Place an orange on the floor, ten feet (3m) away place a cherry.
Earth and moon.
Walk away a thousand yards (1km) and place a 30ft (10m) high pumpkin.
That's how big the sun is and how far it is from us.
* aprox scale
If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
171–180 of 189 posts
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#172It's ironic to read «The brain isn't built to handle "empty."» remark having «How to meditate» (that aims to empty your mind/thoughts) on HN front-page.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#173Earlier 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 ...
Yes, still, I only "use" this feature by mistake.
especially because it's too easy to make it when scrolling up
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#174Nit: kM -> km; meters are abbreviated 'm', usually.
Since this story seems to be nit territory, another one: 'm' is not an abbreviation, but a symbol. That's why you don't write a dot after it.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#175Earlier 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…
The sole advantages of imperial units over metric units is that they are easier and faster to say. 50 miles is a ton less syllables than 50 'kilometers' an inch is much easier to say than '2 centimetres' What would immensely improve the metric system would be recognised, single-syllable slang words for every measurement unit. A lot of native-metric-english speakers try, they say 'mil' for millilitres, they say 'kays'…
Compare equivalent accuracy. "one hundred and eighty three centimetres" is not noticeably more complex than "five feet seven and a half inches". And you have the option of "eighteen decimeters" if that's the level of accuracy you want - try inventing an intermediate unit on the fly with imperial.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#176Thanks for including Pluto (technically not a planet but still one in my mind).
If one's going to include Pluto it would be nice to have Ceres, which was also cruelly stripped of its planetary status.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#177My friend pointed out:
"When pressing the right arrow key, the digits at the bottom are spinning really fast apart from the most significant numbers at the front and the 3rd digit from the right which, curiously, slowly counts backwards without missing any digit"
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#178Are 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.
Annoying but I've just noticed there are icons to 'quick scroll'
The icons are the planetary symbols - e.g. the "female" symbol for Venus, the "male" symbol for Mars, and so on.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#179Back in the late 70's, when I was in grade school, I used to make maps with just about the same scale with rolls of my dad's thermal printer paper.
Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
#180Anybody else get the feeling that we're probably stuck and will all die here on Earth? While scrolling through all that empty space, I was thinking about interstellar travel. I imagine it'll eventually be as easy and commonplace as we see in sci-fi, but I'm having a moment of doubt we'll ever get there, or if there's any point out-living the home planet.
Well, the humanity has (only what? -) billions of resource-brains (with not much other than) to think and figure out a way to get there! ...and we have a lot of time on our hands (or heads?) for that, so don't loose your hope.