And I mean everything! Check it out.
h/t Sarah Simonson on Facebook.
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I am Tom Freeland,
a lawyer in Oxford, Mississippi. The picture in the header is my law office.
I'm on Twitter as NMissC
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Do you want to see everything to scale?17 comments to Do you want to see everything to scale? |
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That ranks among the most remarkable things I have ever seen.
Goes to show: there’s still a lotta stuff to see that I’ll never see …
I hadn’t realized Sirius was so close to the Sun’s size.
… Was showing neighbor kid the Summer Triangle last night. Altair and Vega are, like, 15-20 light years away. Deneb, about the same *apparent* brightness? 2,600 ly away: light from before the births of Jesus or Solon. Was reminded of that b/c Deneb in that thang is Really Really Big. For a star, anyway.
Powers of Ten
Still the reference!
Zoomquilt is art in a similar spirit.
Awesome!
Good stuff. Thanks for passing it on. Didn’t realize Haley’s Comet was so large, but then again, last time I saw it I was a kid, and it was way up there. Actually, most of what I remember was it being a key player in weird St. Elsewhere episode.
I hope he keeps adding to the chart. Three things I never knew were so big until I saw them for myself were Stonehenge, David, and Guernica. Anybody else ever surprised by a scale?
Anybody else ever surprised by a scale?
One of the Navy ships I served in held swim call one fine day, just off the coast of Guam. It wasn’t right over the dead center of the Mariana Trench, but it was close enough to gain my attention. The thought occurred to me: “I’m swimming 3, maybe 4, feet beneath water when I dive off the side of the ship. There’s another 7 miles of water beneath me. I am of no significance whatsoever.”
Another Navy “scale” memory … involved the wisdom of a sailor: We were underway during a North Atlantic transit … Norfolk to Gibraltar and on into the Med. I was officer of the deck, on the ship’s bridge. I stepped out to the port wing of the bridge … an open weather deck … where the port lookout was standing his watch, scanning the surface of the Atlantic and the skies above … both of which were present in sweeping abundance. I spoke to the sailor … acknowledged his presence … and he returned the courtesy. A few words of small talk were exchanged.
And then he explained to me: “There sure is a lotta water out there.”
“Yes,” I replied, “there sure is.” And then he gave me one of my all-time favorite lines from my Navy service:
“And that’s only the top of it, Sir.”
>Anybody else ever surprised by a scale?
A favorite moment of parenthood for me was taking a very small child for their first close-up look at an elephant. My son got a particularly great one– a completely empty elephant house in winter. I rolled his stroller over near the fence. The elephant stuck his trunk out to almost touch the boy in the stroller.
” There’s another 7 miles of water beneath me.”
And that is why I would never, never, never go swimming in the deep ocean. I think too much about stuff like that.
I would also not have qualified for sub duty, and had I been so assigned by some blunder, they would’ve had to strap me to my bunk until returning to base.
How do you feel about all the stuff overhead when walking around outside?
I will say the thought of being in the water with such a deep abyss below is awe-inspiring and creepy all at once.
All this talk about the bleak ocean reminds me of Pip in “Moby Dick,” when he jumps out of the whaleboat into the ocean and is abandoned by his shipmates. There, with his head bobbing like a cork, and with nothing from horizon to horizon, the sky above, the vast ocean underneath, he sees “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom,” among other wonderous sights and goes mad. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.” Spooky.
Thanks for that, Dragoman.
I am less worried about being crushed by the very air above my head.
The ocean is a spooky place in general; we have a very incomplete idea of what horrid things are swimming down there below the sunlight. And some of the ideas we do have are not encouraging.
Here’s a link to another “scale” subject. Read the cutline included with the pic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/2012-hubble-space-telescope-advent-calendar/100415/?utm_source=Atlantic+Media
The things Lovecraft created to scare folks that are much closer to hand got to me in my youth, Anderson. “Rats in the Walls,” for instance.
Poking around online, it turns out that the story I’m remembering as “Rats in the Walls” is actually “The Graveyard Rats,” 30s pulp horror classic by Harvey Kuthner: The opening should make clear why I’m remembering it as Lovecraft, although there’s none of Lovecraft’s baroque mannerisms:
“Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats. Generations ago they had come up from the wharves and settled in the graveyard, a colony of abnormally large rats, and when Masson had taken charge after the inexplicable disappearance of the former caretaker, he decided that they must go.”
“Rats in the Walls” is Lovecraft, but not the plot I was remembering.
At Junior high age, I read a lot of this sort of thing. Three stories really stayed with me: This one, “The Thing in the Celler” by David Keller, and John Campbell’s “Who Goes There.” I haven’t read any of these since about 1970 (just reread “The Thing in the Cellar” online thanks to the wonders of the internet) and they have still stayed vividly with me.
I don’t find that Lovecraft achieves fear so much as metaphysical dread.
Btw, if you haven’t read Charlie Stross’s “A Colder War,” the internet would like half an hour of your time. Instead of Iran-Contra, Iran-Cthulhu. (A good invitation to his similarly-positioned Laundry series, which is a grand hoot.)