Where You Fit in the Universe

Philosophical and religious concerns notwithstanding, there is always the straightforward aspect of size. How big are you, compared to, say a Planck (incredibly small) or the entire universe (unimaginably large). Now, there's a quick way to find out--online, of course.

Go here and you can start with the familiar: dodo birds and beachballs, and work your way to planets at the large end and to quarks and their ilk on the other. Click on any object to learn more about it. It's all about The Scale of the Universe.

Have fun.

Google Body Exposes Everything

I just found out about a great site for studying the human body--Google Body. You may remember textbooks in biology class that showed what we look like under our skin, but this site is interactive.

Similar to the car-configuration sites from the auto manufacturers, you select the item (in this case, a generic looking man or woman), and then you can turn them, resize them, and finally--skin them! See layers of muscle, bone, the circulatory system, nerves, the brain stem. You can see each of these in its own layers or as one big show depending on which slider you select.

The only thing is, you can't view it in Internet Explorer--you need to use Google Chrome or Firefox or something else.

It's always felt strange to me that all that complex material was invisible inside me--and that it works so automatically, and so far, pretty reliably. Lucky they don't show an old, worn out body--a real person -- with the quantities of fat that are inside most of us, too. These are ideal specimens here.

Check it out!