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If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

joshworth.com

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Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#91

Post by krilnon »

opminion wrote: post #47
danbruc wrote: post #16

1. Nice. 2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost? 3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.

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

Looks like the author changed it to 'km'.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#92

Post by laureny »

opminion wrote: post #74
cal2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I only see using imperial units as an advantage 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'…

> 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?

The metric system is 10 based, which makes it trivial to measure and convert: 1000mm = 100cm = 1m. This becomes even more important when you are talking about volume or any ^3 dimension.

I have lived in the US for 15 years and even today, I'm unable to convert fl oz. to any kind of mass measure without getting a headache along the way.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#94

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

mathieuh wrote: post #90
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native speaker, but I had the impression this shift to "were" happens less in the UK than in the US. Is that so?

I speak British English and it's more a matter of register for me. If I'm writing something formal I'll use the subjunctive, if I'm talking to friends I'll just stick with the indicative. If I saw someone write "it is necessary that he goes" in a paper it would stick out as strange to me, likewise if I heard someone say "it is necessary that he go" it would sound overly formal and a bit stilted. So really, you can us…

That was a great reply! Thanks for the insight.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#95

Post by sparkzilla »

mrmaddog wrote: post #58

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.

Or you could just, y'know, view source.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#96

Post by jmpeax »

This has the same effect on me as writing out all the zeros in larger numbers, rather than in scientific notation, and then zooming in to see only about 3 zeros at the same time and asking me to scroll through them.

Even without the horrible "zoom in", the size loses meaning and I can't tell how big it is, because humans think in logarithmic scales. I can't really estimate the difference in size by glancing at the number of zeros written out for 10^27 or 10^80 (maybe unless they were above and below each other, and then I would say it's between 2 and 3 times difference in orders of magnitude... again logarithmic thinking!). One is the number of atoms in the human body, the other is the number of atoms in the observable universe, so the difference really can't be appreciated by glancing at the number of zeros.

Given me logarithmic scales for comparing and estimating sizes any day.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#98

Post by mmanfrin »

Arjuna wrote: post #81

If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, "Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else." For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find Proxima Centauri. However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way (between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Se…

One of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe; does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our planetary system?

If so, that is much closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets (although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous relative to the distance to other planets in our system).

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#99

Post by sgt101 »

mmanfrin wrote: post #98
Arjuna wrote: post #81

If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, "Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else." For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find Proxima Centauri. However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way (between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Se…

One of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe; does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our planetary system? If so, that is much closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets (although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous relative to the distanc…

No, I think 6771 *665 widths is close to the truth.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#100

Post by widdma »

mmanfrin wrote: post #98
Arjuna wrote: post #81

If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, "Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else." For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find Proxima Centauri. However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way (between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Se…

One of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe; does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our planetary system? If so, that is much closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets (although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous relative to the distanc…

I'm not sure where you went wrong, but your original notion was correct!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Distance+to+Proxima+...

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