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Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

insect.sh

171–180 of 205 posts

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#171
post #131

If it could deduce density from the material name, it'd useful for volume-to-mass conversions., e.g. 1 cup of butter -> g Not sure if it's quite scientific though... :)

GNU Units is extensible in this regard. You can add your own dimensions.

I'm trying to think of how you'd specify density of butter, perhaps "butterdensity", cognate, "earthmass".

I've got a number of geographic areas specified, so I can give you, say, paper size in milli manhattanarea.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#174

Kudos! I would love to see two more things: 1. Propagation of uncertainty.[1] I often yearned for a calculator that automatically propagated uncertainties for me while writing my (high-school) lab reports. I think it would be life-saver functionality for many students at the very least. 2. True high-precision. I don't know how Insect works under the hood (so maybe you are already doing it this way) but instead of usi…

Frink is a "napkin math" language that supports units, uncertainty propagation (keeping track of middle/lower/upper), and exact rational numbers. Named after Professor Frink from The Simpsons, of course. Also it has an insanely comprehensive file of units and constants (derived from GNU units and greatly expanded), so it includes handy things like earthmass , stefanboltzmann , etc. http://frinklang.org https://frinkl…

Wow, that seems really promising. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#175

This is exactly what I've been looking for for years. A fast easy calculator that's as convenient as a physical school calculator but with familiar programming style input since computers don't have scientific calculator keys. I can do sqrt(2) much easier than Windows' calculator and it doesn't have the ridiculous attempt to copy a physical calculator's quirks like pressing equals twice to re-apply the previous opera…

Thanks! I'm glad you like it.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#176

Nice, though I'm still highly partial to GNU Units. In large part as it allows specifying output units, and not just for conversions. Note: if you're on MacOS and are using the supplied 'units' utility, that is BSD, not GNU units. You're going to want to install gunits from Homebrew. https://www.gnu.org/software/units/

Thank you for the feedback. What do you mean by "specifying output units"? Insect has the "->" operator which does that:

  40000 km / c -> ms

   = 133.426 ms

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#177
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I didn't know that :-)... that's interesting. I'm very much open for suggestions on how to improve the logo. I already went through a couple of iterations... https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/blob/master/media/insect.s...

Actually it was just a "did you know?" comment, 99.99% of people don't know/care about it. I'd throw a SVG modification but I won't have my laptop around/time until Monday, when I'd just lower the upper wing a bit.

That would be great.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#178

Nice, though I'm still highly partial to GNU Units. In large part as it allows specifying output units, and not just for conversions. Note: if you're on MacOS and are using the supplied 'units' utility, that is BSD, not GNU units. You're going to want to install gunits from Homebrew. https://www.gnu.org/software/units/

Thank you for the feedback. What do you mean by "specifying output units"? Insect has the "->" operator which does that: 40000 km / c -> ms = 133.426 ms

Ah, I didn't find that. Yes, that's useful.

Re: Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

#180
I use Python with pint [0] for this. It integrates with numpy. It has support for uncertainty. You can do all calculations Python can, Python math reads like ascii math. It also can output to latex.

This can easily run local. If you prefer online repl, it's available on repl.it [1]. There you can keep your scripts in the cloud for later, with rudimentary versioning.

[0] https://github.com/hgrecco/pint [1] https://repl.it

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