
The Path to Biological Numeracy - yarapavan
http://book.bionumbers.org/
======
jfarlow
This is one of the most important parts of biological intuition that is _very_
hard to get access to. Even PhD graduates often stumble when asked even about
the order-of-magnitude of some of these values.

It's not dissimilar to the general order-of-magnitude of speeds associated
with various computer components (RAM, CPU, Cache, HD seek, network latency,
etc.). But there are many more components in a biological system, and their
interactions up and down the physical scales are sometimes not obvious.

A simple example of intuition: once you've sequence your DNA, how would you go
about changing it? Which DNA? Is the 'sequence' you got back an average
sequence across just those cells that were sampled? Is the DNA you would want
to change both copies, in each cell, in every tissue?

Another example is running through how a PCR reaction works. The actual result
of the process often trips people up the first time because it's not
immediately clear that there is an infinite pool of each component in the
system to permit self-reactions in later steps of the process. Once a
component is used in the first part of the process, it's still there in later
parts of the process.

~~~
mncharity
You might like the top section 'remembering the sizes of things' of my
wasn't-intended-to-be-public slowwwlllyyy-loading page
[http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms](http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms)
.

It's basically chunked powers-of-ten, so two 1000x frames ("micro view"
um->mm, and "nano view" nm->mm) get you down to 'atoms look like sand'. It
seems to provide useful scaffolding - a place to hang some flavors of rough-
quantitative knowledge. It seems to at least sometimes work nicely with
bionumbers "how big is a X" searches, as "N um"-like answers permit "oh, so
it's about _this_ (tactile kinesthetic) big - so it's bigger than Y and
smaller than Z and about the same size as W - hmm, so I wonder how many X's
there are in a mumble - new search: 'how man X in a mumble'". But that's
purely anecdotal, and from _very_ limited experience.

~~~
2020-3030
Thanks for mentioning your site and have you seen
[http://scaleofuniverse.com/](http://scaleofuniverse.com/) ? I sometimes use
that site as a lecture tool when a larger context of time and space is useful.

~~~
mncharity
Interesting mix. In addition to videos, there are interactives like
[https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/](https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/)
and
[https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm](https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm)
.

------
Edmond
maybe they should consider teaming up with these guys:
[https://www.osmosis.org/](https://www.osmosis.org/)

~~~
mncharity
I talked with someone who did a Japanese startup for learning English. Turns
out that while there's an enormous market for learning to do well on English
proficiency exams (eg, for college entrance)... there was surprisingly little
market for learning to actually understand English.

There's an enormous market for pre-med/MCAT/med-school training. And
surprisingly little for actually understanding biology.

As I very fuzzily recall, the bionumbers site grew out of a graduate student
shifting domains, and realizing: they had little clue; they needed a rough-
quantitative understanding to functionally understand and work in the domain;
existing educational content didn't have that as a goal. So they started
collecting numbers, and it escalated.

------
memming
Awesome contents!!

