6 things that give me a crushing sense of scale
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The Photography of Chris Jordan.
Chris Jordan takes very, very big numbers and represents them in photographs. Here’s one that he made with folded prison uniforms standing in for Americans in prison. More on his official site.
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The 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century.
I found this page by accident several years ago. I end up going back to it when discussions about who’s the worst mass murdered in history come up. The section at the end with the pattern in per-capita killings? Chilling.
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The Slow Rise of the Oceans.
Apparently, even if all of the polar ice were to melt today, it would take up to 50 years for that water circulate throughout the world. The planet is so big, and the ocean currents are so powerful, that the water will remain trapped in a kind of slowly dispersing bulge of fluid.
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The Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste.
This is something that I want to come back to in some detail as a design problem. For now, take a look at this proposed monument to warn people away from the waste site (wherever it ends up). The waste is going to be dangerous for at least 10,000 years. This is the approximate length of recorded human history. How do you communicate a warning forward to people who will be at least as different from us as we are from the Babylonians?
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That We’re Currently in an Ice Age.
This is an interglacial period, a time of relative warmth in the midst of an ice age which is 2-3 million years old. During the past 400,000 years, warm periods like ours have tended to last 10,000 to 30,000 years. The cold has tended to last much longer. Our current (geologically brief) warm period has been happening for about 11,000 years – again, roughly the length of human history.
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This Video.
Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.
