That is fascinating! I guess I always imagined that the Apollo 11 crew was zipping around the moon a mile from the landing site. Thanks for sharing that.
Aside: my new neighbor is an engineer who works for a company that makes blades for those turbines. He told me the blades are made of formed composite materials, and the pieces are all bonded together – there are no bolts or other fasteners anywhere in the blade except where it attaches to the hub. Everything else is, essentially, glued together.
The first time I ever saw a traffic light right up close, at a power company, I assumed it was some kind of special jumbo traffic light. It was a SMALL one. They’re gigantic.
It still gets me every time. I think it surprises everyone. A professional outfield is a gigantic space and you wonder how it can be covered by three men.
Years ago I read of a girl who wanted a source of cheap plywood to use in a treehouse. CalDot was auctioning off some items including some freeway signs. Her bid won but she (and her parents) were dismayed when they discovered they now had to move several tons of huge three-inch ply sheets with the letters scraped off. Luckily, the bidder who came in second was willing to take the signs and give her a dozen sheets of 1/2 inch plywood, more than enough for her treehouse.
I am always amused by folks who make a sign about their yard sale on a sheet of paper with half-inch high, single-stroke letters using their Sharpie and expect it to be readable on the pole. The only reason I know what it is saying is inference from the position.
Do people often underestimate the relative size of giant land snails? I don’t think most people have heard of them, and if they do, it’s right there in the name: giant.
I’m guessing most people don’t spend much time thinking about it. But I also feel most people would be surprised to know there are snails that are as big as a cat.
Not the size of a cow. As heavy as a cow. A legless cow, so to speak.
Once I visited a Holstein bull stud farm. Since almost all dairy cows in the US are AI’d, these places are where all the sperm for all those cows is generated. Dairy bulls resemble black and white mountains with malignant eyes.
When I was a kid I loved going to the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis. There are a lot of old locomotives there. They are giant. They have some tank cars that have openings cut in each end so you can walk through them. It’s pretty cool. Nowadays I take my son there but he’s not quite as into it as I was as a sprog.
I had relatives who were dairy farmers so I was quite used to cows and the occasional bull. One of the farmers in the area had a Holstein cow that was a top milk producer. Got regularly displayed at the county fair. That one made the others look almost dinky.
When I was in grade 12, our history textbook had a picture of Picasso’s “Guernica” on the cover. It was a picture of a painting on the cover of a textbook that I could put in my backpack.
A couple of years later, I visited New York City, and went to the Museum of Modern Art. This was during the time that Picasso’s “Guernica” was on display there, and it was among the artworks I saw on my visit.
It was huge! Roughly ten feet high by 25 feet wide. All I could think, was, “The photographer must have stood way back to get all this in his frame for our history textbook.” It was much bigger than I expected.
That’s… about the size they are, probably closer towards the hand end. I don’t think the woman that picture has very large hands and there’s a bit of misleading photography going on, African land snails don’t normally get longer than about 8" or so. Certainly nothing like the size of a cat.
Aeroplanes always slightly surprise me with their size every time I see one close up. I mean, I know how big they are really, but I get so used to seeing them as tiny dots that I kind of forget…
If I say “Belgian Canal Lifts” I assume nobody is going to think: hmm, that sounds rather small to me. But it’s almost impossible to convey just how damn big these things are.
