FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
Number: about seven (plus or minus two) seems to be the limit of simultaneous human grasp of number (see George A. Miller's paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two)
Many of the objects of scientific interest in the universe are much larger than human scale (stars, galaxies) or much smaller than human scale (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles).
Similarly, many time periods studied in science involve time scales much greater than human timescales (geological and cosmological time scales) or much shorter than human timescales (atomic and subatomic events).
Mathematicians and scientists use very large and small numbers to describe physical quantities, and have created even larger and smaller numbers for theoretical purposes.
Common sense and human scale
"Common sense" ideas tend to relate to events within human experience, and thus commenurate with these scales. There is thus no commonsense intuition of, for example, interstellar distances or speeds approaching the speed of light.
Weights and measures tend to reflect human scale, and many older systems of measurement featured units based directly on the dimensions of the body. The metric system, which is based on other more reproducible physical quantities, still attempts to keep its base units within the range of human experience. Other systems, such as Planck units are useful for theoretical purposes, but are not useful for everyday purposes.
References
George A. Miller: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html)The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
Quotes
"Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not". -- Protagoras
Humanscale means "of a scale comparable to a human being".
The fields of human perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact sciences, because human information processing is not a purely physical act, and because perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences, experiences, and expectations.
So humanscale in architecture can also describe buildings with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient lighting, and spatial grammar that fit well with human senses, with the important caveat that human perceptions are always going to be less predictable and less measurable their physical dimensions.
Scale variations have long been known to constrain the detail with which information can be observed, represented, analyzed, and communicated.
Attempts to describe scaling behavior by fractals or self-affine models, which mathematically relate complexity and scale, have proven ineffective because the properties of many geographic phenomena are not strictly repeated across multiple spatial or temporal scales.
Issues of scale affect nearly every GIS application and involve questions of scale cognition, the scale or range of scales at which phenomena can be easily recognized, optimal digital representations, technology and methodology of data observation, generalization, and information communication.
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