Hacker News Comments on
Powers of Ten™ (1977)
Eames Office
·
Youtube
·
52
HN points
·
44
HN comments
- This course is unranked · view top recommended courses
Hacker News Stories and Comments
All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Powers of Ten was also a 1977 short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0(Duplicating my own comment from a few months ago.)
I assumed you linked "powers of ten"[1]
Homage to the original exploration of forty orders of magnitude, from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
It was also a 1977 short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ euroderfI suspect that Marshall McLuhan loved this film.
To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ last_one_inI watched that with my kids a couple of weeks ago. Definitely one of the inspirations. Also been listening to the "What If?" audiobook and Randall Monroe is never afraid to think about things like 80,000 gorillas.
Very cool! Reminds me of Powers of Ten: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ b__dI watch this at least once a year :)
> Several years later, in 1968, architect Charles Eames, along with his wife Ray, directed a "rough sketch" film of the same concept and finally completed the work (entitled the "Powers of Ten") with the assistance of Philip Morrison in 1977.The video they talk about here is available on Youtube and is still quite interesting, despite looking a bit dated now.
I really liked the Powers of Ten article / film / book originated within SA which certainly doesn't justify any current editorial choices, but is I hope a fun video for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
For any who haven't seen it, I also recommend Charles & Ray Eaemes' "Powers of Ten" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
That, and OP, reminded me of the Eames "Powers of 10" film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ aasasdA better way to enjoy that is with a soundtrack by Gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvG-jqGsWSk
This one is really driving home the scale of the solar system. Another amazing visualization of distances is the video "Powers of Ten" that goes to the largest and smallest distances. It was filmed in 1977 already but that only adds to its charme:
⬐ thangalinhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuYStar Size Comparison 3 is jaw-dropping. The reversal at the end is mesmerizing.
⬐ _MicroftThanks! It was not the video I had expected (there is a pretty popular one that is just comparing star sizes) but I enjoyed it very much. The reversal at the end has a bit too much spinning for my taste ;)
Thanks, I finally understand the beauty of A4. The rest reminds me of a video I watched in physics class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Nice screensaver!Reminds of the powers of 10 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Also check out "Powers of Ten" of you do not know it yet:
Thanks for posting this, haven't seen it before! Original author of the Zoomquilt here. Also noticeable is the Eames' movie Powers of Ten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 and a similar movie Cosmic Zoom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgfwCrKe_Fk. They are both from 1968 and both based on a childrens book about the relative size of things in the universe, to my knowledge the first implementations of an infinite zoom effect.
If you don't mind watching a nearly 50 year old video then I can recommend "Powers of Ten" [0], attempting to visualize the different scales on which things are happening in the universe we know of. It is a very short video, just 9 minutes long.
Seems like a nod to Charles and Ray Eames’s “Powers of Ten” video (1977) might also be in order?
⬐ 082349872349872Also Boeke's Cosmic View (1957).⬐ trimboMy thought exactly. Maybe they felt they couldn't credit the video without opening up to some sort of lawsuit?
Me too! (You might also appreciate the FX show "The Americans" that's set in that era and area. One of the kids on that show had the exact same Star Wars blanket as I did!)https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-STAR-WARS-Blanket-Throw-197...
The "Life in the Universe" exhibit was on the first floor of the West wing, from July 1, 1976 through March 1, 1979:
https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/life-universe-event-exhib-346...
It also featured the original "Powers of Ten" movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
And they had a cool interactive "Pick-a-Star" display that let you press buttons to select hypothetical planetary systems and extraterrestrial life forms:
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
Did you ever see the "Person to Person" Telephone Exhibit in the History and Technology museum? My mom was a docent at the Electricity Discovery Corner, right next to that. So we'd go to the museums every Saturday!
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_955
More photos of the "Life in the Universe" exhibit (it was cool and dark and really great place to hang out if you were stoned):
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smiths...
