{"id":1368,"date":"2011-02-06T18:45:38","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T22:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1368"},"modified":"2023-06-30T16:50:01","modified_gmt":"2023-06-30T20:50:01","slug":"estimation-problems-and-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2011\/02\/06\/estimation-problems-and-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Estimation problems and answers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fermi was famous for asking difficult general questions of interest that could be approximated through a series of good guesses, such as: &#8220;How many molecules of rubber are rubbed off of car tires in the country each year?&#8221; &#8220;How many stars are visible at night to the naked eye?&#8221; Order-of-magnitude approximations are generally appropriate answers.<\/p>\n<p>This is equally interesting outside of physics, though it relies on knowing different trivia and rules of thumb. &#8220;How many schools are there in the country?&#8221; &#8220;How many people climb these mountains each year?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I was up early this morning for a walk, and at work at 6. It was gray out, yet across the river bright lights were on in a cube of windows in the middle of the John Hancock building. It has large glass windows, so its lights make an impression; there were lights in dozens of rooms in one corner of the building, looking out of the river, covering many floors. One light every 4 windows, perhaps a cube 8 offices on a side extending up 8 floors. 100 offices if just by the building&#8217;s edge, 500 if the pattern continued inside. Part of a large company, surely. The lights were bright enough to be construction, which would explain them being on round the clock [as much as anything would; I&#8217;ve never understood that practice].<\/p>\n<p>So who was the company? There were about 60 floors in all, and the lights were between 35 and 45. Searching for new companies moving into the Tower turned up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;biw=1347&amp;bih=672&amp;q=John+Hancock+moving&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=&amp;aql=&amp;oq=\">Bain Consulting<\/a>&#8230;<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\n&lt;<em>unfinished<\/em>&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fermi was famous for asking difficult general questions of interest that could be approximated through a series of good guesses, such as: &#8220;How many molecules of rubber are rubbed off of car tires in the country each year?&#8221; &#8220;How many stars are visible at night to the naked eye?&#8221; Order-of-magnitude approximations are generally appropriate answers. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[206,78851],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod","category-unfinished-draft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-m4","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4566,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions\/4566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}