Connections: [[Digital Garden/epistemicide]], [[cognitive justice]] Allex Bellos' book "Here's Looking at Euclid" first introduced me to this interesting phenomena in spatial perception. Imagine that you are given the numbers 1 to 10, and you have to lay them out on a line. This is called the number line. How would you space them out? Evenly right? That seems obvious. However, there is another way of spacing them out so that the earlier numbers are further apart, and the later numbers get closer and closer together the higher they get. So the distance between 1 and 2 is much greater than the distance between 9 and 10. Spacing numbers out so that the distance between them remains constant is called a linear scale. Spacing them out so that they get closer and closer as the numbers increase is called a logarithmic scale. It turns out that whereas most educated people in the modern world would space the numbers using a linear scale, children and some Indigenous tribes follow the logarithmic scale. Education explains the difference. In 2004, researchers Robert Siegler and Julie Booth asked children of different ages to place numbers on a line. Those in kindergarten mapped them out logarithmically. By Grade 1, children started straightening out the line. By Grade 2, they are spaced out evenly. The reason children and tribes people use the logarithmic scale is because they are comparing ratios. If you had to place 5 dots in relation to 1 dot, you'd see that 5 dots was 5 times bigger than 1 dot. So you'd put it further away from the 1 dot. If you had to place 5 dots in relation to 10 dots, you'd see that 10 dots is only 2 times bigger than 5 dots, so you'd place it closer to 10 dots.