You might enjoy Wait But Why's Religion for the Nonreligious post [1]. It gave structure to the thoughts I had for a long time.I also say that my concept of God is explained in a Simpsons intro [2]. It is based on the Powers of Ten video [3], where the camera is looking down increasing its height exponentially. First at 1 meter, then 10, 100, 1000, and so on. By the end, after we pass by the planets, solar systems, galaxies, and on, we end up in Homer's bald head. In other words, we're all part of the same entity; just like the bacteria in our guts is part of us, we're part of what we call God. And Homer (aka God) is not alone, which fits nicely in the many universes theory.
Many religions came to this conclusion, but I'm yet to find a better way to explain it than that Simpsons intro.
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEuEx1jnt0M [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ fbhabbedInteresting to see how far we have become in knowledge of outer space and rendering capabilities as can be seen in more recent videos such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U
This video zooms out to 10^24 then in to 10^-16. Made in 1977, for IBM.
⬐ mncharityOne difficulty with continuous zooms, is you lose context. "Was Earth 10^6 or 10^7 meters?" "Are viruses bigger than bacteria, or smaller?"One alternative is to chunk the zoom. If I ask you, how big is a soda can, you're not going to wave your hands with a factor of 2 error - you've handled them, and have a feel for their size. Similarly, if you repeatedly hear stories at some scale, like 1000x, with cardboard box salt and M&M red blood cells, those sizes become familiar too. The first "How to remember sizes" section of my crufty page[1] has some illustrations (mostly clips from failed user-test videos).
[1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms Extremely crufty and slowwwwwwwly loading - it wasn't originally intended to be public.
> reminderTime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0
Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
It's like asking a 2 year old to count way... way past 10
⬐ amelius(They should make a similar movie about wealth distribution, going from someone who makes 1 dollar a month up until Jeff Bezos.)⬐ throway88989898⬐ aasasdMoney https://xkcd.com/980/⬐ hjk05Look up dollar street by the same people who made gap minder. It’s a wonderfully simple look into the differences in wealth and living, which shows you things like “favorite thing” filtered along an axis of wealth.A more modern soundtrack for ‘Powers of Ten’: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NvG-jqGsWSk⬐ air7> Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0Damn... I'm gonna ask that cute girl out.
⬐ TomMckenny>Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0Made in 1977 and we can already comfortably go two orders of magnitude larger. Not bad.
Wow, it's like the two extreme endpoints of "Powers of Ten".https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Those two transistors had better be hella good to justify the price difference.
⬐ nine_kThose transistors can drive 60V and 1A; hardly any controller can do such things. You might expect some special controller pins to drive e.g. 100 mA at 5V; more often, something like 20 mA at 3.3V.
It is, i remember being captivated by this film in the (mid? late?) 90s.. (from the late 70s, pieced together by hand). Never imagined it would be (partly) possible in realtime.. some 10 years later.(eagerly hanging out for orbit view milky way, but probably not in my lifetime)
⬐ lozfThanks for posting that - I was thinking about it the other day when I saw this[0] posted in another thread here. Great for sense of scale, but no "street view" in this one.
> You’re free to think about computation as acting on bits… but for those bits to do us any good, they have to actually represent something (e.g., data structures).I suspect this is a case of confusing epistemology with ontology.
Galaxies are ontologically composite in that they're the highest holonym in the supervenience hierarchy [0]. Atoms are ontologically fundamental in that they're the the lowest meronym in the supervenience heirarchy.
Galaxies are epistemically abstract in that the notion of galaxy is far removed from everyday experience. Atoms are also epistemically abstract in that the notion of atoms are also far removed from everyday experience. What's epistemically fundamental are the immediate objects of our everyday experience, like chairs and food. (My impression of Zen is that it advises to focus more on things like chairs and food [1].)
In the xkcd, which is more "fundamental", Math or Economics? Well, it depends. Likewise, what's more "fundamental", bits or ADT's? Well, it depends.
