3 ms·

Consider arm sized, hand sized, fingernail sized, and pinched-fingers "tiny" sized. About 1000, 100, 10, 1 mm. Tray of cookies, hand-sized cookie, chocolate chi

Consider arm sized, hand sized, fingernail sized, and pinched-fingers "tiny" sized. About 1000, 100, 10, 1 mm. Tray of cookies, hand-sized cookie, chocolate chip, and tiny crumb - yum. Now zoom 1000x, taking tiny sized to arm sized, and they become 1000, 100, 10, 1 um. Call this microview, with microscopic microorganisms measured in micrometers. A grain of salt is sized like a cardboard box, a head hair like a hand-sized pole, your red blood cells like red M&M Minis candies, and bacteria like nonpareil sprinkles. Zoom 1000x a second time for nanoview, with nanotechnology and nanoscale nanoparticles measured in nanometers. Arm, hand, fingernail, tiny, are now 1000, 100, 10, 1 nm. Bacteria are garbage bags and benches, viruses are small sports balls, proteins are chewing gum, and atoms are sand. Beach world, with a grain of salt towering over the city skyline. Scale/size can seemingly be taught accessibly young... we just don't. Nor use size as an organizational frame to catalyze understanding of the physical world. Asking first-tier medical school graduate students how big red blood cells are... goes surprisingly poorly. But there seems lots of fun to be had.

Nick87633 5y ago
Feels like a good VR experience or magic school bus episode would help solidify this! Or maybe time for this adult to make some dioramas.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Let me know when you have the 1:1 µm-scale beach ball setup on the horizon! (I wonder what existing structures you could paint.)
- mncharity 5y ago
  Years back I was doing passthrough AR, and spiked a zoom to nanoview (atom beach and towering grain of salt; hardwired to a parking-lot view out my window). Was crude but fun. Intended to go to picoview, to demo a physically-realistic atom-bonding interactive, but it got put aside. Magic school bus uses "zoom you", rather than "zoom objects". Tradeoffs, but one advantage of "objects", especially for chunked-zooming and AR, is you retain your environment to use as a size reference. Eg, "the red blood cell is M&M sized, and a grain of salt is cardboard-box sized, therefore the table, room, and playground are...". Fwiw, my fuzzy recollection is someone wrote a simple VR zoomer in unity some years back. Re dioramas, you might find some inspiration from http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms (very slowwwwly loading page - wasn't intended to be public). I did outreach with a few 1 m diameter tables, each with assorted objects. Pool-noodle floats for hairs, Goodsell's molecular bio illustrations in nanoview, etc. Thought about how one might design a larger exhibit. But I never did manage to find a community interested in this kind of thing, aside from scattered folks at MIT and Harvard. Size/scale is occasionally taught done down towards primary, and is taught in most every science and engineering curriculum. But knowledge of size/scale is rarely then used to teach other things, so there's little incentive to teach it successfully. With "well, that shouldn't come as a surprise, but oh my, yipes" outcomes.
omnibrain 5y ago
There is a book from the 80ies/early 90ies "POWERS OF TEN: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe" by Philip & Phylis Morrison. That is exactly that.
- mkl 5y ago
  It was also a 1977 short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
  - euroderf 5y ago
    I suspect that Marshall McLuhan loved this film.
- mncharity 5y ago
  It's similar. There are several such continuous or 10x-stepped zooms, but a downside for education, is it's easy to lose context. Were viruses bigger or smaller than bacteria? Was Earth 10^6 or 10^7 m? Whereas, if you're asked say, how big is a glass of water, you're unlikely to say fingernail sized, or spread-arm sized - you've handled the item, and so now have a feel for how big they are. The 1000x chunking let's you leverage that. Once you've eaten red blood cell M&Ms, you know they are 10-ish..., err, ummm, not mm, not nm, so um. The Earth is a blue marble, so 10-ish..., err, mmm, not km, not Gm, so Mm. A downside of 1000x steps is objects can end up inconveniently sized. 2 um zooms as either 2 m or 2 mm, often inconveniently large/small. Different zooms are good for different things. The small toy car scaled nicely for making roads, vs the larger toy car with moving doors; the small doll scaled nicely for making rooms, vs the larger doll with brushable-not-painted hair. Here, the 1000x step zooms are good for remembering and interconnecting sizes, but for then playing, you'll often want some other zoom.
rnjesus 5y ago
for a neat visualization of this, https://www.htwins.net/scale2/ https://www.htwins.net/scale2/ — it’s a bit old now, so to view it on mobile the app is pretty much required. i can’t remember exactly what i paid for it on the app store, but i know it’s been worth the few dollars

