Did you know that as well as light years, there are light minutes? I didn’t. What a wonderful thing. It sounds so simple a unit of measuring anything I wondered how far it was and if it could be a contender for one the ‘standard’ units of measurements journalists use. You know the kind of thing - olympic-sized swimming pools, double-decker buses, blue whales, a city-the-size-of-birmingham - those sorts of things, to render distances and volumes a bit more, well, tangible. 

Unfortunately, the delicately sounding light minute (lighter even than a real minute!) is equivalent to 1.118×107 miles. Which 11,176,943.823073 miles. Or 47 times further than from here to the moon. Suddenly simple things like this zoom out of all useful or usable proximity for most of our experiences or analogies for our world. . Good for astronomers.
Less so for typographers.

The idea of finding a way of compressing distance, of gaining a sense of ‘nearness’ was sparked by a conversation around something I’d called ‘near-specialisms’ - a way of thinking about avoiding falling into the trap of thinking that either specialism or generalism would be a better learning strategy for designers embarking on their career. As a self-avowed Generalist, you can guess which my money would be on.  

It was this cogitation on proximities such as these, and the benefits of ‘not-to-close-ness’ is, I guess, what helps give us the benefit of perspective, which is always a good thing, and one in rather short supply often - given the demand to give answers at light-speed. Or internet speed. Which is nearly the same thing. Approximately.

So when comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - and come on, don’t tell me there’s not a better name for it than that! - passes us this time next week (and it’ll be visible on my birthday by all accounts, which lends it a certain personal poignancy), at a distance of 2.5 light minutes, it’ll be for the first time in 50,000 years. What kind of perspective would that give us, if we wanted to use that measure of time to a problem?

In that time, the world will have travelled nearly 5.6 x 1011 miles… going, well, not very far in a kindly (to us, and thankfully pretty stable) stationary orbit.

But what’s good for the whole world doesn’t make for ideal for you. Sometimes specialising, exacting, in one thing might make you feel like you’re making great progress. Without a bit of variation, it’s hard to approximate whether you are - or simply going round in big circles.