[0] powers of 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
[1] http://www.itsokblog.com/2011/01/wash-your-bowl-zen-of-mothe...
⬐ pronWell, in this case all models are quite abstract, and there's a very real computational complexity difference between them. The key, if I were to use your way of presenting the issue, is the recognition that some epistemological abstractions are more computationally costly than others. So it's true that you can choose either representation as a foundation, but the representations objectively and radically differ in their computational complexity.⬐ Double_CastThe key is to recognize how it's not just that TOP and TOC both measure X with different models. It's that TOP measures X while TOC measures Y.It's as if we claimed Spell Checking were as complex as Natural Language Processing because they were both called "linguistics". Yes, they both abstract over language. But the primitives of Spell Checking are glyphs while the primitives of NLP are morphemes. Glyphs don't exhibit the same patterns as morphemes. Which is why Spell Checking uses a Trie while NLP uses a Matrix. Debating whether glyphs or morphemes are "more fundamental" is a distraction.
Likewise, bits don't follow the same patterns as ADT's. Calling both the study of bits and the study of ADT's "Complexity Analysis" is misleading, which I believe is what Pressler was getting at. But we've put bits and ADT's in the same bucket for the entire history of computing, because the Church Turing thesis (i.e. anything a TM can do, lambdas can do too) lead us to believe Turing and Church were studying the same primitives.
⬐ pronWhat I was getting at in the article is that:1. TOC and TOP ask different questions.
2. The disparity of the computational complexity involved in the two classes of models is so great, that it is objective proof that they represent two distinctly different things, and therefore comparing them directly is meaningless. That a jet and a bicycle require vastly different amounts of energy to power is conclusive and objective proof that completely different tradeoffs must be involved in choosing them.
Pretty interesting, and pointed me to the "powers of 10" film visualizing changes in order of magnitude: http://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ coderholicAn amazing journey from the distant edges of the universe (10^24) right down to subatomic particles (10^-16). A great demonstration of orders of magnitude, and a reminder of how small a part of space (both big and small) we occupy."This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." - at 100 million light years
If you want to see their amazing film work (and they made quite a few cool films on computing thanks to IBM) take a look at this:https://www.youtube.com/user/EamesOffice
If you want to be inspired by an amazing product roll out take a look at their video for the SX 70 (this is one of the amazing products that Steve Jobs admired Edwin H. Land for):
If you're a fan of data visualization you MUST see The Powers of Ten if you've never seen it before:
⬐ icsThere is also a book for the exhibition A Computer Persective (http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/copernicus-exhibition/). It's on Google Books but unfortunately unreadable because most of the images are withheld.
The base of that goes back to a very simple realization: On a cosmic scale nothing that we do is of great importance. This planet likely is not as special as we would like to think it is and we are not as special as we like to think we are. We are to the universe as a single bacterium is to us.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.
⬐ sullyj3There's no such thing as importance independent of sentient minds. Importance is what we find important; or to put it another way, whatever we find important - is.⬐ marcosdumayI can just as easily extract the opposite conclusion, and say that we must be incredibly special if it took an universe that big to create us. And it's as good as a conclusion until we discover if intelligent is common or not.I'd side with it not being a good argument.
⬐ jrs235"We're significantly insignificant while also being insignificantly significant."⬐ sfilipovAnother humbling aspect is how fragile we are. Even today, there is a number of unpredictable cosmic events outside our control that can destroy humanity and life on Earth very quickly. And every one of us is just a "meat bag" that doesn't know whether it will wake up tomorrow. I find these realizations humbling. Some people get depressed by these thought but they make me appreciate life even more.
An alltime classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (Powers of Ten (1977))
⬐ jeffwassThanks for that. Saw it in high school many moons ago, just watched the whole thing again.⬐ adonovanIt shows its age. The straight white man is literally at the center of the universe.⬐ MaggieLSomebody has to be.⬐ socceroosYou're right, it should have been Cthullu.
