The rafflesia is the largest single flower in the world.

My dad is a huge nerd. It was really helpful in middle school and high school because he would help me with my math and science homework (AP calculus, yay!), so it was like having my own tutor but way cheaper and he could help me at all hours of the day. But to give perspective on what kind of a nerd he really is, I will share this anecdote:

I'm in 7th grade, it's the beginning of the year and it's almost open house. My parents ask me what my locker number is so they can go look at it (I have no idea why they even cared, all the lockers look the exact same). I tell them it's number 2048. The very first thing my dad says is, "Oh, that's 2 to the 11th power!" What kind of person has that memorized? My dad. And now me.

Anyway, he always sends me these weird but super interesting links to the most random things. Like this article about The Tau Manifesto and how pi is actually wrong. The most recent link is much more exciting and interactive; The Scale of the Universe. It lists a whole bunch of things in the universe and shows the size of all of them relative to each other, from quantum foam (smaller than an atom), to humans, to states, to planets, all the way to the entire observable universe. I spent a significant amount of time looking at the entire thing.

One of the things it lists is some flower called the rafflesia. It's huge (but actually super tiny compared to the whole universe).

Photo credit: Troy Davis

It's found in southeastern asia and can weigh up to 22 pounds. Next Valentine's Day I would like someone to give me one of these.

It also had some thing called the Japanese spider crab. Ew.

Photo credit: The Conservation Report

There's also a bunch of nebulas which are huge, like 1,000,000,000,000,000-times-bigger-than-that-spider-crab huge. Nebulas are pretty cool things to look at.

Photo credit: Hubble Space Telescope