Number of dogs in the USA on anti-depressants = 2,800,000 https://t.co/FQkQBG8Cbg
— Mark Miodownik (@markmiodownik) April 4, 2014
A freshly-launched repository for curious, random factoids about numbers: https://t.co/CMj6M3ANLE Browse, and submit your own…
— Alex Bellos (@alexbellos) April 5, 2014
Fans of numbers will be pleased to hear that they now have their own social network. I’m not sure if I mean than numbers do, or fans of numbers do, but either way Meterfy is a newly launched internet website on which you can share, and discover, a huge quantity of numbers – statistics, constants, totals, averages and molar masses abound.
It has the potential to be a superb resource for numerical facts, although I did find a couple of nonsensical and demonstrably wrong entries, as well as some clearly jokey ones. All entries seem to link to some form of reference, such as Wikipedia, or a news article, so if you do pick a fact out for use elsewhere you can also get a source confirming it (a couple of those links are missing “http://”, and point to the wrong place – it looks like the input field for reference URL will accept anything, including ‘wikipedia’, as a value). EDIT: Pete, who runs the site, has been in touch to say he’s fixed the URLs issue. Some entries also lack context or scope (“18% of people leave work after 7pm” doesn’t mean much unless you know who was asked, and in how much of the world).
I’m not quite confident how would be best to browse the site – if you have a specific thing you’re looking for, they seem to make great use of keywords and hashtags to label topics, but it’d be good to have a ‘most shared’ or somehow rank them by interestingness, for the purposes of browsing aimlessly. The main page seems to list them by ‘most recently added’.
You have to log into the site to add your own numbers, and once you’re a signed up member you can ‘follow’ other users and ‘favourite’ entries, much like on Twitter. It’s easy to share entries to other social networks, and each entry can have its number edited or updated as time-stamped versions, which are all stored together.
See what you think – is this the new Twitter? Number Twitter? Two-itter?
Thanks for covering Meterfy Katie. We just launched a few days ago and are on the lookout for as much feedback (& bug reporting) from the community as possible!
It fact, it’s only today that we’ve been asking the very first contributors to start classifying numbers with hashtags at the end of the descriptions, e.g. using #maths to make https://meterfy.com/search/maths a good starting place to find stuff.
Most of the numbers I had put in myself so far could be classified with a top level topics of
#sport #business #health #giving #maths #science #fun
I’ve then I started to add a few extra as well now to help narrow down e.g. #science #physics
I’m going to ship a couple of tweaks over the next day or two to ensure the source is tagged with an actual URL rather than just say “wikipedia” in the examples you came across.
The home page is just a firehose right now, a reverse chronological feed of everything being entered. Once we have more user contributions to get our teeth stuck into, we’ll be able to start recommending / filtering / highlighting content. Great thing about a crowdsourced / social site revolving around numbers rather than text is the ability to get your teeth into the stats on user interests. If someone only ever shows an interest in prime numbers, because they’re the ones they contribute or favorite, you can actually do some maths on their interests, and discover their interest in primes without resorting to Natural Language Processing!