I can't help it. Everything like this reminds me of Powers of Ten [1].
I always liked http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Obligatory IBM Powers of Ten (1977): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Have a look at 'Powers of Ten' by Ray & Charles Eames (1977) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
They made a movie in 1977 about just that:
More atoms starring in movies by IBM (1977):
Isn't that (loosing yourself in the grand scheme of things) the whole point of the animation ? A bit like Power of Ten [1] and Scale of the Universe [2] but with time instead of space.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 [2] http://www.htwins.net/scale2/
⬐ jlcxI don't know what tzaman was saying exactly, but what I noticed was that "today" got down to one or two pixels pretty fast, while the larger and larger time periods were restricted to only another ~1000 pixels or so, so at some point you have to shift back to imagining the relative lengths of time in your head again, instead of seeing e.g. "today" as 1/30 of the month.⬐ ScriptorI'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but for me the most striking point was when it circled back to today. It was a reminder that in that grand scheme of things, there's some stuff you do control. Now, time to get that stuff I was planning to do done.⬐ dvanduzerThe problem with this one is that you actually don't lose yourself. Today remains highlighted and continues to occupy a pixel or two. Even the millennium vanishes next to epochs to preserve our bookmark on today. It's jarring, and completely ruined the effect for me.
(Edit: I'm responding to each question in its own paragraph)What do you mean, 'infinite in dimension'? The universe has only 4 dimensions, 3 spatial, 1 in time.
Your question barely makes sense to me. Why do you need to invoke infinite speeds and times? If 2 particles stay in the same place, and do not interact with each other (gravitationally, electromagnetically, etc) then the distance between those 2 particles would increase over time, due to the expansion of the universe.
Yes, there is an infinite amount of matter in the universe [1]
Maybe. If you pick a random direction and travel really fast for a really long time, the chances of you running into any other matter is extremely remote. [2]
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ewt9y/good_analo...
⬐ gibersonI'm was not asking how many dimensions the universe has. I was asking if the universe is infinitely tall, infinitely wide and infinitely long.What do you mean, 'infinite in dimension'? The universe has only 4 dimensions, 3 spatial, 1 in time.Simply for matters of scale. I was trying to avoid considerations like "it's so big, it would take so long ...".Why do you need to invoke infinite speeds and times?Actually, it's one particle that moves, and other is stationary, thus providing two points of reference for determining a displacement. Specifically the intention was to indicate a path through space such that you always are moving further from where you started and will never arrive back at your starting point (as opposed to the spherical theory of space such that you can only go half way around the sphere until you start getting closer to the point at which you started.If 2 particles stay in the same place [...]I didn't mean physically collide with other matter, I simply meant to pass by it in the "vicinity". Similar to how traveling along a highway you pass by or through towns, you don't physically collide with them though. If matter in the universe was finite, then regardless of how sparse that matter is, there's an imaginary bounding box you could draw around all matter in the universe. A particle moving really fast for a long time would eventually end up outside of that bounding box. At which point its distance not just from the stationary particle at it's original, but all particles of matter would forever be increasing. However, if matter is in fact infinite, then such a scenario can not occur.If you pick a random direction and travel really fast for a really long time, the chances of you running into any other matter is extremely remote.Luckily, despite my questions barely making any sense, you've managed to provide in your reference [1] a comment that answers exactly my questions so thank you for that.
Reminds me of IBMs Powers of Ten video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Powers of Ten is a good way of visualising how large our universe is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
⬐ jamesbressiBrings a whole new visual (for me) to "As above, so below". Cool find, thanks.
A video which gives perspective of distance, in appreciable way. The powers of ten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0&feature=playe...
⬐ GrandMasterBirtCute. Does give a nice picture. Move decimal 13 places one way, you get a galaxy, another way you get an atom.