If the Moon Were Only One Pixel

Photo ©Josh Worth (www.joshworth.com)

There are plenty of great reasons to love electronic media, but one thing that they do best—that you really can't do in just about any other communications medium—is demonstrate concepts in wildy interactive ways.

Case in point:  Graphic designer Josh Worth found himself struggling to describe the scale of the solar system to his young daughter, and realized that our brains aren't really equipped to handle really large numbers.

So he built If the Moon Were Only One Pixel, an interactive scale map of our solar system, using a single pixel to represent the diameter of our moon.  It's crazily effective in helping us wrap our heads around the distances involved in our solar system alone (let alone between stars).  If you want to understand exactly how small, and how precious life on Earth is, you need to experience this.

The real lesson here is that you couldn't do this in just about any other medium.  You could do try to do something similar in the real world (in fact, some people have tried), but even that won't give you the true scale of both sizes of celestial bodies and distances in solar system.

So do yourself a favor.  Take the time to scroll through our solar system, and get an idea of how small you are.

Pro tip:  Use the left and right arrows on the navigation (see the screen shot below) to "hyperlink" to the next milestone.  It makes the trip through the solar system a lot faster, even if it is cheating.

Getting At the World's Libraries

This one's more about potential than actuality, but the world of electronic media has made a good start.

At what, you're wondering?  How about making every book ever written available to you, and most of the classics—at least the ones that have passed beyond the scope of copyright law (a not insubstantial number)—absolutely free?

eBooks have become de rigueur, but initiatives like Project Gutenberg are aiming to make as many books as possible not just free, but openly available on the Internet.

From classics in the original Latin ('cuz you know you want to read first-century commentary on Julius Caesar's reign) to titles like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you can find something for everyone.

Sure, you could argue that all of these books could be found in the library somewhere, but how many of us are really going to explore literature—in today's crazy-busy world—beyond the easy-to find stuff at Amazon.com or on the NY Times bestseller list?  The electronic world is making the world's information accessible any time, anywhere, and Project Gutenberg's an excellent example of when it's done right.

Democratizing Creativity

I've been focusing a lot lately on the ways in which electronic media help us demonstrate, interactively, concepts that might be difficult to wrap our heads around.  This blog has seemed, in the last few days, to be almost exclusively about demonstrating cosmic scales.

But another awesome thing—maybe the most awesome thing—about the advent of electronic media is the fact that it's democratized the creative process.  Whether it's Youtube videos or Soundcloud audio distribution or podcasts available just about anywhere, everyone basically gets to have a voice these days.  Anyone with access to a smartphone and a computer can basically create anything they want.  Sure, it makes for a lot of dreck, but it also gives outlets to people who deserve it and might not otherwise be able to create and distribute their content.

Without the distribution available via the Internet, we wouldn't get to see awesome stuff like this:

A Tale of Momentum & Inertia from HouseSpecial on Vimeo.

Scientific Notation and the Scale of the Universe

Visit The Scale of the Universe

Scientific notation is a mystery to me.  Tell me that an elephant is 5 meters long?  I can wrap my head around that.  Tell me, however, that an elephant is 5 X 10⁰ meters long is a bafflement.

The problem, however, with comparing things across really large measurements, is that you need a way that people can wrap their heads around the differences involved.  We've talked before about how humans have a hard time with really large numbers, and how we need to find ways to help ourselves understand them; our sense just aren't built to work on those scales.

So, we can look at 5 X 10¹² and 6 X 10¹⁵ and intellectually understand that the latter has a couple extra zeros slapped on the end; but what does it mean?

Something electronic media can do that no other medium can do in an interactive way, is give us a visual representation of these scales; to help teach us the real difference between those two numbers above.

One of the best ways I've ever seen it done is Cary & Michael Huang's The Scale of the Universe.  With just a mouse scroll, it's possible to zoom in for an understanding of the size of smallest theoretical bits of existence and zoom out to the width of the known universe.

Seeing a neutron star (at 2.4 X 10⁴ kilometers) next on the scale to Rhode Island (at 7.5 X 10⁴ kilometers) gives a pretty sharp insight into the sizes of two wildly different objects.

Jump on over to The Scale of the Universe and scroll through for some mind-blowing information.

Tag Galaxy

Get the full effect at taggalaxy.de

Sure, photography is a relatively new art form.  It's only been around about a century and a half, right?

So it seems like there have always been photos.  There have always been photo albums.  It's not like electronic media have changed that a whole lot, right?

Wrong.  Or, at least, partly so.

One of the things that electronic media has done is simplified the way we experience our vast and growing collection of images.  Take for instance, Tag Galaxy.  It's a site that pulls images from Flickr and displays them—based on their tags—as orbiting celestial bodies.  But when you click to zoom in, you get to see the photos inhabiting their own little planets.

It's really quite something, and you should see it for yourself.