Perspective
So as I’ve mentioned on here, I’m going through all my old blog posts one by one, recording information about them in an Excel spreadsheet, and fixing my “category” tags, as I have added a few more that seem appropriate additions to the 35 original categories I had (for example, I’ve added a “walking” category so that I can move all my walking-related posts out of the “health” category).
I’m currently in the middle of my Year 4, which corresponds to October 2009. What was I doing in October 2009? Starting grad school at UBC.
This made me realize something. My first round of undergrad took up only the first 3.5 years of my nearly 20 years of blogging. That is an incredibly short amount of time. In my head, I always think of that first round of undergrad as being a very significant portion of my life time-wise – probably because of all the stuff that happened during it – but at this stage of my life, it really was just a small blip.
Which is weird to think about.
Like, I’ve been living in Calgary for over 10 years now and that seems like a shorter amount of time than Undergrad Round I.
It’s weird how our brains frame things like that, isn’t it?
Do you have a period in your life that feels like it lasted a lot longer than it actually did?
TWSB: Hydrogen: Putting the ‘H’ in “Holy Crap, the Universe is So Empty”
Crap!
So I found this page the other day and bookmarked it for a TWSB post…the page was a demonstration of how ‘empty’ we all are at the atomic level. On the current replacement page, the author states, “The page had a picture of a proton that was one thousand pixels wide, and a little electron that was only one pixel wide, and they were separated by fifty million pixels of empty space – I worked it out that that was eleven miles if your monitor displayed 72 pixels per inch, not uncommon at the time. You could try to scroll between them and it would take a long time. It was kind of neat.”
It was neat. But because of browser issues and issues surrounding the model of the atom the author used (he used the model Bohr developed), he took down the page.
In its place, though, he offers a similar study of scale and emptiness: the solar system.
To me, his atomic demonstration is more powerful since its fascinating how “solid” beings such as ourselves are composed of so much space, but the solar system demo is pretty snazzy, too.
Related: I’m assuming some of you Moscow people who stumble across this have taken the Moscow-Pullman trail…have you seen the little solar system distance exercise set up by a bunch of elementary school kids? It’s pretty cool. Pay attention at the head of the Moscow end of the trail to see the pics.
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