Unit conversions and context
- Necessary to solve numerical problems.
- But also necessary in *writing* to establish context: Numbers alone (particularly large numbers) may be hard to relate to your readers' experience.
Wind turbines kill birds!
Anecdote - the power of the particular
...a flock of 15 American White Pelicans ...caught [the biologist's] eye, flying toward the nearby Peñascal wind farm. As he watched, a pelican at the flock's tail end was swiped by a massive turbine blade and "literally 'erased'" from the air.
Numbers - "objective" information
Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of green energy.
Adding context to a number
What does such a number *mean*? Can we compare it with anything else?
Write down your ideas about something else (related to humans) that kills birds that could be used as a comparison.
America's cats, including housecats that adventure outdoors and feral cats, kill between 1.3 billion and 4.0 billion birds in a year-Peter Marra, Conservation biologist at the Smithsonian, 2013
Recognize the complexity
So, does that mean we can safely ignore the effect of wind turbines? Or should we stop all wind turbine construction?
What can you bring into this discussion to make it more complex? What other perspectives?
- Anecdote - the particular
- Numbers - the general
- Context
- Complexity