Lemmyversers, I’m looking for some help developing a new mnemonic device.
Inspired by a video by Epic Spaceman, where he explains a handy system for comparing the size of things from a banana to an atom, I’ve come up with a mnemonic device to aid in remembering these scales.
He lists items, each smaller than the previous by a factor of 10:
It goes:
- Banana
- Coin
- Edge of the coin
- Waterbear/microorganism
- Red blood cell
- Bacteria
- “Good virus”/Bacteriophage
- Corona Virus/“Bad Virus”
- DNA
- Atom
So a coin is roughly 1/10 a banana, and the edge of that coin is roughly 1/10 the size if that coin.
It gives good references for thinking about other things if similar size. A sort of banana for scale at each factor of 10.
And allows you to quickly determine approximations like Covid is roughly 1000 times smaller than a red blood cell. Or an atom is roughly 1 billion times smaller than a banana. (That doesn’t sound right. Is that actually right?)
Do you think that’s a useful memory tool? And are these best touchstones for scale at each level?
The mnemonic I’ve come up with for it as you may have guessed, is:
- Be
- Cool
- Even
- When
- Really
- Big
- Goblins
- Casually
- Drop
- Acid
Do you have any better ideas or tweaks you"d recommend for the mnemonic or the touchstones?
Would this be helpful when trying to wrap your head around the scale of the micro?
Also, what would make for a good macro version of this? Where everything got bigger by a factor of 10?
A water bear being 1/10th of the edge of a coin doesn’t seem right, that’d be like 0.2mm and probably still visible. Did you miss a stage?
edit I’m totally wrong, apparently they can be up to 0.5mm. Crazy. Althought they’re much smaller when young
I had that same thought. Water bears are visible to the naked eye?! I had no idea.
.2 mm is pretty darn small. Also, keep in mind that they are mostly transparent.
Anybody else old enough that they immediately think of Charles and Ray Eames when powers of ten come up?
