As I was scrolling through I started to notice a really nice, subtle star background pattern that wasn't moving. I thought that was a really nice touch.
And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust.
There's a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.
None of the ancestor comments are in the spirit of HN. They're much closer to the kind of comments found on Reddit.
See:
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial.
The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience."
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
to read the fun little text snippets. I like how it got fairly philosophical—everything eventually turns to philosophy if you are stranded out in space. Thanks for putting this together; it was a nice take on the perspective of our universe.
Thanks for that line of code. I liked the writing too. It would be nice if there was a compressed mode where you could see the statements and planets without scrolling through space but that would defeat the purpose of showing you the scale of the solar system.
If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, "Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else."
For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find Proxima Centauri.
However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way (between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Sedna and Voyager 1, to name a (non-exhaustive) few.
If we redid it with the solar system (diamater: 10bn km) as a single pixel then it would be 3,800 pixels to Proxima Centauri, 94m pixels to cross our galaxy and 2bn pixels to get to Andromeda, the nearest "major" galaxy at 2m light years away.
One of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe; does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our planetary system?
If so, that is much closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets (although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous relative to the distance to other planets in our system).
If moon = 1 px is your yardstick, then I can see not putting Voyager up there, but otherwise I'm with you. If you stick Pluto in at about 2/3 the size of the moon, no reason not to include Eris (about the same size as Pluto) and the half dozen or so other TNOs that are a half or more the size of Pluto.
No disrespect intended, but this is yet another example of the inverse correlation between grammatical knowledge and enthusiasm for pouncing on grammar mistakes.
In Standard English, this use of the subjunctive mood is optional, not required.
Descriptive linguistics doesn't mean "whatever anyone says is correct and it should go." This ain't 'nam, there are rules, and you can still run afoul of them. The basic tenet of descriptivism is that, as people who study linguistic patterns as a science, we can't make a value judgment about a certain set of rules or what a person "should use". However, I think it's generally accepted that we try to strive for some common set of agreed upon linguistic rules when trying to formally communicate on the Internet, and many would claim that the subjunctive mood would fall into that.
I saw a really good write-up about this before and wish I could find it :(
I speak British English and it's more a matter of register for me. If I'm writing something formal I'll use the subjunctive, if I'm talking to friends I'll just stick with the indicative.
If I saw someone write "it is necessary that he goes" in a paper it would stick out as strange to me, likewise if I heard someone say "it is necessary that he go" it would sound overly formal and a bit stilted.
So really, you can use either and be understood perfectly well. It only seems to annoy prescriptivists, and I would say one has a moral obligation to annoy prescriptivists anyway.
somewhere along the way when I was young I learned "were" and I almost wish I hadn't haha. here in the northeast/midatlantic the majority of people use "was". it's only a slight nuisance now :) and i'm not even a native speaker. can't imagine how english teachers and actual writers and such feel about it.
Use of the subjunctive mood is slowly declining, especially in the UK. We often smooth out the difference by inserting a "should" or "might". E.g. "It's important that you (should) be on time."
Quote: "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."
For a similar visualization of the human genome, and to get a sense of how vast that landscape is, check out this genome browser I made a couple years ago:
At the lowest zoom level, one pixel is 280,000 bp (roughly the length of one or two genes, including noncoding segments). You can zoom all the way into the individual base pairs (a, c, t, and g).
There is a track below the chromosome cartoon (cartogram) that shows you the genes if you pull down on its label.
I have previously wandered along the scale model of the solar system on the St Kilda beach in Melbourne. Yesterday I did the same with the scale model in Bonn. In both cases I only got as far as Uranus.
It was interesting along the way to verify Kepler's relationship between the orbital period and the distance. Saturn takes about 30 years to go around, and is about 30^(2/3) ~ 10 times the distance. Jupiter takes about 12 years to go around and is about 12^(2/3) ~ 5.2 the distance.
Standing by the plinth with the Earth and the Moon, looking back at the Sun, then forward to Mars, and not being able to see Jupiter really does give a true sense of the scale.
Not to diminish this effort, but getting out and walking the distances make a difference.
