Scientists invent "slime" – could be used in medical, energy, robot applications

I wondered how the math works out in reality.

https://energy-floors.com/products/kinetic-dancefloor/ implies one tile is rated at up to 20 W output. The 44 tiles Coldplay has would then be up to ~800 W (some of them seem less accessible). I guess I don't know enough to figure out how much it saves compared to the emissions of lugging it around, but I'm kind of skeptical it actually "boosts sustainability".

They have a solar product too, but their main approach is this:

> The weight from each step across Pavegen tiles creates a small vertical movement of 5mm-10mm compressing an electromagnetic generator and creating a rotary motion to produce 2-4 joules of off-grid, clean energy.

https://www.pavegen.com/what-can-pavegen-power

I also never understood who the 747s need to be placed nose to tail. I think if I was in charge of measuring via planes, I would place them nose to nose and tail to tail.

"so", boa said, "in parrots i am much-much longer"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Parrots

:)

Convert that to bananas

155 miles = 1409090.9 Bananas

8.8 miles = 80000 Bananas

Not really. In the abstract that's just some number. It's the same issue with money. The numbers involved don't mean anything. 1, 2, 3, 4, large number. Most measurements that actually tend to mean anything tend to be human scaled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_scale

In the case of the distance measurements used, those are numbers beyond distances most humans will ever personally travel. In the modern era, many likely travel that distance in cars fairly regularly, yet then there's an intermediary. The human themselves are not traveling 100+ miles. Even in those cases, it's often changed into another form, such as "a couple hours drive." Very few actually walk 100+ miles and have any concept of that type of distance from their own human perspective. Used to be a part of Boy Scouts, and even in an organization focused on hiking, the amount that ever actually went on a 50 mile hike was rather small.

They also use abstract units without much actual connection to humans themselves. What's a mile? How about a km? A unit decided by committee based on the distance across the Earth.

  "In August 1793, the French National Convention decreed the metre as the sole length measurement system in the French Republic and it was based on  1/10  millionth of the distance from the orbital poles (either North or South) to the Equator, this being a truly internationally based unit."

When it gets smaller and closer to your actual life, people can actually visualize those ideas. It's a concrete object, you may have actual experience with, and a sensation of how far that is, and amount "noun" it takes to interact with. (time, effort, ect...) It's rare that anybody ever even looks at anything labeled "this distance is a mile", "this distance is a km", or something similar. The most frequent would be road markers. How often do most people walk down the highway and try to "human scale" remember how far a mile is? "That's like the distance from downtown to that highway onramp" or something similar.

For a lot of humanity, there's suspicion that most likely cannot even tell me how far it is across their town. A distance that's interacted with semi-regularly. It might be the numbers you quote. Perhaps it's 8.8 miles. However, most can probably not just state that number, and would likely use an intermediary form like "a couple hours walk", or "a 15 minute drive by car."

For a nice reminder of how science communication used to be, there's always the BBC archive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bb6yTPZrnA