These are the kind of cotton balls that I used for my model of the inner Solar system. In Swedish they are called "flirtkulor", literally "flirt balls", and the name is totally innocent in Swedish since we all know that these things are toys for kids, or they used to be toys for kids before kids started hanging out on Instagram and Snapchat all the time. At least in Sweden.neufer wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 7:13 pmAnn wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:43 pm
My Sun was a table cloth, two meters in diameter. My inner planets were cotton balls, 2 centimeters in diameter, except the Moon and Mercury, which were small yellow peas. I placed my Earth 200 meters from the Sun, and Mars 300 meters from the Sun. If I remember correctly, I placed the Moon 60 centimeters from the Earth.
Perfectly accurate? Heck no! Good enough? I thought so.
- Oh when those cotton balls get rotten
You can't pick you very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home
It was down in Louisiana
Just a mile [~8 AU] from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back home
Anyway, "flirtkulor". The first time I tried to talk about in English about my model of the inner Solar system, and had to find a way to translate "flirtkulor" in a way that didn't sound totally outrageous in English, I settled on "cotton balls". After all, these little things are made of cotton.
Ann