I remember reading years ago in a "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" book, that if
the earth were shrunk to the size of a cue ball, it would be more perfectly
round and smoother than the best cue ball money could buy. Believe it or
not....

Lou Cook


-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 3:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Kansas really is flatter than a pancake


Cindee writes:

> Fo anyone who has ever been in Kansas, it is fairly flat, but it does have
a
> few rolling hills.

The point of the study was however that, with proportional scaling, Kansas
is
still flatter than the rolling hills, grooves and valleys of a pancacke.

But a lot of things are like that. Look carefully at an orange the next time
you get a chance. If you blew the orange up to the size of the Earth, the
grooves on the orange are deeper proportionately than any of the heights on
the
Earth, even if you were to measure that distance from the deepest seafloor
to
the top of the highest mountain. In fact, the grooves are deeper than the
atmosphere of the Earth is thick. The result is that we spend our entire
lives
"conquering the fishes of the sea and the fowl of the air" in only about
half of
the thickness of an equivalent orange groove.

You can't let your perception of the world be swayed too much by only what
you see around you. Twenty years of education will never guarantee that
you're
going to be able to get and hold a good job, but it will allow you to be
amazed
at things once and a while, and that's certainly worth something.

Wirt Atmar

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