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Posted by eatonphil 1 day ago

Size of Life(neal.fun)
2507 points | 277 commentspage 3
mchinen 1 day ago|
If you liked the first half of this site and want an extension, Cell Biology by the Numbers (2015, Milo, Phillips, https://book.bionumbers.org/) is great and has a similar intuition-building fun sense about size as well as various other measurements, including weight, time and energy at the atomic to micro-organism level.
fastaguy88 13 hours ago||
Nice display, but it starts off with misleading measurements of DNA. The spacing between DNA base pairs is 0.34 nm, so the 10 base pairs pictured are in fact 3.4 nm. But the DNA in a single human cell is about 2 meters, and chromosome lengths vary from 2 to 10 cm. I am skeptical of the hemoglobin vs ribosome sizes as well; hemoglobin has a molecular weight of about 60,000, while ribosomes weigh more than 5 million.
hamiecod 1 day ago||
It makes me emotional when I think about where life started and what it evolved into. Life created so many different types of organisms, each having different features while maintaining the equilibrium of the planet. From bacteria, to massive dinosaurs, to tiny homosapiens who inevitably control the largest organisms.
pazimzadeh 1 day ago||
This has DNA as the smallest object and has a large protein next to it, so it misses the fact that a gene's DNA is almost always larger by weight and volume than the protein it encodes.
bobnarizes 1 day ago||
HUMAN

A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites. :)

js8 19 hours ago||
I would like to play an open world game (like Minecraft) where 1 in-game meter equals 1 micrometer in the real world. That way, one could get a feeling about the scale of things.
mncharity 16 hours ago|
Hmm, perhaps with flying? When stuck on the ground, people's feel for size gets poorer as things get bigger (tall buildings, clouds, map distances). I think of having 4ish orders of magnitude available for visual reference in a classroom (cm to 10 m), plus less robustly 100 m and km in AR. At that micrometer per meter, a grain of salt towers over a city skyline - "nano view" in [1] (eep - a decade ago now - I was about to take another pass at it as covid hit).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/http://www.clarif...

mncharity 10 hours ago||
Hmm, err, that could be misleading... 4ish for visible lengths in a large class. But especially in a small group, one can use reference objects of sand (mm) and flour (fine 100 um, ultrafine 10 um). The difference between the 100 um and 10 being more behavioral and feel (eg mouth feel) than unmagnified visible size. Thus with an outdoor view (for 100 m), one can use less-abstract "it's like that there accessible length" concrete-ish analogues across like 8 orders of magnitude. Or drop to 6, or maybe push for 9, as multiples of 3 nicely detent across SI prefixes.
throwaway290 2 hours ago||
Arthropleura is missing shadow.
krosaen 1 day ago||
Neal.fun is good clean fun - my kids love it too. Neal, if you are listening, would pay for an ad-free version (I already bought you some coffees too).
sheepolog 1 day ago||
Very cool. I was surprised that orangutans are described as being only 2 feet 9 inches tall, I think most are a bit larger. Maybe when sitting they're under 3 feet? From wikipedia:

"females typically stand 115 cm (45 in) tall and weigh around 37 kg (82 lb), while adult males stand 137 cm (54 in) tall and weigh 75 kg (165 lb). The tallest orangutan recorded was a 180 cm (71 in)."

LeifCarrotson 1 day ago|
It's using the size of the ruler, matching the posture as shown in the image. A few keys over and there's a picture of a grizzly bear that says it is 1m or 3'4" tall. And maybe when it's on all fours, that's a typical measurement to the shoulders - its arm length, more or less.

That's much shorter than the human at 1.7m or 5'7". From just those numbers, you might think that a human would weigh more than a grizzly or take one in a fight: But when a bear stands on its hind legs, it's 2.4m/8' tall and can be 800 lbs, I'd have put a grizzly way further to the right.

ComputerGuru 1 day ago|
Onl missing a Wikipedia link on each page!
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