Pickles by Brian Crane for January 05, 2021

  1. Coyote
    eromlig  almost 4 years ago

    They’ve been there a long, long time, too.

     •  Reply
  2. B986e866 14d0 4607 bdb4 5d76d7b56ddb
    Templo S.U.D.  almost 4 years ago

    yeah, who knew Earl was such an astronomer?

     •  Reply
  3. P1010004
    KA7DRE Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    Well he ain’t no Neil Degrasse Tyson, that’s for sure.

     •  Reply
  4. 20150712 095628
    LookingGlass Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    As the saying goes, “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your ……..!”

    ;-)

     •  Reply
  5. Nc201206
    some idiot from R'lyeh Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    Carl Sagan got famous with not a lot more specificity.

     •  Reply
  6. Picture
    DavidWilliams1  almost 4 years ago

    The national mall has a scale model of the solar system. The sun is a basketball at the Capitol. Jupiter is a golf ball at the Smithsonian Castle. On this scale the nearest star is in California.

     •  Reply
  7. Picture
    Breadboard  almost 4 years ago

    Nelson …. Earl … Enjoy the moment of “Star” bonding ! The only cost is your time together :-)

     •  Reply
  8. Mrpeabodyboysherman
    iggyman  almost 4 years ago

    At a local jogging trail there is a depiction of the planets and are spaced in scale from how far each one is from one another and from the earth, very interesting!

     •  Reply
  9. Fb img 1516982044221
    jagedlo  almost 4 years ago

    If you enjoy a nice walk along Corpus Christi Bay, there’s the “Voyage”, which has the sun and solar system (http://voyagesolarsystem.org/community-network/corpus-christi-texas-voyage-mark-i/)

     •  Reply
  10. Oldwolfcookoff
    The Old Wolf  almost 4 years ago

    Explain to me about Laniakea, Grandpa!

     •  Reply
  11. Missing large
    f_murphy  almost 4 years ago

    So here is the question: When you look up do you see more stars and or more galaxies?

     •  Reply
  12. Mrpeabodyboysherman
    iggyman  almost 4 years ago

    Yes Nelson, in the 60s I watched a lot of Star Trek!

     •  Reply
  13. 101718piglet
    joe piglet Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    Stop talking, Lucy is trying to count them.

     •  Reply
  14. 200px the green dragon sign
    Ralph Newbill  almost 4 years ago

    There are biiiiillions and biiiiillions and….

     •  Reply
  15. Missing large
    1953Baby  almost 4 years ago

    I don’t think Neil de Grasse Tyson has anything to worry about. . .astronomy I can pretty much understand while I listen/read. Physics, on the other hand. . .

     •  Reply
  16. Little b
    Dani Rice  almost 4 years ago

    I once got into a battle of “Wits” with a gal who told me the earth was flat, and covered with a dome. The stars are NOT far away; they are quite close, but twinkle because we are looking at them through both the dome, and the water that covers the dome. I was amazed that she knew so much . . .

     •  Reply
  17. Coexist
    Bookworm  almost 4 years ago

    Several reasons Astronomy is the superior choice for a college lab-science course: 1. No pickled dead animals to be handled, smelled, and (in the hands of the average college freshman) mutilated. 2. No smelly, potentially explosive chemicals, open flames, caustic acids to be exposed to or handled (especially important if you’re somewhat accident prone, such as I am – I once took out a corner and a bank of windows in my high school chemistry lab; no injuries or fatalities but the smoke lingered for days). 3. Staying up late at night to observe, locate, and identify the stars. 4. The labs are mostly math calculations (not a necessarily a plus for those like me who are numbers-challenged but doable) and you’re allowed calculators (and in my day, the “calculator” was a slide-rule).

     •  Reply
  18. Missing large
    trainnut1956  almost 4 years ago

    Well, Dr. Tyson had to start somewhere. He probably did start with Lots and Lots Far Away…

     •  Reply
  19. Photo 1501706362039 c06b2d715385
    Zebrastripes  almost 4 years ago

    Earl should buy Nelson a telescope and they can both learn together….lol

     •  Reply
  20. Dd523a5d6e8bd3838bdffadf19b6652f
    leopoldenoch  almost 4 years ago

    actually, the earth is flat

     •  Reply
  21. Can flag
    Alberta Oil Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    The wisdom of the aged.. and Earl has more than his share

     •  Reply
  22. Image
    MuddyUSA  Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    Grandpa’s made things simpler for grand kids.

