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Well, 10cm is approximately the width of your hand.

And a meter is somewhat close to a yard, which is often the distance to your outstretched hand.

http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/bodyruler/

Pardon my blog-whoring, but I've posted a short history of powers of 10 media, which goes:

• 1957 book Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps
• 1968 film Cosmic Zoom
• 1977 film Powers of Ten
• 1996 film Cosmic Voyage
• 1997 film Contact
• Most Recent flash interactive Scale of the Universe

Just another way to celebrate an exponentially awesome day. : )

It may have better bandwidth, but I hope you have less latency then the 1.25 sec on the moon(1).

1 - http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir0/light_delay.html

Fear not: http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/cosmicview/ has an online version of the book!

COSMIC VIEW: The Universe in 40 Jumps

The questions is *when* did the US gov't acquire this frequency? If it was well after these things were sold, what on earth were they thinking, and if it was before, who let garage door manufacturers keep making these things?

The DOD has had these frequencies for far longer than the garage door manufactureres have been in business. The devices are specifically allowed under an FCC exemption that allows low power RF devices to operate so long as (1) they are below a certain power output (typically 10w max) and (2) that they do not interfere with whoever actually has the frequency allocated to them.

This is, among other things, how those home TV broadcast devices are allowed (the ones that let you broadcast over a TV frequencey to your TV), the FM transmitters you can buy for you MP3 player, and numerous other RF devices on the market today.

Office of Spectrum Management:
http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/frequency_al location_chart/UnstableURL/allochrt.pdf
That is an old copy from 1996. It shows the frequency being "Government Exclusive" for 335.4-399.9Mhz.

Given what I know of the history of RF allocation, most likely the only people who had that frequency before the DoD was the Ham Radios and that was only up until 1960 at the latest. Prior to sometime before WWII, the Hams had all frequencies above 1500Mhz as it was believed to be useless for anything.

There's a difference between decentralising the infrastructure and decentralising the control. Radia Perlman's thesis is a good example: a robust, decentralised routing protocol made possible by a centralised PKI.

My favorite part is when I heard about IPv6 in college, they had calculated that there would be enough addresses for 10 IPv6 devices for every square foot of the planet!

Oh, goodness me, are you ever off. Earth's area is 5.1e14 square meters. 2**128 ~= 3.4e38. 3.4e38 / 5.1e14 = 6.7e23 IPv6 addresses per square meter. For square feet, call it 6e22 addresses per square foot. (1 square meter's pretty close to 10 square feet.)

So, you're off by a about 21 and a half orders of magnitude. That's not even close by astronomical standards. :) You'll forgive me for not carrying more significant digits around.

Sorry. According to this, the 10^15 joules figure is appropriate for a 100 megaton weapon. A 10^9 joules weapon would barely qualify as a car bomb, just under a ton of TNT. However, I can see the use in this thing being totally unpredictable. But as efficiency goes, why not use a well known tech, say... bombers?

that's a total power of about 3e41 watts.

Well, your estimate is only as precise as the most imprecise value that you use in your computation. It is much better to look at actual supernovas and compute the wattage based on its distance from us. Type II supernova peak photon luminosity: 5 x 10^35 watts.

"The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest model of our planetary system, at a scale of 1:20 million. The Sun is represented by the Globe arena in Stockholm, the largest spherical building in the world. The planets are placed and sized according to scale with the inner planets being in Stockholm and Jupiter (diameter 7.3 m) at the International airport Arlanda. The outer planets follow in the same direction with Saturn in Uppsala and Pluto in Delsbo, 300 km from the Globe. At each planet station, exhibits provide information about astronomy and the natural sciences, and also about related mythology and culture."

I'm not very familiar with Parrot

I think you are right, but Parrot is not in the same game with Java and .NET., yet.

Even /. has gotten over (most of) its .NET trolling and is starting to look at the platform in a practical, even positive light. There are coding projects well into production, some are finished, and surely there are some in maintenance stages. By the time Longhorn rolls out, the .NET runtime will probably be on the majority of active Windows systems. Mono may be an even bigger contender in the near future.

Meanwhile, programmers are waiting, many patiently, for Parrot which is just at 0.1.0. As an equivalent, Parrot isn't really in the race yet. Everyone would love to seriously consider it, but it's not a contender (in the same way .NET and JVM are) to technically consider yet. I hear things like mod_parrot are still in need of work, though there are related projects coming about.

Hopefully Parrot will become adopted over projects like Mono, not just in concept and ideology but in a practical platform. I think Python support may be critical, even more so than Perl6. Let's hope Parrot's maturity doesn't need to wait for Perl6.

Recent developement summaries on Parrot and other Perl-related things. Is there a timeline for Parrot? I haven't seen it.

qualify this. how many sqr feet does the earth contain? - for how long? - what time frame? - what is the size of the area to be measured? what spectrum(s) are being used?

are you telling me that 500 square Megameters of data times 3.28 (1 meter approx 3.28 feet) of data is collected *realtime*?

it is more likely this occurs on very selected target area for a selected period of time within a specified range of the spectrum - but not the entire earth.

