My childhood comes through. Calculators / converters. Yes, have you ever muttered about Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions? Ever written a converter?
I’ve done it twice. Once was for a commercial product which never saw the light of day. For that, I invented (along with a few thousand other programmers, I later learned) a method by which adding a single conversion to support a new unit in a category resulted in automatic conversions for the rest of the members of the category by repeatedly converting to other units until the desired unit was found. Expensive in terms of computer cycles, but it changed an O(n) task to an O(1) task for the engineer – and engineer cycles are generally considered more important than computer cycles. There’s a name for this approach, but I forget it.
Later, when I was learning Mythryl, it was the basis of my approach (no, I had no connection to the actual project) to eliminating the mistake that destroyed the Mars Climate Orbiter. What was that mistake? From SimScale:
The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at a cost of $125 million, was a 338-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes. In addition, its function was to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor ‘98 program for the Mars Polar Lander. The navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds. JPL engineers did not take into consideration that the units had been converted, i.e., the acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds^2 for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.
Briefly, Mythryl provides[1] fine abstraction support. I used it to provide abstract categories from which variables could be defined, such as mass, length, acceleration, and the like, plus intuitive mathematics operators. Mythryl would not compile attempts to add a length and a weight, so it was safe in that matter. Programs would be responsible for initializing variables with the proper unit, and requesting the results in the proper unit, but all math beyond that was handled by the operators – and was theoretically safer, since there was no need to worry about units.
Some of the more abstruse categories lead to some odd problems and interesting conversations with Mythryl project lead Jeff Prothero concerning compiler hooks for handling such problems, but he died before we could pursue them seriously.
And, again, a project which never saw the light of day.
ANYWAYS … the latest in online converters appears to be the Omni Calculator. At first, it appeared fairly mundane. Then, as I searched for a promised conversion to blue whales, I ran across this:
The list of supported currencies is limited, and includes two I’ve not heard of – no surprise there.
This is rather upping the game, isn’t it? It really makes me wonder what else is hidden away in this mathematical / information tool. For example, here’s a Tree Benefits Calculator.
This might be worth a quick traipse through the undergrowth, and qualify as a useful resource.
1 Or perhaps past tense provided, as I believe that without the late Jeff Prothero’s support, it’s sadly going nowhere.
