SketchUp

In my years of teaching, I used the free version of SketchUp from time to time, running on my computer. I always found it easy to use. Nowadays I use it only occasionally but when I do, I find the downloadable version difficult to use. In my frustration, I sought an online version and fortunately one is now available at:

https://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-for-web

Happily, it's an easier to use as the earlier downloadable versions were and I was able to come up with the graphic shown in Figure 1, using text added using OS X's Preview:

Figure 1

It's creation came about via a friend who texted me in Messenger about various ways to come to terms with the concept of a trillion. Here is what he wrote:

If you can live 1 trillion seconds you would live to be about 31,709 years old. If you take an inch and decide to walk 1 trillion inches you would have to walk around the earth, from the equator 633 times (1 lap is just under 25,000 miles). If frequent flyer miles offered unlimited flights if you had 1 trillion miles you would need to make 107 round trips from the Earth to Pluto.

This got me thinking about the microcosmic equivalent of a trillion, namely a trillionth. I wrote in response:

Figure 2 

Moving from the macrocosm to the microcosm, a trillionth of a meter is called a picometer. The diameter of a helium atom is about 62 picometers.

From there, I went to look at some visual ways of representing one trillion and come across this site that was quite helpful. The site included the visualisation shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

I think I'll make more use of the online SketchUp when creating visualisations of numbers that come up in my daily analysis of my diurnal age.