I found some nifty videos/animations all to do with scale:
- A scale zoom of the universe
- A scale zoom of biological objects from coffee bean to carbon atom.
- Taking 3 days to create the earth, YHWH set himself quite the task to make ‘the stars’ in one day. This video explains the magnitude of the mistake
- Best one yet: true math porn! If you’ve ever seen a zoom video of a Mandelbrot Fractal you might be annoyed that it ends so soon. Well THIS ONE goes for a full 10 mins complete with psychedelic music! 10 mins of zooming makes this fractal billions of times bigger than our universe and you’re zooming into it much faster than the speed of light. Amazing stuff.
Non-animation links:
- New device for the blind which gives a picture by stimulating the tongue.
- Comedy gold: Yahoo Answers proves there really is such a thing as a stupid question
- Great post from Takis about a prisoners problem that seems impossible to solve but isn’t.
- A takedown of the nonsense that was circling the media about a month ago about a study that supposedly concluded the G-spot is a myth.
- Greta Christina giving a lecture on atheism and sexuality
- Test how good you are at estimating your own certainty/uncertainty
- A zero rupee note to shame Indian public officials into not asking for bribes.
- Worst rabbi ever
- US soldier waterboards his own child. Funnily enough the papers don’t hesitate to call this particular case torture.
- Great article on the experiences of children being raised in racist extremist families. Hat tip to BroadSnark
4 comments ↓
Don’t you feel emotional when you realize the size of the universe, the age of it and the position of humans in it? I do. I’m in awe every time I think about the difference between 10^(-80) and 10^80. Such realizations have an amazing effect to one’s “psyche”. Wooaoo.
Thanks for posting the links. They are all wonderful.
N.B. About http://vimeo.com/1908224. It doesn’t immediately work. I think you typed an extra ” at the end of it.
Yeah — but I think part of it is just trying to use the human brain for grasping at scales it certainly wasn’t designed for.
Thanks, fixed the Vimeo link tag.
No doubt about that. Whichever the cause however, the result is that I’m thrilled when I think of nature. (And no, this is not religion
)
It’s a realization that my brain, the product of evolution, can grasp the immensity of the universe and the inverse of the immensity of its subatomic structure. At the same time, I feel so “lucky” that I can do this. I realize the constraints of my brain and, despite them, it is amazing it can do whatever it can. Often there is a certain sadness in contemplating about the limitations of the brain and that it is likely to be unable to understand everything–whatever the latter means.
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