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If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

joshworth.com

61–70 of 189 posts

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#61
post #57

There is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty much the entire city. It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.

How big is the Sun model on that walk?

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#63
post #51
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was designed for a Macbook's excellent trackpad. That said, I can see how it would be really difficult to scroll without one.

This broke the "two finger right sweep" to return to the previous page (HN). I had to touch the back button on Safari. Felt horrible about that ...

I think that is Apple's mistake. I have to go into settings and turn the two finger pref/next pages to three, three finger spaces swipe to four just to avoid the problem you described.

And why the hell don't they enable "tab to all controls" by default?

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#64
post #57

There is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty much the entire city. It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.

How big is the Sun model on that walk?

Just over a metre, slightly smaller than the one on St Kilda beach in Melbourne.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#66
post #57

There is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty much the entire city. It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.

I've heard of at least one in the northeast US. It stretches for some distance along a highway, IIRC. A local water tower was painted as the Sun, and the planets and distances are scaled accordingly.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. Correct, and not knowing anything about the author I would venture that the reason is that he uses imperial in his everyday life, and thus it has been a concession to the wider world to do this in metric, for which I am grateful :-) Citation for "lowercase m for meters": http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html

I'm American, so I use imperial units in my everyday life. I'm also a (bio)chemist, so I do use metric units about as often as I do imperial units. While I might be slightly biased ("M" is molarity gosh dangit), I don't think I would confuse "M" for "meters (m)" simply because I use imperial units in my everyday life. I bring this up simply because I've seen a few comments over the past few days to the tone of "imper…

"Imperial" in USA is actually not the same as "imperial" in the UK. There are slight differences between all units, but a significant difference with volume. A US gallon and a UK gallon are different by about 25%.

The US "imperial" vs UK "imerial" is why during WW2 the Allies (USA, UK, France etc.) used metric. Cause there's only one cenimeter. (Very important when you're making bullets)./

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#69

Somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, I had to resort to $(".essay").each(function(i){console.log($(this).text())}); to read the fun little text snippets. I like how it got fairly philosophical—everything eventually turns to philosophy if you are stranded out in space. Thanks for putting this together; it was a nice take on the perspective of our universe.

Thanks for that line of code. I liked the writing too. It would be nice if there was a compressed mode where you could see the statements and planets without scrolling through space but that would defeat the purpose of showing you the scale of the solar system.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#70

Are you kidding me? Sideways scroll with no way to use my scroll wheel? It's choppy and unreadable scrolling using the scrollbar, and using the right arrow is just too slow.

It is actually far too fast, several times the speed of light. If you really wanted to realize how vast and empty space is, you should make it scroll slower.
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