TWiki - here's an example, Parrot. There are plenty of references around explaining the what a wiki is. It is up to you to use it.

About the same as a 50 euro. Say 24 mm.

There is a scale picture on How Big Are Things?.

Hrrmm. According to my python console and this page

2^127 / (.51*10^15 m^2 * 1,000,000 mm^2/m^2)

Or, roughly, the number of usable addresses (estimate) divided by the number of square millimeters on the surface of the planet still yields 3.33*10^17 addresses per square millimeter!

Anybody care to check my math?

A Solar System Scale Model Meta Page .

Secondly, one point I think needs to be raised whenever the concept of hydrogen fusion as an energy source comes up is (and I do not take credit for this, although I cannot cite the source, I did read it somewhere) if we as a species found a cheap and viable source of energy, there could be long-term enviromental consecquences, even if the production was emissionless in the traditional sense.

What I mean is, although the "global warming" which concerns many people now is due to greenhouse gasses from the combustion of fossil fuels, a cheap and limitless source of electrical energy could begin a new type of global warming; one caused simply by the amount of energy we are adding to our planet as a basically closed system.

For comparison, the energy density of the sun's rays is 1.4 kW/m^2. Multiplying that by half of the surface area of the earth, 2.55E14 m^2 gives us approximately 3.57E14 kW. That's 357000 Terawatts coming in from the sun. Compared to that, all the energy we extract from fossil fuels is insignificant. But if fusion were available as a practically limitless source of power, it's not hard to imagine producing a sizable percentage of that amount within a short (geologically speaking) amount of time.

Whenever you "produce" (release from storage, either in hydrocarbon chains, or in inter-atomic forces) energy and transform it into electricity, it will eventually end up as heat. Even if you go fusion-electricity-hydrogen gas-mechanical energy ... the eventual result is heat.

Just something to think about...

Earth's surface as a 20 x 25 Megameter rectangle has some old npp numbers from John Harte's "Consider a Spherical Cow". (I would have inlined them here, but I can't seem to do a PRE tag...) Google would no doubt turn up other sources.

10. Bright times in optics
Optical physicists made progress in many directions in 2002. Researchers in Göttingen used conventional optics to image clumps of bacteria just 33 nanometres across [...]

33 nm was the resolution. Not the size of the object being looked at! Sigh.
How many people have read that paragraph without noticing the absurdity?

You too can spot such humorous silliness. Just [plug] look at How Big Are Things?. Bacteria are the size of tables , not ping-pong balls! :)

10. Bright times in optics
Optical physicists made progress in many directions in 2002. Researchers in Göttingen used conventional optics to image clumps of bacteria just 33 nanometres across [...]

33 nm was the resolution. Not the size of the object being looked at! Sigh.
How many people have read that paragraph without noticing the absurdity?

You too can spot such humorous silliness. Just [plug] look at How Big Are Things?. Bacteria are the size of tables , not ping-pong balls! :)

Our sun is about 10^30x2 kg while the earth is 10^25x0.6 kg That makes the sun about 10^6 times heavier than the earth([1])

This black hole now is about 2.6 to 3.7 times that heavy when compared to a sun of the size of our own.

Our planet roates around the Sun at about 150,000,000 km at a speed of ca. 29.658 km / s if my math isn't wrong.

That other sun rotates around the black hole at about 17 light hours at a speed of 240.652 km / s (if I am not mistaken here either).

The speed of that sun is more than 8x the speed of the Earth, generating a significantly higher centrifugal force.

Now, that sun is 127.5 times further away from the black hole's event horizon than Earth is from Sun.

At the same time, the increased distance should provide a significantly lower gravitational pull than the 3.6 x relative weight of the sun could provide.

As this sounds completely bogus to me, I'd be happy if someone could enlighten me how this is supposed to work.

We all know light-seconds are a foot long (about 300 Mm) illustration.
That's just the old "a foot is a light-nanosecond" network wiring rule.

Similarly, light-minutes are almost 2 cm long (a bit less than 20 Gm),
light-hours are meters (about 1000 Gm (1 Tm)),
and light-days are inches (about 25 Tm).
So the heliosphere is coin-sized.
Light-years are centimeters (10 Pm),
and a parsec is a longish inch (30 Pm).

I find it much easier to use SI, than to constantly have to convert between units. ;)

We all know light-seconds are a foot long (about 300 Mm) illustration.
That's just the old "a foot is a light-nanosecond" network wiring rule.

Similarly, light-minutes are almost 2 cm long (a bit less than 20 Gm),
light-hours are meters (about 1000 Gm (1 Tm)),
and light-days are inches (about 25 Tm).
So the heliosphere is coin-sized.
Light-years are centimeters (10 Pm),
and a parsec is a longish inch (30 Pm).

