Magnitudes
A two-minute daily micro-lesson that trains your intuition for scale by serving one real-world number and showing where it sits between a Planck length and the observable universe, with a browser helper that rephrases numbers in articles into the same scale.
Curious adults who want to build scientific intuition without textbooks
- One 'number of the day' with an animated visual ladder comparing it to atoms, humans, mountains, stars, and galaxies
- Browser extension that converts numbers on any webpage (news, Wikipedia, science articles) into the same magnitude scale
- Weekly 'guess the order of magnitude' quiz with streaks and shareable results
- Saved 'scale ladders' for topics you care about (energy, money, distance, time) so numbers build on each other
The Mag World project on HN is building this for self-directed learners but ships only a podcast and a basic browser tool; a consumer-friendly daily version with a quiz loop would reach the much larger 'I want to finally get this' audience.
The HN source trend is weak in practice — the underlying Medium piece shows only 2 points / 1 comment after 189 days, and adjacent 'scale of the universe' interactives exist as classroom/STEM curiosities rather than viral consumer products.Nuxt HN | A Galaxy You Can Dig: When Human-Scale Intuition Breaks ↗Scale of the Universe ↗
No direct daily-quiz competitor for scale intuition exists, but well-known free interactives (Scale of the Universe, Interactive Explorer's 50 worlds) cover the visual side; the daily-lesson + browser-helper combo is genuinely novel but the niche is thin.Scale of the Universe ↗Interactive Explorer | 50 Free Interactive Science & Education Worlds ↗
Brilliant proves adults pay ~$13/mo for daily interactive science lessons, but 'scale intuition' is sci-tainment, not a credential; browser-extension revenue is notoriously weak and a 2-minute daily micro-lesson with no clear ROI resists premium pricing.Pricing & Plans - Help Center | Brilliant ↗Brilliant Premium | Brilliant ↗
Physical and cosmic scales are essentially evergreen — once a number is verified and placed on the scale bar it stays valid for years, giving the corpus long half-life compared to news/edtech content.
MVP is straightforward (one number + scale viz per day plus a small content DB), but quality hinges on curating and fact-checking each real-world number, and a cross-browser extension adds non-trivial maintenance; cost-effective but not trivial.