This weekend there will be a mystical confluence of mathematic synchronicity that hasn’t been seen in 100 years – that’s 102 years! On Sunday, Oct 10th the date will be 10/10/10. Geeks like me live for such interesting number sequences and I thought it would be neat to take pause and consider the mysterious power of 10’s. To kick things off, the fine folks at Eames Office have posted their classic “Powers of Ten” video online which stretches ones brain as we try to fathom the seemingly symplistic task of scaling our reality up or down by a factor of 10…

It boggles my mind whenever I watch this video. We throw around powers of ten all the time when we describe the world around us, like the volume of the ocean being 1.332×1021 liters or the size of picoplankton which is on the order of 0.2-2 x10-6 meters (or 0.2-2 micrometers). On the electronics side of the house, each jump forward in computing power and efficiency usually coincides with another jump down in trace-width size for integrated circuits and microprocessors – with some of the latest microprocessors being fabricated using 45 nanometer (45×10-9 manufacturing processes.

In recognition of 10/10/10 – the “Powers of Ten” website will be relaunched on Oct 10, 2010. They have a Google Maps link that shows the various events going on worldwide to celebrate this every-100-year event.

Some local events in the US include:

We deal with numbers either written in scientific notation or in engineering notation all the time – take time to share the video with your friends and kids. It will definitely fire up some brain activity trying to fathom the vastness of the universe and infinitesimal tininess of the atomic realm all in one short video clip.

For extra 10 goodness:

Happy 10/10/10 Day!