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How many elephants? (howmanyelephants.co.uk)
34 points by tagawa 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments


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


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).


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.


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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