Orders of magnitude/TalkAboutExampleColumn

I think the example column should be placed immediately after the column of dimensions that it's an example of. As it is now, it's unclear what dimension things in the example column are an example of; for example, is the Sun an example of something that is 10⁹m in diameter, or is it an example of something with an area of 10¹⁸m²? This gets even more confusing when mass is considered as well. I'll move it over and see if it looks okay.

There, fixed. If everybody hates this, revert it; otherwise I'm going to add empty example columns for the other measurements as well for future expansion. :)

Hmmm, I think having an example for every unit might clutter up the table too much. My intention of lining things up in rows the way I did was to show a general sense of order of magnitude of objects that have "normal" densities (within an order of magnitude of water at 1000 kg/m³). But perhaps this is not appropriate as things like sub-atomic particles and galaxies have densities that are much-much bigger or smaller. So perhaps on reconsideration we should try to keep the table clean and not put examples columns, but just have people link down to the pages to see the examples. --Eob

Hi 129.128.164.xxx, thanks for entering all those examples, but I think that now the table is getting too cluttered up and some of the examples are not in the individual pages. I suggest we do get rid of the examples column and move them to the individual pages. That way they will be more useful in other pages that link to those pages. --Eob

Heh. Sorry, got a bit carried away and wasn't reading Talk updates while I worked. :) I was getting those examples off of http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/distances.html for the most part, if you want more precice measurements. I think it'd be good to have at least a few examples scattered throughout the range of this table, however; otherwise the measurements are just meaningless numbers. - BD, from a public terminal

Here is my reasons for not including examples in the table:

1. I think the table should be as clean as possible. This will become particularly important if we add columns for time, temperature, pressure, etc.
2. The formatting on this table is tricky because of the use of HTML tables. Many people will have problems editing it if we are going to keep on adding examples. (In fact some of the recent edits had bad HTML which might have caused problems with some browsers.) I think that it should be more like the periodic table which does not get modified very often once it is set up.
3. Having the same info in two places would make it hard to maintain.