2010

Better UI for math

It's much too easy to miss the difference between the numbers 1000000 and 10000000000, so it's hard for me to blame people too much when adding 3 easy-to-miss numbers creates a number 1000 times larger (or perhaps 10000. :)

Scientific notation is also shitty at making the most important number prominent;  for example, in the number 6 x 10^32, the 32 is by far the most important part of the number but is typically written in very small type, and the 10 should be written in small type or even just implied.

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