December 01, 2005

OW! MY BRAIN!

filed under: Stuff you never, ever needed to know

From the ProcrastiMom comes this brain-sprainer - a java applet that shows a view of the Milky Way from 10 million lightyears away (10 to the 23rd meters), then gets closer by an order of magnitude with each slide (10 to the 22nd meters, etc.) until it's face to face, real-size, with a leaf on a tree outside the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida.

Then it continues into negative orders of magnitude, going into the leaf's cells, then the nucleus of one leaf cell, then the genetic material, and finally to the quarks that make up one proton of the carbon atom's nucleus.

Ow! Ow ow ow!

After the slide show, you can use the arrows to go back and forth in scale, from this:

scalelightyears.jpg

to this:

scalefemto.jpg

(Actually, you can go two orders of magnitude smaller than that, but it makes a boring picture out of context)

Go check it out, but prepare to spend several minutes going "Dude... whoa, dude..."

And, as far as I know, my mom's not even a stoner...

Posted by rjt at December 1, 2005 12:45 PM
Comments

the simpsons did an opening that was similar, the molecule was in homer's head. cut to his reaction: "whoah".

ep. aied 3/5/05, if you're bitorrenting.

be sure to take the tyke to natural history museum, they do something similar with orders of magnitude on the ramp around the planetarium.

i am an order of magnitude.

this ends my short period of procrastination. if any actual work had been done during this time, the useless information you heard would have been followed by detailed instructions on how to do something related to nyc theatregoing. this has only been a procrastination.

Posted by: frydry at December 1, 2005 03:18 PM

I cannot speak to whether or not the lady is a stoner, but I was reminded of an August night spent with ProcrastiMom at the side stage of the WARPED tour, and John Popper had come out into the crowd after his set and he had this wicked Peyote. He called it Vitamin Christ, and we all took several hits. Next thing I remember, we're on the roof of the tour bus waving sticks and branches at each other reciting MacBeth from memory, and Procrastimom cracks everyone up when she asks "who gets to be Bilbo?" Popper wet his pants (again) and we all retreated to a local Denny's for hash browns and a 4 hour conversation about God.
Maybe she wasn't there. Hmmm. Who WAS Bilbo?

Posted by: PERJ at December 2, 2005 01:35 AM

No, no--someone else asked about Bilbo. I was, of course, reciting most of MacBeth (I'd reached the "Out, out damned spot..." monologue that someone thought referred to some else's pants...?) Perhaps your confusion about whether I really was there or not has to do with the fact that it was only my nonmaterial self...she doesn't eat hash browns.

Posted by: Procrastimom at December 2, 2005 11:14 AM

Oh noes! My momz just laid the stonerhumor smackdown on Peeeeeejaaaaaayyy....

Posted by: rjt at December 2, 2005 07:45 PM