Nick87633 5y ago

Feels like a good VR experience or magic school bus episode would help solidify this! Or maybe time for this adult to make some dioramas.

exikyut 5y ago
Let me know when you have the 1:1 µm-scale beach ball setup on the horizon! (I wonder what existing structures you could paint.)
mncharity 5y ago
Years back I was doing passthrough AR, and spiked a zoom to nanoview (atom beach and towering grain of salt; hardwired to a parking-lot view out my window). Was crude but fun. Intended to go to picoview, to demo a physically-realistic atom-bonding interactive, but it got put aside. Magic school bus uses "zoom you", rather than "zoom objects". Tradeoffs, but one advantage of "objects", especially for chunked-zooming and AR, is you retain your environment to use as a size reference. Eg, "the red blood cell is M&M sized, and a grain of salt is cardboard-box sized, therefore the table, room, and playground are...". Fwiw, my fuzzy recollection is someone wrote a simple VR zoomer in unity some years back. Re dioramas, you might find some inspiration from http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms (very slowwwwly loading page - wasn't intended to be public). I did outreach with a few 1 m diameter tables, each with assorted objects. Pool-noodle floats for hairs, Goodsell's molecular bio illustrations in nanoview, etc. Thought about how one might design a larger exhibit. But I never did manage to find a community interested in this kind of thing, aside from scattered folks at MIT and Harvard. Size/scale is occasionally taught done down towards primary, and is taught in most every science and engineering curriculum. But knowledge of size/scale is rarely then used to teach other things, so there's little incentive to teach it successfully. With "well, that shouldn't come as a surprise, but oh my, yipes" outcomes.

omnibrain 5y ago

There is a book from the 80ies/early 90ies "POWERS OF TEN: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe" by Philip & Phylis Morrison. That is exactly that.

mkl 5y ago
It was also a 1977 short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
- euroderf 5y ago
  I suspect that Marshall McLuhan loved this film.
mncharity 5y ago
It's similar. There are several such continuous or 10x-stepped zooms, but a downside for education, is it's easy to lose context. Were viruses bigger or smaller than bacteria? Was Earth 10^6 or 10^7 m? Whereas, if you're asked say, how big is a glass of water, you're unlikely to say fingernail sized, or spread-arm sized - you've handled the item, and so now have a feel for how big they are. The 1000x chunking let's you leverage that. Once you've eaten red blood cell M&Ms, you know they are 10-ish..., err, ummm, not mm, not nm, so um. The Earth is a blue marble, so 10-ish..., err, mmm, not km, not Gm, so Mm. A downside of 1000x steps is objects can end up inconveniently sized. 2 um zooms as either 2 m or 2 mm, often inconveniently large/small. Different zooms are good for different things. The small toy car scaled nicely for making roads, vs the larger toy car with moving doors; the small doll scaled nicely for making rooms, vs the larger doll with brushable-not-painted hair. Here, the 1000x step zooms are good for remembering and interconnecting sizes, but for then playing, you'll often want some other zoom.

rnjesus 5y ago

for a neat visualization of this, https://www.htwins.net/scale2/ https://www.htwins.net/scale2/ — it’s a bit old now, so to view it on mobile the app is pretty much required. i can’t remember exactly what i paid for it on the app store, but i know it’s been worth the few dollars