Originally published at: Exploring the universe through a piece of A4 paper | Boing Boing
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Everything everywhere is mostly nothing. Which is kind of comforting.
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“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
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Thank you for quoting THHGTTG for perspective!
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Right. So, can I have your liver?
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Nice, but i think that I prefer the music in the Eames version
also worth watching, en earlier version
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I get this exact lecture from Hal in office supplies every time I ask for a legal pad. It’s a lot.
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So, the Planck area is A275. Handy to know.
For our UK readers, absolute zero is gas mark 2^-30, as near as makes no difference.
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I think you mean total perspective:
“The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.”
“Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
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I stand corrected - sloppy me. Imbibing many times too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters (too many = one) can damage one’s ability to accurately recall and regurgitate various sections of The Guide.
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Understood 
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Of course when I was watching the film “Their Finest,” about screenwriters during WWII, I was trying to figure out whether they were using the correct foolscap papersize or A4. Because where I worked we had a problem with the occasional report on foolscap paper not fitting on our shelves.
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Wait, I have some of this paper in my desk. Should I be concerned?
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I was just about to post the Eames film. They did a great job… and w/o the paper gimmick.
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It’s a pity that Eames decided to drop the relativistic info. It illustrates that to the person moving, the speed of light doesn’t seem like a barrier. Constant acceleration always seems like constant acceleration, it’s just that the rest of the universe slows down.
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So love A4 paper!
Feels so elegant, will never go back to Letter…
No, dont make me!
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But how do you adjust it for a fan oven? Surely that means absolute zero is about 10-20 degrees C lower than that.
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The metric system is based on powers of ten, but the presentation is based on powers of two. The software engineer in me is delighted.
Now if we could just get hexadecimal into this somehow …
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