     •  Reply
  23. Gc icon khj
    khjalmarj  almost 4 years ago

    I think he needs one more “lots” and two more “longs.” I’ll leave the math as an exercise for the student.

     •  Reply
  24. Img 20201123 201142
    Mando  almost 4 years ago

    supguys!

     •  Reply
  25. Roundel of sweden.svg
    rhpii  almost 4 years ago

    Back in the 1970’s I took a college astronomy course from Dr. James Van Allen of the Van Allen Belt fame. Who knew that there was so much chemistry and math involved in looking at the stars and planets? That turned out to be a tough elective for this liberal arts – History major.

     •  Reply
  26. Picture
    StevePappas  almost 4 years ago

    Earl speaks the truth.

     •  Reply
  27. Picture
    ForrestOverin  almost 4 years ago

    “That’s right, Nelson, I’m an expert in astronomy. For my doctoral thesis I wrote ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’…”

     •  Reply
  28. Wb
    mwksix  almost 4 years ago

    Billllllllllllllllions and billlllllllllllllllions of them… (apologies to Carl Sagan)

     •  Reply
  29. Img 20240924 104124950 2
    David Huie Green LoveJoyAndPeace  almost 4 years ago

    “…so far away that some of the light we see now has been traveling thousands of years to get here now.”

     •  Reply
  30. Kirby close up with poppies behind   close cropped
    mistercatworks  almost 4 years ago

    Originally the word “google” was invented by an astronomer to handle the vast distances between stars. It is a “1” followed by one hundred zeroes. It wasn’t big enough. Someone else had to invent the “googleplex”, which is a “1” followed by a google zeroes.

     •  Reply
  31. Nowyoulisten
    zeexenon  almost 4 years ago

    The universe is big, really big. Deep Space 1 would take over 81,000 years to traverse the 4.24 light-years between Earth and Proxima Centauri.

     •  Reply
  32. Missing large
    briangj2  almost 4 years ago

    Googol (not Google):

    The term was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. Other names for googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.

    A googol has no special significance in mathematics. However, it is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. Kasner used it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics. To give a sense of how big a googol really is, the mass of an electron, just under 10−30 kg, can be compared to the mass of the visible universe, estimated at between 1050 and 1060 kg. It is a ratio in the order of about 1080 to 1090, or at most one ten-billionth of a googol (0.00000001% of a googol).

    Googolplex:

    In 1920, Edward Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol, which is 10^100, then proposed the further term googolplex to be “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired”. Kasner decided to adopt a more formal definition because “different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance and could write for longer”. It thus became standardized to 10^10^100.

    (Continued)

     •  Reply
  33. Missing large
    briangj2  almost 4 years ago

    (Concluded)

    A typical book can be printed with 106 zeros (around 400 pages with 50 lines per page and 50 zeros per line). Therefore, it requires 1094 such books to print all the zeros of a googolplex (that is, printing a googol zeros). If each book had a mass of 100 grams, all of them would have a total mass of 1093 kilograms. In comparison, Earth’s mass is 5.972 × 1024 kilograms, the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated at 2.5 × 1042 kilograms, and the mass of matter in the observable universe is estimated at 1.5 × 1053 kg.

    To put this in perspective, the mass of all such books required to write out a googolplex would be vastly greater than the masses of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies combined (by a factor of roughly 2.0 × 1050), and greater than the mass of the observable universe by a factor of roughly 7 × 1039.

    In pure mathematics, there are several notational methods for representing large numbers by which the magnitude of a googolplex could be represented, such as tetration, hyperoperation, Knuth’s up-arrow notation, Steinhaus–Moser notation, or Conway chained arrow notation.

     •  Reply
  34. Bth baby puppies1111111111 1
    kab2rb  almost 4 years ago

    Nelson your Grandpa is trying to make you think that.

     •  Reply
  35. Missing large
    Homerville Premium Member almost 4 years ago

    Us grandpas know a lot that we never have a chance to share until a grandchild arrives.

     •  Reply
  36. Erikeye
    tabby  almost 4 years ago

    My father knew the constellations and would point them out in the night sky. I miss that.

     •  Reply
Sign in to comment

More From Pickles