Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Things I didn't know I wanted:

A tape measure calibrated in yottameters.

Just in case I needed to measure any, you know, universes or anything.



(The latter link connects to the coolest thing I have seen on the internets since TV Tropes. Thanks, Matt!)

10 comments:

Bram said...

Okay, that is damn cool.

Anonymous said...

Heady stuff. Bravo.

Chalkie said...

Minor point, we can actually see more than 14 billion light years away (more distance than you would expect given the age of things). I don't fully understand it, but people smarter than me say it's due to expansion.

This comic sort of describes it. http://xkcd.com/482/

Matt G said...

Yeah, but Chalkie, due to the Expanding Universe, things are 'way beyond what we can see, even if we were at the center of the 'Verse. Which we are not.

Tam said...

That'll be house arrest for you, then, Mr. Gallileo. ;)

Divemedic said...

Even cooler was the difference between the small side of the scale was larger than the difference between a meter and the top end.

Tam said...

Yup.

One of the hardest things to wrap my head around is that "solid" matter has not all that much more "stuff" in it than does empty vacuum...

Anonymous said...

I wonder how they came up with 50nm for UV? Odd.

All kinds of neat-o, that aside.

Jim

OrangeNeck said...

I have a theory that the only thing faster than the speed of light is the expansion rate of the universe, or else light would pass beyond it, which would mean there was something else beyond the confines of our universe, and that would mean that our universe is bigger than estimated, or there's an adjoining universe. But if there was an adjoining universe, would the light from that universe reach us and what would it look like? If not, what happens to light escapes our universe's confines if it isn't traveling faster than the speed of light? Oh, my head hurts...

Ed Foster said...

And, surfing out from it lead to Roy Batty's final words, which I hadn't heard since I saw the movie way back then.

"I've seen things you peole would never believe....".

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain".