The Power of Observation - the pill counter example
Sunday, March 25th, 2007If you have ever worked in a pharmacy, you will recognise the ubiquitous triangular pill counter (fig. 1). Ever wondered how the row of numbers was derived?
fig. 1
The row of numbers looks something like this:
fig. 2
So if you have 7 rows of tablets, the number of tablets you would have counted is 28 and so on. The question of how these numbers were derived exercised my curiosity recently. I wanted to develop a mathematical model for working out these numbers. The process I went through highlighted some profound issues relating to the power of observation.
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