The Scale of the Universe

This is a very clever little bit of flash put together by someone whom I have no idea who they are.   All I know is that the site was blocked at work.  I went in and nabbed the SWF file and I’m going to place it on my blog.  You still have to endure the Newgrounds logo to see the animation.

Use the keyboard to move left or right for a smoother experience.  The largest things in the Universe are mind boggling.  The really fascinating stuff is all of the tiny things that go into making the world around us.  You can see how small a neutrino is for instance; and why it passes unhindered through just about everything  (including entire planets!).

The music is very pleasant too.

How big is space?

Watch the video.  That is all.

I had a big write up on this but why bother?  The video is enough as it is!

We are all made of stars

I know Moby made that phrase popular but hearing that song yesterday just reminded me how awesome everything is.  I got out of my truck to pick our oldest up from school and felt the sun beating down on me.  I looked up and it hit me; this is an amazing place, our universe.

Which reminds me of an awesome miniseries I’m looking forward to in June.  A DiscoveryHD show called When we left Earth.  There is a great ad for it playing using Gimme Shelter from the Rolling Stones.  Can’t wait to see it.  I’ve seen many documentaries and they just don’t get old.  It’s not every day you send something as tall as an office building into outerspace.

When the heavy lift Ares V starts testing it’ll be about as tall as fully stacked Saturn V.  I can’t wait to see those bad boys go up, a guaranteed Earth trembling experience.

Brainy Smurf

I like science.  I love science.  It doesn’t make the world go ’round, it explains why the world goes ’round.  Without it we’d still be in caves.  We’re the only species to fully grasp it and it’s importance.  Even still we haven’t fully grasped everything and I think some things we won’t or some things weren’t meant to be grasped.

Things don’t exist unless observed.  So, we observe the universe.  Would it exist without us?  Is the universe alive and wanting to see what it looks like?  Are we the mirror the universe looks into?

Can we travel through time?  In Back to the Future, Marty McFly nearly erased his existence after disrupting his parents meeting.  In a real world scenario, since the future already exists, doesn’t that mean you basically can’t fail?  Think about it.  You go back in time to kill your Great Grandfather.  You get there and tell him he’s done for.  You pull the gun out and pull the trigger.  Jammed!  It won’t fire!  So you find a large blunt object and lunge at him, you trip and fall.  Every effort you make at his demise is thwarted by some…thing.  Well the trip sprained your ankle and bought time for him to call the police.  You, the crazed madman, gets carted away and your ancestor lives on.  You explain to him who you are and that you were only proving a science experiment.  He posts bail and you zip off to the future with your findings.

This randomness brought to you by the letter N for Nerd.
And the number 9 because it’s king of the single digit numbers.