When I was a kid I wanted to make such a scale model. I think I calculated sizes with Earth = 1 inch, and the distances made the mind boggle. Using a pixel as a unit of measure was pure genius, it makes the model so much more manageable without detracting from the overall grand scale.
2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost?
3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.
3. Correct, and not knowing anything about the author I would venture that the reason is that he uses imperial in his everyday life, and thus it has been a concession to the wider world to do this in metric, for which I am grateful :-)
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 "imperial sucks" and "imperial is clearly inferior."
To me, I only see using imperial units as an advantage. As Americans, the metric system is already hammered into our heads in grammar school anyways. Some might see it as Americans being uninformed or accustomed to antiquated methods, but I see it as Americans being able to speak two languages (at least the Americans I'm most familiar with).
Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view, other than being able to communicate to other people who use the same system, at the cost of not being understood by everyone else?
(What I heard in the UK during the supermarket transition to metric a decade ago: imperial uses fractions, which is a useful to grasp for learning children, etc. But I'm surely misquoting so don't worry about this argument)
I am asking because I only come across the imperial system when watching Mythbusters or reading a book about the Space Shuttle, or someone tells me their weight in stones, which always leaves me rather puzzled.
This is just out of curiosity, I'm not trying to work anyone up.
> Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view, other than being able to communicate to other people who use the same system, at the cost of not being understood by everyone else?
What other advantage, you ask? Well, I'd say that there is none. I was merely trying to convey that being fluent in both imperial and metric is better than being fluent in only metric. As long as it doesn't hurt me (which imperial doesn't) the more skill-sets I have, the better!
I hope you better see where I'm coming from now. You didn't work me up though, and I also didn't mean to work anyone up either. :)
> Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view, other than being able to communicate to other people who use the same system, at the cost of not being understood by everyone else?
The metric system is 10 based, which makes it trivial to measure and convert: 1000mm = 100cm = 1m. This becomes even more important when you are talking about volume or any ^3 dimension.
I have lived in the US for 15 years and even today, I'm unable to convert fl oz. to any kind of mass measure without getting a headache along the way.
Since we're talking about astronomy, both imperial and metric units are "wrong" and domain specific units should be used instead.
Unit of length should be astronomical units (abbrev. au, formerly AU), the mean distance between earth and the sun. If talking about distances in stellar scale, it should be parsec ("parallax second"), the distance from which an 1 au object can be seen at 1 arc second apparent size (and sin x = x is assumed because x is small).
Unit of mass is usually solar masses. In some special cases earth masses or jupiter masses.
Unit of density is either number of atoms in m^3 or other big volume when talking about interstellar medium or kg/m^3 when talking about planets or stars.
Unit of time is usually measured in years.
When you use solar masses, years and astronomical units, Kepler's 3rd law is reduced to: (m1+m2)period^2 = semi-major-axis^3 and the gravitational constant G = 4 * pi^2 (and thus it's cancelled out from G(m1+m2) * P^2 = 4 * pi^2 * a^3).
I definitely would have liked to see the distance in astronomical units and a verbal description of the distance ie. (5 million kilometers, not 5000000 km). Humans are really bad at understanding big numbers, any means of helping to understand that would be useful.
"Imperial" in USA is actually not the same as "imperial" in the UK. There are slight differences between all units, but a significant difference with volume. A US gallon and a UK gallon are different by about 25%.
The US "imperial" vs UK "imerial" is why during WW2 the Allies (USA, UK, France etc.) used metric. Cause there's only one cenimeter. (Very important when you're making bullets)./
I think that most common infantry bullets in allied side were .30in (7.62mm) and .45in (11.43mm) and to some degree 9mm. So yes, to some extent you are right, but note that caliber is inch based
There is at least one reason for me that metric is vastly superior as a way to describe the world than the UK or US version of Imperial: the relationship between mass, volume and length is trivially easy to understand.
A small cube of 1cm represents 1cm³, which is also 1mL which is also 1g of water.
So a cube just 10cm across contains 1000cm³, or exactly 1 Litre and weighs exactly 1kg (of water).
It's easy to grasps and visually/physically see the relationship between these fundamental units.
Relationships to other fundamental units is also greatly simplified: the Newton is the mount of force needed to accelerate 1kg to 1m/s²; the Joule is the amount of energy needed to move 1kg by 1m or moving 1A through 1Ω, ...
