I first encountered Mateusz Mucha when he put together a website that let you track your blood pressure (a boon for both hypo- and hyper-tensives as well as hypochondriacs). He has now expanded his repertoire and built a collection of useful scientific calculators, here are just a few of them with Mucha’s own descriptions:
- Significant figures calculator performs math operations on measurements and produces results with a correct precision. Especially helpful in chemistry.
- Compound interest calculator shows the impact of exponential growth, which is often underestimated.
- Probability calculator shows how often events occur in real time. It’s even more fun if you realise the calculator solves for any value, so you can check for example “if A or B occurs in 15% of cases and B’s chance is 5%, what’s the chance of A happening?”
- Ohm’s Law calculator has obvious practical uses for the resistance movement.
- Volume calculator lets us quickly find out how large something really is.
Apart from the science-oriented calculators, he also has several others, such as a gross margin calculator, a calculator to work out which addiction would most reduce your life expectancy, one to calculate how much weight you could lose by playing Pokemon GO or whether it’s better to buy a larger pizza or two smaller ones. Mucha confesses that, “surprisingly to some and just sadly to realists – the most popular is the percentage calculator, which…well…does exactly what it says.”
There were a couple of others which Mucha recommends: One that displays what happens in the world every second or every century and one that works how much money you could save if you quit smoking (or indeed any of those other addictions that might shorten your life and empty your bank account).