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> Proper scale makes the visualization impractical.

So lie?

You can see from the comments most Hacker News users can't handle the abstraction.

Your blog post is great, but most people don't know the Earth is a perfect sphere or simple things like the sun is white, the real "Don't Look Up"

Universities have become pop culture, they are Gravity (2013), not 'science', whatever that word means now.

We cross mountains so that abstraction has a use, here it is for the nihilist crowd.



> So lie? Any 'visualisation' is a 'lie'.

If you look at google maps you'd think the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 3 inch (depending on your zoom factor).

If you manage to grasp that abstraction, you might think the roads are about 5 miles wide.

etc etc.

where to draw the line.


> If you look at google maps you'd think the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 3 inch (depending on your zoom factor)

But not twice the distance between Sacremento and San Jose.


> Your blog post is great, but most people don't know the Earth is a perfect sphere

Typo? The Earth is a an oblate spheroid, slighly flattened out at the poles and wider at the equator.


> So lie?

You're going to enjoy the log scale




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