James Burchett
My blogs
| Introduction | Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist and leader of the Manhatten Project in WW2. To fortify the morale and fix the frayed nerves of his fellow bomb makers Fermi would throw out quirky mental challenges. How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? he might ask. As Fermi saw it a good thinker should be able to come up with an ad hoc way of attacking virtually any problem and coming up with an answer within the vaunted terrain known as "an order of magnitude". The purpose of this blog is to answer quirky estimation questions either posed to me and to give an answer only using my own empirical knowledge and logic. As I will not be running to Google to find out what the right answer is I am hoping my answers will be correct in an "order of magnitude" in other words I should not have to multiply or divide my answer by more that a factor of ten to embrace the real answer. For example if my answer is 100 the real answer should be in the range of 10 - 1000. Would hope that public quantative reasoning will ensure that I think everything through properly. Most importantly this is a fun excercise to try and increase flexibility of thought and to try and answer some really dumb questions! |
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| Interests | Estimation, probability, Enrico Fermi, order of magnitude, ad hoc thinking, thinking, problem solving |