Not all units are so cleanly expressed in terms of other units, but, at least for the everyday ones, the kg, Litre and metre, the relationship is easy to understand.
To me, Imperial measurements are confusing. It's even worse considering how food recipes are described in terms of cups (a unit of volume) rather than weight.
Getting a cup of dry pasta is not going to give me the same amount of pasta depending on the shape of the pasta I'm trying to cook. Try getting a cup of spaghetti.
> the relationship between mass, volume and length is trivially easy to understand.
Imperial units also have a simple relationship between mass and volume. In the US, a pint's a pound the world around, and in the world around the US, a pint of water is a pound and a quarter, and in some of those places that rhymes.
(One fluid ounce — either kind — of water weights approximately one ounce.)
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' for kilometres, but you're still left with either awkward decimal points or excessive syllables.
I am 'one point eight three metres' tall, or 'one hundred and eighty three centimetres'. Or I am 'six feet'. Guess which gets used most?
The curse of the metric is the endless tongue-twisters.
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.
But you wouldn't go down to a half-inch, and there is a shortcut - '5 foot 7'. I'm not referring to accurate measurements, but the sort of day-to-day, rounded off measurements that pepper our daily speech.
If I said a decimeter to any of my friends, they would have no idea what I was talking about.
> If I said a decimeter to any of my friends, they would have no idea what I was talking about.
Well, mine would - and any who didn't could easily figure it out. If you're willing to memorize all the random names the imperial units have, you can afford to remember "deci".
Funny. It feels like an adventure game, it illustrates a point, and it's just a static page. I even checked, it works perfectly fine without JavaScript. Great example of what can be achieved with good design. I can't help to mentally contrast this with what people call "web apps" these days that use extremely complicated client-side code to communicate far less interesting things, and often do it badly anyway.
I remember Bill Nye doing this in one episode. He had the earth as a golf ball, I think? He was running around a soccer field showing the planets. And he drove miles away to show where Pluto would be.
But this should not use the subjunctive, because he has indeed drawn an image using the scale of the Moon being one pixel wide. This shows it's possible, and hence the subjunctive is inappropriate.
That's not really correct. Even if we assume that this is no longer a hypothetical/counterfactual case, then the correct grammar is to use the present tense ("This is the moon as one pixel"). But, in this case, it still is counterfactual. This is really short for "If the moon were only [the size of] a single pixel", a statement which we know is not correct.
You're probably confusing this with the rule surrounding verifiable facts (ie, "I asked John if he was happy").
Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to
express various states of unreality such as wish,
emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity,
or action that has not yet occurred.
The action has occurred, it is not an unreality. It seems to me that using the subjunctive would be inappropriate.
And yes, perhaps using the present tense would be more appropriate. Certainly I would have used something like:
The solar system plotted on a scale where the Moon is one pixel.
My comment still stands - the subjunctive is inappropriate. Saying it should be still something else does not make that less true.
<Shrug /> It's the interwebs, people will write what they like, and declare that nothing is right, and nothing is wrong, it's all OK. In that case telling someone to use the subjunctive seems doubly inappropriate.
English is not my native language, but using "was" sounds pretty weird to me. In latin languages, when a sentence starts with "if" and the verb is in a past tense form, it must be the subjunctive form of the past tense. I remember in primary school they teach the past of the subjunctive with "if" before all the pronouns. Don't know how they teach the past of the subjunctive in English though.
Nice presentation, but the need to stop and read the text breaks the experience. It can be improved so that text could fly alongside the viewer for some time. I.e. so one wouldn't have to stop the flight to read it.
Anybody 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.
I've always felt that way, thanks to the voyagers (37 years and the two little unmanned projectiles have managed to move 16 light hours). My dad always tried to tell me we're just waiting for the next scientific breakthrough. Either way, I think we desperately need to take care of earth; I can't think of an analogy but the earlier we move to take care of earth, the greater the extension to the time we have.
Things have evolved in the meantime and I think with current technology newer unmanned projectiles can be sent to surpass the 37-year old unmanned spacecraft, if that would be a goal. To take those "16 light hours" as a benchmark is not fair.
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.