I find it much easier to use SI, than to constantly have to convert between units. ;)

It proved helpful to "clump" the powers. Into 1000x lumps. So 10^0 through 10^3 are shown together, 10^3 through 10^6, etc. Rather than having separate "Powers of Ten" pictures of 1, 10, 100, and 1000 meters, we can step off the page, and use the whole room. So standing in the "meter room", 1 meter people are 1 mm high ants, 10 meter buildings are 10 mm high, 100 meter skyscrapers are the size of 100 mm soda cans, and 1000 meter neighborhoods can fit on your desk top. The cost is things are less pretty - rather than consistently sized 10 cm pictures, one is now constrained to frequently inconvenient sizes. The classic reclining person is either life-size, or a millimeter high. The benefit is I can actually remember and use the sizes of things. The Earth is a blue marble, so it was ten to the seven meters. A largish marble, so between 1e7 and 2e7 meters. And it becomes much easier to compare sizes (the "meter room" building is the size of a soda can, so it's 1000x bigger than my real soda can, and 10^6 times bigger than my hair (which is also can-like -- pool "noodle" floats make a good model)).

You already have a feel for the rough size of things which you handle, things you can hold in your hands. Leveraging this, one can often get not only the order-of-magnitude size of something, but also a digit of precision (as with the 10 to 20 Megameters Earth estimate). Which makes this scheme great for doing Fermi problems! :)

So while there is a dusty copy of "Powers of Ten" on my bookshelf, on my wall is a 2 meter high, 12-point, Times-Roman "a". And there are a pile of pool noodle-float "hairs" against the door (100 mm x 1500 mm, so 100 micron by 1500 micron - so a few days growth). And I'm out of M&M red blood cells at the moment, but they make a good snack. And if someone says 30 mils, or 30 nanometers, or 30 light years, it means something concrete, visceral, and familiar.

I'm actually trying to export this concept using a web page,
How Big Are Things?.
It's a very rough draft. Comments would be most welcome.

- Mitchell N Charity
(Apparently "space aliens have infested the server", or this wouldn't be posted as Anonymous Coward...)

It proved helpful to "clump" the powers. Into 1000x lumps. So 10^0 through 10^3 are shown together, 10^3 through 10^6, etc. Rather than having separate "Powers of Ten" pictures of 1, 10, 100, and 1000 meters, we can step off the page, and use the whole room. So standing in the "meter room", 1 meter people are 1 mm high ants, 10 meter buildings are 10 mm high, 100 meter skyscrapers are the size of 100 mm soda cans, and 1000 meter neighborhoods can fit on your desk top. The cost is things are less pretty - rather than consistently sized 10 cm pictures, one is now constrained to frequently inconvenient sizes. The classic reclining person is either life-size, or a millimeter high. The benefit is I can actually remember and use the sizes of things. The Earth is a blue marble, so it was ten to the seven meters. A largish marble, so between 1e7 and 2e7 meters. And it becomes much easier to compare sizes (the "meter room" building is the size of a soda can, so it's 1000x bigger than my real soda can, and 10^6 times bigger than my hair (which is also can-like -- pool "noodle" floats make a good model)).

You already have a feel for the rough size of things which you handle, things you can hold in your hands. Leveraging this, one can often get not only the order-of-magnitude size of something, but also a digit of precision (as with the 10 to 20 Megameters Earth estimate). Which makes this scheme great for doing Fermi problems! :)

So while there is a dusty copy of "Powers of Ten" on my bookshelf, on my wall is a 2 meter high, 12-point, Times-Roman "a". And there are a pile of pool noodle-float "hairs" against the door (100 mm x 1500 mm, so 100 micron by 1500 micron - so a few days growth). And I'm out of M&M red blood cells at the moment, but they make a good snack. And if someone says 30 mils, or 30 nanometers, or 30 light years, it means something concrete, visceral, and familiar.

I'm actually trying to export this concept using a web page,
How Big Are Things?.
It's a very rough draft. Comments would be most welcome.

- Mitchell N Charity
(Apparently "space aliens have infested the server", or this wouldn't be posted as Anonymous Coward...)

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

Some years ago, COSMIC VIEW: The Universe in 40 Jumps - by Kees Boeke was put online. It was the precursor of "Powers of Ten", and another of these half-century old classics - out of print, hard to find, but still well liked. There was interest in putting SCMG online as well, but the reprint was planned, so it didn't happen. This is a reoccurring situation.

Which raises some questions. If one wishes to maximize the number of people, around the world, exposed to some out-of-print book, is one better off with a reprinting, or with the work drifting towards the public domain? If reprinting costs drop, and more OOP books are reprinted, does this help or hurt us?

SCMG won't be PD for half a century.
A reprinting makes it more likely copyright will be enforced.
So is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

Interested in pulling out your scanner and that old book? Here is a sketch of Copyright duration (but IANALawyer). Within the US (other countries vary, and I don't know what that means for the web), if it was published before 1923, it's public domain - scan away. 1923 to 1963 is a mess. It may be PD - you have to ask the US Copyright Office. And apparently under GATT, foreign works can be un-PD'ed. With a copyright notice after 1963 - give up. 1964 to 1978, copyright lasts a century. After 1978, 3/4 century after the death of the last author standing. Maybe your grandchildren can scan it. Or great-grandchildren. Notice things are getting worse with time. Thank the entertainment industry ("thanks Disney!"), international trade agreements importing a European emphasis on author rights over public good, and the deep wisdom and intelligence of your congress critters. Perhaps there will be a backlash at some point...? :)