Powers of 10

This film about the very small to the very large popped into my head last week, I remember being fascinated by it as a child which is probably linked to my current interest with Google Earth. It was created by Ray and Charles Eames who were brilliant designers in a range of areas.



I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the squares so you could fly through them in in Google Earth with the film itself as a placemark. Unfortunately a cycle track runs through the area of the original picnic - blasphemy! IMHO there should have a plaque there to commemorate the site :) (maybe there is?). To deal with the cycle track I put in a couple of screen shots from the film as overlays at the one to ten meter scale. Its for fun so I did the squares by eye rather than calculate them precisely, for example the last 10,000km square is a fair bit smaller than the stated scale, it's as large as I could make it. You are limited to only a few orders of magnitude by the scale of Google Earth but it was still fun to do.

Powers Of 10
(Note: you may have to right click, 'save as' and then open the file from the saved location - I have an unresolved problem with it not opening automatically from my browser)

The fame of the film seems to be continuing, for more details click here.
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Later: Frank of Google Earth Blog just emailed to say what I thought was a browser problem with the file (and hence local to me) is a MIME type error. I've replaced the link to one to his servers above, he's done some work on improving it too.