This has the same effect on me as writing out all the zeros in larger numbers, rather than in scientific notation, and then zooming in to see only about 3 zeros at the same time and asking me to scroll through them.
Even without the horrible "zoom in", the size loses meaning and I can't tell how big it is, because humans think in logarithmic scales. I can't really estimate the difference in size by glancing at the number of zeros written out for 10^27 or 10^80 (maybe unless they were above and below each other, and then I would say it's between 2 and 3 times difference in orders of magnitude... again logarithmic thinking!). One is the number of atoms in the human body, the other is the number of atoms in the observable universe, so the difference really can't be appreciated by glancing at the number of zeros.
Given me logarithmic scales for comparing and estimating sizes any day.
I found this really helpful insofar as grasping orders of magnitude of big numbers:
1 thousand seconds is 16.7 minutes
1 million seconds is 11.6 days
1 billion seconds is 31.6 years
In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much more.
> In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much more.
Another way to think about these scaling ratios is to realize that a billion is a thousand times larger than a million.
I found this to be a peaceful late-night experience. I put the window to fullscreen to avoid all other distractions, rotated my Magic Mouse 90º, and just smooth scrolled through the story. Really nice.
".. we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real. The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying"
Abstraction is where our imagination lights up, where we make art and fall in love and build things. These empty spaces, it's where we find that these brains that evolved to escape Jaguars and find food, are actually pretty amazing in themselves.
http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/
More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)
Nicely done! I've always wanted to build something like this, and have never gotten around to it. I can't imagine it would have ended up as good as this.
Neat comparison. But it would be nice if there was something on the initial screen that suggested scrolling. I just thought that a black page locked Safari.
I made it about halfway past Saturn before I gave up scrolling. Nice work.
One comment: If you're using km for the distance units, you might as well stick with it (metric) for all the other examples like 75 mi/hr and 475 ft to be more consistent. Better yet, an option to switch the units between imperial and metric would be pretty cool.
There is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty much the entire city.
It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.
I've heard of at least one in the northeast US. It stretches for some distance along a highway, IIRC. A local water tower was painted as the Sun, and the planets and distances are scaled accordingly.
"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"
This really drives home to me how frustrating it is that Chrome has gotten rid of the OS scrollbar widget on Windows and replaced it with some non-native thing. It's one of several annoyances that are making me think of going back to IE.
I tried to use the scrollbar to scroll but I never landed on anything but empty space. While it did perfectly show off the vastness and emptiness of the universe, it probably was not the intended result.
It'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.
Are 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.
I kind of felt that the slowness of using the right arrow to scroll was kind of the point. Even holding it down, you're moving significantly faster than light. And it still takes an age to get anywhere.
Yep it doesn't. So actually, on chrome, without an autoscroll extension, there is no way to scroll that page (apart from the with the right cursor button, which is way to slow to actually be valid) on a normal desktop pc. Happy new world.
Using a trackpad would mean I'm hunched over my laptop trying to destroy my back and neck further than I already have. Designing websites specifically for anti-ergonomic use cases is unwise.
Designing for one thing that's really good in a world of things that are average, isn't the best strategy. Reminds me of "Designed for IE6" and look where that got us.
I think that is Apple's mistake. I have to go into settings and turn the two finger pref/next pages to three, three finger spaces swipe to four just to avoid the problem you described.
And why the hell don't they enable "tab to all controls" by default?
It is actually far too fast, several times the speed of light. If you really wanted to realize how vast and empty space is, you should make it scroll slower.
I think sticking to the speed of light for scrolling transitions would put things even more into perspective (though make the content a little harder to reach haha).
shift + scroll wheel works okay, but really, it should have been scrolling vertically. horizontal scrolling doesn't really add anything to the site but inconvenience for the viewer.
I had to come read the comments to figure out why I was just seeing a black screen that wasn't scrollable. Sideways scrolling? Really? There's a reason no one uses it.
I feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else the map gets even larger.
To wrap my mind around it, I try to imagine astronomical objects as everyday objects. For example, if Sun was a base-ball in my hand, the earth would be a mote of dust some throwable distance away. My favorite one is: if Sun was the size of a grain of sand, the nearest start would be another grain of sand 30 kms away!
And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust.
There's a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.