Slimming for the Beach

Briefly fol­low­ing up on the last post, A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe:

The New Size of Our World
This is a graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how small our beau­ti­ful earth really is.

I wrote this in the title poem of my last book, Dia­logue in Fad­ing Light:

Our sun is many times the size of the earth,
and red giants like Bel­tegeuse dwarf the sun,
and for all I know Bel­tegeuse is a mote
in the scale of Cre­ation. Yet we belong.

The New Size of Our World shows the extent to which Bel­tegeuse is a mote in the scale of cre­ation. It’s a short, lovely sequence (with sound­track), so watch it a few times to grasp it.

Now, if only some­one could do a sim­i­lar graph­i­cal con­pari­son on what pre­oc­cu­pies us in the west­ern world — or indeed, on planet Earth.

Mean­while, again from the pre­vi­ous post, Spar­ti­cus O’Neal leaves a com­ment about what appears to be a must-have book, A Beginner’s Guide to the Uni­verse
This is from the Parabola review:

Math­e­mati­cian and edu­ca­tor Michael Schnei­der bemoans the fact that “chil­dren are exposed to num­ber as quan­ti­ties instead of qual­i­ties and char­ac­ters with dis­tinct per­son­al­i­ties relat­ing to each other in var­i­ous pat­terns.” Instead of open­ing up our per­cep­tion to the under­ly­ing struc­ture and beauty of the world, the edu­ca­tional sys­tem dead­ens us to “the spir­i­tual qual­i­ties of num­ber and shape by empha­siz­ing brute quantity.”

As some­one who is hope­less at maths as I was taught it, but loves math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els, I iden­tify strongly with that obser­va­tion.
Ama­zon
quite clev­erly pairs A Beginner’s Guide to the Uni­verse with a book on Sacred Geom­e­try. One could do worse than read all about it on a winter’s night.