Mostly review today for Thursday’s exam.

First we made up the exam. Five topics, so about five questions, covering relative and absolute change, percentage increases and decreases, inflation, unit conversion, and Fermi problem estimation.

No one knew who Fermi was, so I talked a little bit about him. Did his participation in the invention of the atomic bomb mean he was a good guy or a bad guy? Well he was on our side at a really dangerous time, but the bomb is a pretty dangerous thing to let loose in the world …

Worked some of the homework problems – miles/gallon vs gallons/mile, currency conversion, Lady Liberty.

Quick tour of scientific notation, large and small metric prefixes. In order to spend time on the quantitative things these students (nonscientists) will actually encounter, I need to spend less time on really large (peta, exa) and really small (nano, pico). I did do a little, to show that the Google calculator switches to scientific notation for really large and really small numbers, and to stress the importance of simply counting zeroes when estimating.

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