Spreadsheets and AI

I notice that there are several sites offering spreadsheet capabilities in combination with AI so that users need very little knowledge to carry out reasonably challenging tasks like creating pivot tables. One such site that I tried yesterday was quadratic and, after signing up to the site, I copied and pasted some data from the b-table of a sequence in the OEIS. Figure 1 shows what the data looked like.

Figure 1

However, Figure 2 showed what happened when I pasted the data in.

Figure 2

This was extremely annoying and didn't make any sense. I used the site's AI to fix the problem but the fix was tedious and only temporary. The spreadsheet was determined to keep messing up those cells on rows 11 and 12. I liked the site because Python code can be inserted directly into cells but the site obviously has glitches and it's also very slow to load. 

So today I'm trying a different but similar site called Bricks. I carry out the exact same task and see what happens. At first it made a complete mess of it and lumped all the date into cell A1 where I'd pasted it in the first place. At least quadratic had enough sense to put the data into the first column. However, I asked the AI in Bricks to fix the problem and it did. Figure 3 shows the result.

Figure 3

So I was satisfied with that, although I got the message that I only had 99 of 100 trial AI messages left. I hope that's just for the day and not for all time*. To be fair Google Sheets does exactly the same thing as Bricks and then it's very hard to fix without the AI. I'm encouraged to use Bricks again for more complex tasks than the very simple one attempted here.

* It turns out the free plan is as described in Figure 4 with 30 trial AI messages a month, that's only one per day!? The premium plan of $20 per month allows 500 AI queries per month and collaboration with up to 200 team members. This seems very stingy to me.

Figure 4

SketchUp

In my years of teaching, I used the free version of SketchUp from time to time, running on my computer. I always found it easy to use. Nowadays I use it only occasionally but when I do, I find the downloadable version difficult to use. In my frustration, I sought an online version and fortunately one is now available at:

https://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-for-web

Happily, it's an easier to use as the earlier downloadable versions were and I was able to come up with the graphic shown in Figure 1, using text added using OS X's Preview:

Figure 1

It's creation came about via a friend who texted me in Messenger about various ways to come to terms with the concept of a trillion. Here is what he wrote:

If you can live 1 trillion seconds you would live to be about 31,709 years old. If you take an inch and decide to walk 1 trillion inches you would have to walk around the earth, from the equator 633 times (1 lap is just under 25,000 miles). If frequent flyer miles offered unlimited flights if you had 1 trillion miles you would need to make 107 round trips from the Earth to Pluto.

This got me thinking about the microcosmic equivalent of a trillion, namely a trillionth. I wrote in response:

Figure 2 

Moving from the macrocosm to the microcosm, a trillionth of a meter is called a picometer. The diameter of a helium atom is about 62 picometers.

From there, I went to look at some visual ways of representing one trillion and come across this site that was quite helpful. The site included the visualisation shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

I think I'll make more use of the online SketchUp when creating visualisations of numbers that come up in my daily analysis of my diurnal age.