Relatives

Relatives turns an abstract measurement into something you can picture.

Ask it about 70 micrometers and it answers: about as thick as a human hair. It's a TypeScript comparison engine — a framework-agnostic core library paired with a SvelteKit frontend — that ranks 919 curated real-world facts across 13 dimensions (length, mass, time, energy, data, pressure, and more) to surface the comparison that actually lands.

Picking a good comparison

Ranking the matches is the interesting problem. The numerically closest fact often reads as the least relatable, so closeness is scored on two factors. Proximity measures distance from a perfect match on a log scale, so 2x and ½x count as equally far off.

A nice-number multiplier rewards ratios a person can actually say out loud: "twice as long" or "ten times heavier" wins over a technically-closer 7.3x, because round multiples are the ones that stick.

Each fact also carries hand-assigned relatability and accuracy ratings, and the final ranking is a weighted blend of all three, with live sliders in the UI to favor the closest match, the most familiar one, or the most precise.

The frontend leans into that immediacy: results re-rank as you type, the input box accepts shorthand like 5k, 1e6, or 2^10, and ratios are spelled out in words — scaling all the way up to "1.3 million times" or a googol when the numbers get absurd.