In case of power outage

In the EECS building on the Berkeley campus...

Am I fascinated by scale because I'm a Libra?

One of the greatest gifts given us by mathematics is a language for scale. It's how we know that 1,000 is different from 1, which is in turn different from 0.1.

One of my earlier memories is of attending this captivating exhibit on the limits of scale as understood thirty years ago. Those extremities have not been pushed back much further since then. Amusingly, it was only last year that I found out that it was produced by one of the most significant design houses of post-WWII America.

Someone (sadly uncredited, working for Nikon) has created an interactive work with the same lessons. Everyone should learn what's out there, what's up there, what's in there, and where we live in it all.

Continuous and discrete

This photo is more than two years old. You can tell because in spite of the huge grin on my face, the crow's feet near my eyes are still relatively small.



Thanks to C. Dewey for finally getting around to making these public.



And in case you were wondering: Yes. Yes we do.