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Understanding Physical Scale

I was always a sickly child. In eighth grade, I missed like a week of school or something and so I turned in my project late, well after everyone else.

We were supposed to make a scale model of the solar system. I used a beach ball for the sun and various sizes of other balls and marbles for the planets.

I was a smart kid and this teacher took GLEE in busting me. She's the same bitch who got after me for explaining the letter substitution thing to my Hispanic friend who spoke English as a second language.

That's the point at which I concluded I'm not necessarily inherently smarter than anyone else. I knew what it was because my high school drop out father did the cryptoquote in the newspaper every single day. This kid had no idea where to start and she bitched at me about "cheating" for telling him it was a letter substitution puzzle so he had some hope of succeeding.

So we are having a fairly private conversation about my very late project and she asks me about scale and I talked about using different size balls etc and then she's like "But what about distance?" with a gleam in her eye expecting this to be a gotcha where she proves I'm not such hot stuff after all and I can check my smarty pants ego at the door because her class is RIGOROUS.


I've always been a mathy kid and I politely explained to this college educated toxic bitch that if I used one millimeter to equal the distance between the Sun and Mercury, Pluto was so far out, her classroom wasn't large enough to hold a scale model of the solar system.

Most people don't seem to understand scale well. It doesn't help that our exposure to concepts of the solar system are routinely drawings in books that cannot possibly be to scale. It takes at least half a mile to make a scale model of the solar system and there are too few of them in the world for most people to have visited one in person in their lifetime, much less get frequent exposure to one from early childhood.

My ex husband had a telescope at an early age and I did astrology, including calculating charts by hand. Our sons got taken to the Goldendale Observatory in Washington State to use a serious telescope open to the public well before we officially began homeschooling and we took them to the parking lot behind their dad's office to watch a total eclipse of the moon one night and gave then other similar exposure to star gazing because the stars were an interest their father and I had in common.

Completely unintentionally and unrelated to us intentionally exposing them to astronomy, I gave my sons a solid education in scale because we were a military family who moved a lot and my mother ran her mouth constantly in an educational way, explaining things to people.

So on our frequent road trips as a military family moving from place to place, simply to keep the kids quiet, I kept up nonstop patter about "We are heading west on X highway. We just passed the state line, leaving X state and entering Y state. We are entering such and such city. It is best known for blah feature which you can see up ahead if you look out your window to the left...."

I gave them an old, out of date almanac and we traced the latest road trip in a different color of marker and they got to look at the map while I ran my mouth to keep them entertained.

After he was an adult, my oldest son told me that's what taught him scale because some states took many hours to drive through and others didn't. He got to experience scale in a very visceral way repeatedly because I just never shut up when he was a kid because my mother was like that and I felt that had value to me that she talked nonstop about life, the universe and everything.

Footnote 
If I ran the world, scale models of the solar system would be more common.

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