Waldo Jaquith illustrates the size of our nuclear arsenal. Totally excessive. But it’s great to see those numbers in a form that’s more easy grok—like the links in my sense of scale category.
Category: senseofscale
One of my ongoing fascinations is with sense of scale. Here’s a couple other interesting thought experiments to understand the immensity of our universe:
Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. How big would the Sun be, and how far away from the pen tip? First, Hold the ball-point pen up in the air. Now hold a ping-pong ball about 15 feet away from the pen tip. This is approximately a size and distance scale model of the Sun and Earth. The moon would be the size of a dust speck beside the ball in the pen.
The Universcale guides you from cosmic size all the way down to the immeasurable sub-atomic scale. Kind of like the Powers of Ten film, but this one has chill Musak.
I was reading this profile of Albert Einstein yesterday and came across this mind-blowing bit of trivia. Einstein “calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres.” That’s pretty cool in and of itself. But going further, Äúthat many unpopped popcorn kernels when spread across the United States would cover the country nine miles deepÄù.
An image of all the objects in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. This is a nice addition to my other links about sense of scale and projects that try to make sense of Really Big Ideas. [via waxy]
A couple additions to my growing series of links about understanding large-scale concepts. Here’s a timeline of evolution from the beginning of Life up to Now. The image of the timeline is 135 feet long, and homo sapiens showed up right at around last pixel. And via infosthetics, a video comparing the planets, the Sun, and a number of other stars.
The first five links in my scalar collection were about the scale of the atom, the Earth’s population, the stars in the sky, showing 570 million years in 1 hour, and visualizing enormous numbers. Oh, as a bonus there’s also the one I linked a while back where you can learn about existing in 10 dimensions.
Two more additions to the first three links in my Scalar Series:
A clock depicting the last 4.6 billion years of history in one hour and a project in visualizing enormous numbers with pennies, from one to one quintillion. [via svn]
—Scientists rethink the collapse of Easter Island society. Spoiler: It wasn’t just environmentally rapacious islanders, but the rats they brought along. [via ptdr]
—Anil Dash gathers the best of Zidane Headbutt spin-offs, “dedicated to the head-first fight against alleged racism, the grand tradition of ridiculous memes on the net, and the premise that “Yakety Sax” is always funny.”
–Here is another entry to compliment the two earlier links in my ad-hoc Scalar Series: take a look at the atom and relative size of proton versus electron.
–The concept book for the Seattle Public Library, where the vision was introduced: “to redefine / reinvent the Library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store, where all media – new and old – are presented under a regime of new equalities.” I’m not sure about the actual content, but it certainly came out beautifully. [via ic]
Mark Larson 
