Cell Biology by the Numbers

Cell Biology by the Numbers
by Ron Milo and Rob Phillips

Thoughts on adapting this for the mnemonic medium

it’s already available online as a web book—though there’s no license specified. The robots.txt is permissive.
- Unfortunately, the typography on the web book is… not great. I suppose I could improve that, too!
I’m feeling somewhat uncomfortable about this text because it really is just so numerical. I’m confident that a memory system would really deepen one’s engagement with this text, but I worry that it’s not the best way to demonstrate what I’m trying to do.
The numbers are just overwhelming. There are so many. It’s an interesting problem to attack, but I think I’d need to do something special to handle all the numbers:
- Extremely data-dense texts need a different mnemonic medium design
- sequence them over time rather than throwing them all at once
- possibly adding mnemonics
- creating question groups to ensure that related questions aren’t presented back-to-back
I worry also that my own interest in this material may not be quite strong enough.

2^{10} $\approx$ {1000} ☉

2^{20} $\approx$ {10^6} ☉

e^{7} $\approx$ {10^3} ☉

10^{0.1} $\approx$ {1.3} ☉

sqrt(0.5) $\approx$ {0.7} ☉

ln({10}) $\approx$ $2.3$ ☉

ln({2}) $\approx$ $0.7$ ☉

log_10({2}) $\approx$ {0.3} ☉

log_10({3}) $\approx$ {0.5} ☉

{seconds in a year} (time frequency mnemonic) $\approx$ {$pi \times$ 10^7} ☉

{seconds in a day} (time frequency mnemonic) $\approx$ 10^{5} ☉

{hours in a year} (time frequency mnemonic) $\approx$ 10^{4} ☉

{Avogadro’s constant} $\approx$ {$6 \times$ 10^23} ☉

{cells in the human body} $\approx$ {$4 \times$ 10^13} ☉

{1 Dalton} = 1 {g/mol} $\approx$ {$1.7 \times$ 10^-24} g ☉

Density of {air} $\approx$ {1} kg/m^3 ☉

Density of {water} $\approx$ {1000}x density of air = {1000} kg/m^3 ☉

Base pair volume $\approx$ {1 nm^3} ☉