[jfarlow]

Very cool! I've actually built similar models for myself to build that intuition. They're so helpful and generally hard to find. I agree that scale is generally poorly taught.

I personally think having even a modest intuition for how to map physical knowledge to its appropriate 'scale' (time/space, from plank to universe) is one of the most straightforward ways to be "smart". And a great way to get to know the limits of our knowledge.

I still haven't seen a video that matches my intuition. Which is unfortunate. I want to build a version of your scaler there, but for VR that you can slide up and down along at least time/scale axes - and maybe additional ones too.

[mncharity]

:) It does seem physical scale can serve as skeleton and scaffold to support learning and integrating knowledge of the physical world. I don't know of any attempts to really push on that.

> for VR

An unfinished lockdown project was a RL version of that hands-apart-to-zoom cartoon, with an atomic-bonding interactive, with realistic electron density, as content. Educational XR might eventually be so much fun.

> maybe additional ones too

Maybe Ashby diagrams in XR?! Someday.

I'd love an "measure explorer" - a densely fleshed out space of order-of-magnitude overviews. Length; velocity; accel; jerk; length/dollar; length/dollar^2; length/mass; etc, etc.

Years ago I prototyped an interactive where oom diagrams were tied with other content. So as you slide mass, you get different animals, and as metabolic rate scales with animal mass, you get heart beat. Life expectancy, etc. Heart to Hz, keyboard, and sound ripples spreading in space. Or explore equations: select ideal hand crank for torque, with a meter arm, a bacteria for mass, and a second later, hey, relativistic E. coli. :)

I've found the bottleneck on creating such to be finding usable media. Hopefully google will eventually do semantic scene indexing of youtube videos, and of images. If anti-trust doesn't break them. And sci-hub still exists. Finding "a bit of video with an X doing Y" is still prohibitively hard. And licensed for reuse? Perhaps structure the effort to survive being sued for aggressive use of Fair Use, or some country's similar exception, because copyright is a nightmare.