Somehow reminded of the video for "Seven Nation Army"...
There is a National Film Board of Canada short movie called "Cosmic Zoom" that does a similar thing. Also, Arthur C Clarke described a fictional TV presentation based on da Vinci's Vitruvian Man etching, where the man is the yardstick, so 1000 Vitruvian Men side by side make about a mile, then he squares this, and compares it to common structures, increasing the scale by a factor of ten each time. Can't remember the book, maybe even "2001" (though not the original short story "The Sentinel".
"Trin Tragula was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion."
Although there are three major units, (The Altairian Dollar, the Flainian Pobble Bead and the Triganic Pu) none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeble for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
I like.
ReplyDeleteSomehow reminded of the video for "Seven Nation Army"...
There is a National Film Board of Canada short movie called "Cosmic Zoom" that does a similar thing.
Also, Arthur C Clarke described a fictional TV presentation based on da Vinci's Vitruvian Man etching, where the man is the yardstick, so 1000 Vitruvian Men side by side make about a mile, then he squares this, and compares it to common structures, increasing the scale by a factor of ten each time. Can't remember the book, maybe even "2001" (though not the original short story "The Sentinel".
Love it. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThe Measure Of Things
ReplyDeleteHow big do they look, at the distance of the Moon?
ReplyDeleteI want Saturn up there, dammit.
ReplyDeleteScale of the Universe
ReplyDeletevia monkeyfilter.com
Scale of the Universe
ReplyDelete(Even BIGGER and smaller!)
"Trin Tragula was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
ReplyDelete“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion."
H2G2
Monetary units
ReplyDeleteAlthough there are three major units, (The Altairian Dollar, the Flainian Pobble Bead and the Triganic Pu) none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeble for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/23/just-a-second-steve-jenkins/
ReplyDeleteAll 786 known planets
ReplyDeletehttp://xkcd.com/1071/large/