TM

 Symbolcraft

Mount Rainier can often be seen from many places in Seattle, and the two locations are about about 100 kilometers apart. This makes it a nice measuring stick to help Seattleites envision relative distances.

For example, if you could enlarge a one-centimeter-long ant so that its gaster (tail) extended over downtown Seattle and its antennae hung over Mount Rainier, a strand of ant DNA would be about two centimeters in diameter–about as wide as a US nickel. A hydrogen atom in that DNA strand would be roughly a quarter of a centimeter in diameter, or about as big as a pepper grain. A human red blood cell would be much larger, about as big in diameter as the length of two full-size cars end-to-end.

Going to the other extreme, if you shrunk the solar system so that it spanned the distance between Seattle and Mount Rainier (with the sun half-way between), then the sun would be 11.6 meters (about forty feet) in diameter, just a little bit smaller in diameter than the width of the Space Shuttle Mobile Launcher Platform. By contrast, Jupter would be about 116 cm (almost four feet) in diameter, and Earth would be almost 11 centimeters in diameter, or a little smaller than a softball. A trip from Earth to its moon would cover 3.16 meters (10 feet, four inches), but the nearest star outside the solar system would be much farther than Mount Rainier; in fact, the miniature astronauts have to go all the way past Rainier, out of the atmosphere and to the moon.

Zooming out even farther, if the Milky Way galaxy could span the distance between Seattle and Rainier, then our solar system would be somewhere near Burien. You’d have to look hard to find it, though, because our entire solar system (all the way out to the Termination Shock) would be only about 1.2 millimeters in diameter at that scale, about the size of a pin head.

If we zoom out again and compress the entire known universe to one Rainier distance from Seattle, then our Milky Way Galaxy would be 6.3 centimeters in diameter, or about as big around as a bracelet.

Published in 2004, this fun, fast-paced modern space opera is vast in scope. It tells the story of how a single human, Fassin Taak, begins to change an ancient balance of power between two galactic civilizations. The multi-billion-year-old galaxy-wide post-civilization of long-lived gas giant dwellers is rumored to own a secret vast network of wormholes, and the nearly galaxy-wide civilization of “quick” species (which includes humans) wants in on the secret. Seer Taak is a kind of emissary to (and explorer of) the Dwellers, and his mission is to find the key to their secret wormhole list in time to summon defenses for an impending invasion of his home world. His exciting adventure is filled with twists, turns, and interesting details about the Dweller world Nasqueron (where most of the action takes place).

Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my contribution to the interweb’s effort at locating Matt, who hasn’t posted a topic on Defective Yeti for an alarming nineteen days, I’m setting up a user-aided search tool similar to the one that unfortunately failed to find Steve Fossett. Instead of searching satellite photos of the desert, we’ll be searching through snapshots of board game stores. However, this is a low-budget effort, so I only have one photo so far (of First Pick Games on Stoneway in Seattle). If you spot Matt in the photo, let us know!

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody knows the old children’s rhyme “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

I haven’t met anyone who didn’t play that game as a child. Some people with OCD are unfortunately even driven to play that game continuously. So where does this desire come from?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a WordPress plugin author, you can reach a wider audience by providing translations of your plugin in languages other than English. For step-by-step instructions on how to do that, read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you speak a language other than English? If so, you might be able to solve a mystery. Read on to find out more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Web knows that it provides access to a huge amount of information, some of which is even accurate. However, despite the fact that you can learn much by reading, there are still some things that you can only grok through experience. After reading yet another article about the benefits of meditation, and realizing that I spend way too much time learning by reading newsfeeds and social news networking sites instead of by experiencing things directly, I decided it was time to experience meditation.

Read the rest of this entry »

A World War II bomber flies overhead. “Cool,” I think to myself. “That must be a clue.” I get out my digital camera in anticipation of another, and am shortly rewarded with a nice photo of a low-flying vintage bomber.

Read the rest of this entry »