A View from the Back of the Envelope top

Meters in your hands
1 meter per mm (Magnification of ×10-3)
Scaling the universe to your desktop
How Big Are Things?
Length Area Volume Speed
10 [ | -6 | -3 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18 ]
If trees were 1 cm high... 103 meters per meter

1 m

10 m

100 m

1000 m
100 m
0.3 m
32 cm
3 m
316 cm
101 m
32 m
102 m
316 m
0.3 km
103 m
3162 m
3 km
You
1 m per mm
Actual size (though rough, as screen resolution varies).
you

a car

Big 747. More recent 737-300.
US football
Titanic's nose

1/2 lt·us (ticks every 1/10 light-microsecond (lt·10-6s))
0 1/10 2/10 3/10 1/2 lt·us

A View from the Back of the Envelope
Comments encouraged. - Mitchell N Charity <mcharity@lcs.mit.edu>

Doables:
  schoolbus, 3 story building, 1/10 mile, street, house plan, 
  speed-of-sound ruler 330 air (variation), 1500 h2o 5k steel 5.5k glass
Other meta info on zero magnification page.
Notes:
  Titanic image derived from Rigging Plan (300K BIG)
    from Deck Plans for "Olympic" and "Titanic".
History:
 2003-Feb-03   Repaired links - 4 fixed, 1 replaced.
 2001.Apr.20   Added link to `How Big Are Things?'.
 1999.Apr.21   Added Titanic at a reader's suggestion.
 1998.Jun.17   Corrected error with magnitude boundaries (3.333->3.162).
 1997.Oct.07   Added 747, 737, football field, people, car.
 1997.Aug.25   Created.