71–80 of 189 posts
Some predecessors, just out of interest: http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/ This page has been kicking around for ages, not sure how long though. http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)
I have previously wandered along the scale model of the solar system on the St Kilda beach in Melbourne. Yesterday I did the same with the scale model in Bonn. In both cases I only got as far as Uranus. It was interesting along the way to verify Kepler's relationship between the orbital period and the distance. Saturn takes about 30 years to go around, and is about 30^(2/3) ~ 10 times the distance. Jupiter takes abou…
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…
Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view, other than being able to communicate to other people who use the same system, at the cost of not being understood by everyone else?
(What I heard in the UK during the supermarket transition to metric a decade ago: imperial uses fractions, which is a useful to grasp for learning children, etc. But I'm surely misquoting so don't worry about this argument)
I am asking because I only come across the imperial system when watching Mythbusters or reading a book about the Space Shuttle, or someone tells me their weight in stones, which always leaves me rather puzzled.
This is just out of curiosity, I'm not trying to work anyone up.
Abstraction is where our imagination lights up, where we make art and fall in love and build things. These empty spaces, it's where we find that these brains that evolved to escape Jaguars and find food, are actually pretty amazing in themselves.
This really drives home to me how frustrating it is that Chrome has gotten rid of the OS scrollbar widget on Windows and replaced it with some non-native thing. It's one of several annoyances that are making me think of going back to IE.
As I was scrolling through I started to notice a really nice, subtle star background pattern that wasn't moving. I thought that was a really nice touch. And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust. There's a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.
I feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else the map gets even larger.
To wrap my mind around it, I try to imagine astronomical objects as everyday objects. For example, if Sun was a base-ball in my hand, the earth would be a mote of dust some throwable distance away. My favorite one is: if Sun was the size of a grain of sand, the nearest start would be another grain of sand 30 kms away!