{"id":2568,"date":"2008-01-20T17:56:12","date_gmt":"2008-01-20T17:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2568"},"modified":"2008-01-20T19:32:33","modified_gmt":"2008-01-20T19:32:33","slug":"thinking-in-an-alternate-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2568","title":{"rendered":"Thinking in an Alternate Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Dave Davison<\/strong> at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thoughts-illustrated.blogspot.com\/\"><strong>Thoughts Illustrated<\/strong> <\/a>recently <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/thoughts-illustrated.blogspot.com\/2008\/01\/original-powers-of-ten-movie-charles.html\">featured the &#8220;Powers of 10&#8221; video by IBM<\/a>; by today&#8217;s hyperkinetic\u00a0attention span, it might be considered &#8220;long&#8221; but the impression it makes is very powerful, particularly on those not well acquainted with physics.\u00a0\u00a0Dave justly called it &#8220;9 Minutes of video you will never forget&#8221;. Here it is:<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\" width=\"425\" height=\"355\"><param name=\"width\" value=\"425\" \/><param name=\"height\" value=\"355\" \/><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/BBsOeLcUARw&amp;rel=1\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"425\" height=\"355\" wmode=\"transparent\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/BBsOeLcUARw&amp;rel=1\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p height=\"355\">One of the themes that I stress with my students, when we are trying to\u00a0analyze a primary source,\u00a0is the danger of relying upon one&#8217;s own habitual perspective and frame of reference. An important element of a\u00a0mental perspective is <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scale_%28spatial%29\">scale<\/a> and the general tendency of\u00a0people to visualize\u00a0new concepts only in terms of\u00a0the scale in which they go about their daily lives without any comprehension of alternate <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Orders_of_magnitude\">orders of magnitude <\/a>leads to serious logical errors. The distortion\u00a0becomes still worse, when matters of science or\u00a0economic policy or planning are involved and the person trying to analyze is equally unable to conceive of using different time frames.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated recently featured the &#8220;Powers of 10&#8221; video by IBM; by today&#8217;s hyperkinetic\u00a0attention span, it might be considered &#8220;long&#8221; but the impression it makes is very powerful, particularly on those not well acquainted with physics.\u00a0\u00a0Dave justly called it &#8220;9 Minutes of video you will never forget&#8221;. Here it is: One of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,24,64,47,377,436,200,263,32,63,61,259],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytic","category-cognition","category-davison","category-intelligence","category-physics","category-psychology","category-recommended-viewing","category-scenario","category-science","category-thoughts-illustrated","category-visualization","category-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}