Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with estimation

I've told you a million times!

surenoproblem — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:57:48 -0800

What are your benchmarks for estimating/comprehending quantities? I'm terrible with magnitudes; if someone tells me that they weigh 85kg, or that they come from a city of 2 million people, this doesn't create a mental picture for me at all; they might as well be speaking another language. After a lifetime of being resigned to this, I've decided I'm going to familiarise myself with a list of benchmark quantities: my height, the height of my tallest friend, population of my city, etc. Help me compile a list of quantities I should be familiar with, and tips for learning to come to grips with quantities! For example, these are some of the quantities I'm going to familiarise myself with:

Population of Australia: 21 million
Population of USA: 304 million
Population of China: 1.33 billion (1,330 million)

My height
Height of tallest friend
Height of short friend

My weight
Weight of buffest dude at my gym

Population of my city
Population of all cities I've lived in

GDP of Australia
GDP of major nations

Distance from my house to the corner shop
Distance from my house to work
Distance to other cities

Any quantities that you find useful, or tips for better visualisation, would be appreciated. Thanks!

ZomBay Critical Mass

Ambrosia Voyeur — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:51:17 -0800

AquaticNecromancyFilter: Combined, the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley employ about 3500 uniformed police officers. Do they outnumber the army that could be raised by dark magic from the floor of the San Francisco Bay? Approximately how many entire sets of human skeletal remains are there in that body of water, considering disasters, shipwrecks, bridge jumpers, tidal movement of sediment, etc.? Yes, I'm sure a reanimated skeleton warrior with a missing digit or patella could probably still serve well in the zombie army, but I'm going for an approximate head count, here, so that the skeletons can mix and match parts to create as many complete horrors from the deep as possible.

How much was that stuff worth?

nakedcodemonkey — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:11:37 -0800

How much was that stuff worth? I have to prepare a fairly precise net worth statement for Sept 93 on short notice. Most is easily pulled off old statements, but how do I come up with a solid fair market valuation for household/personal goods? It's peak tax season, so impossible to get an fast answer from an accountant. The only obvious calculator just throws validation errors. The place has been through several clutter purges and a couple buying sprees in the interim. Darned if I recall what was and wasn't here so long ago. What's a good method for estimating the value of household contents?

How do they do that??

brain cloud — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:21:50 -0800

How do you judge large horizontal or vertical distances visually, with no (or few) other objects around to compare as a reference? The story about the UFO sighting in Texas made me wonder something, or rather, reminded me of something I've been curious about for a while now.

One of the men who claimed to see this craft in the air judged it to be 3000 feet or so above the ground. Others judged the dimensions of the craft in terms of football fields, or miles (yes I know, that's a big difference) in length.

My question is this: How is it possible to estimate, from ground level, the height at which an object is in the sky? (Never mind the further complicating matters of not knowing what the specific object is that triggered this question, nor its mystery dimensions -- I don't necessarily care to dissect this particular incident, it just got me thinking is all). Is there some trick to being able to figure it out, without any special instruments -- just your eyes? Even if it was something of known origin and size, such as an airplane or a bird. Perhaps not so much a cloud because they come in all sizes.

I am also curious how one would go about estimating the same but at ground level, e.g. a horizontal distance. I am horrible at this and wonder how it is so easy for others to at least throw a good guess out there. For example, let's say you're in a relatively open outdoor area, and you see a deer running across your field of view from left to right. There are some people who would be able to quickly ascertain that the deer was 400 or 500 feet away. How??!!

Is there skill involved? Really good intuition? Secret black project military training?

Help me remember something I once read about estimation

zachlipton — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:44:16 -0800

WisdomOfCrowdsFilter: I read a theory smewhere that there's a peculiar thing that happens when you ask a group of people to estimate something. As I remember it, there's something about the magic number of 50%, but I'm not wholly sure how this works. The idea was basically that when at least 50% of the individuals were estimating properly in some way, the average estimate would eventually converge on the true value, but when less then 50% of the individuals estimated properly, widely divergent values would emerge. Essentially, more then 50% or _something_ produced good estimates, less then 50% produced estimates that were substantially worse than those produced by just one individual. I've spent some time with Google and Wikipedia on Estimation and Delphi methods, but to no avial. Any mifites know what I'm talking about?

tables of costs of software projects

uni verse — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:11:13 -0800

I need a link to tables of costs of software projects to help me estimate cost. I have heard of it as a large depository of thousands of sf projects, with basic information on type of project and what it cost. I have tried googling. Thanks!