One error I think I spotted: Wooly Mammoth atill lived 4000 years ago in Wrangel Island but the the website says it got extinct 10,000 years ago.
Size of Life
271–280 of 286 posts
Re: Size of Life
#272[dead]
Re: Size of Life
#273Great job. I did a side project that helps with comparisons, but in a rather different way (e.g. how many African elephants does something weigh). Not as slick as this site, but someone might find it useful: http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/
Nice. Two quick UI thoughts. Upon loading, perhaps start with some unit selected, and a default amount 1, so there's immediate content to be seen? And to extend the experience, maybe add a "dice roll" button, so users can "see more neat things" click-click-click without the cognitive overhead of pathing the option space
Re: Size of Life
#274If anyone wants to set this up to auto-run all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left, here is a vibe-coded (sorry) browser console script. Makes a great "screen-saver" if you kick off the script and then put your browser in full screen mode :) (function() { let direction = 'right'; // Start by going right let intervalId; function getCurrentAnimalName() { const animalDiv = document.querySelector('…
Cannot stand robot code. Thanks for the genuinely cool thing though. I hope you don't mind me rewriting, if only for my own satisfaction. { const s = window.scroller = {} const press = (key, code) => () => document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent('keydown', { key: key, keyCode: code, which: key, code: code, bubbles: true })); const step = () => { const div = document.querySelector('.animal-name') const name = div?.te…
I don't mind at all, your rewrite looks much more elegant. Thanks!
Re: Size of Life
#275I 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.
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...
Re: Size of Life
#276This is absolutely incredible. Thank you.
Re: Size of Life
#277Tools like this are surprisingly effective for teaching, especially compared to static diagrams. Interaction makes the scale differences stick.
When my daughter is old enough, I'm definitely going to show her a bunch of visualizations on Neal's site as supplementary education. I learned so much from these visualizations as an adult, and even without being able to read you can get a sense of scale.
> When my daughter is old enough
Fwiw, I've done a pinch-nail-hand-arms 1-10-100-1000 mm "body as size reference" a couple of times around 5ish. And a 1000x "micro view" "pinch is zoomed to arms size" "it's like a scale model or doll playset - everything zoomed together" world of "bacteria sprinkles, red blood cell candies (M&M minis or concave Smarties minis or Sweetarts - there's lots of cell candy analogs), hair poles, salt/sugar boxes". Stories of sitting on a grain of salt and eating... etc; pet eyelash mites. No idea if it actually worked.
I did some user-test videos, now only on archive.org.[1] Hmm... the "Arms, hands" video there now doesn't seem to play inline? - but does wget'ed and browsered. :/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/www.clarifyscienc...
Re: Size of Life
#278Neal delivers. I recently learned that viruses are not considered living being, but I'm nevertheless happy they're included here because they're both relevant and interesting in this context.
From what I remember from undergrad the reason they're not life is that they lack their own metabolism, they use the metabolism of host cells. And metabolism needs to be a constant thing, they don't have any when outside a cell.
Re: Size of Life
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cannot stand robot code. Thanks for the genuinely cool thing though. I hope you don't mind me rewriting, if only for my own satisfaction. { const s = window.scroller = {} const press = (key, code) => () => document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent('keydown', { key: key, keyCode: code, which: key, code: code, bubbles: true })); const step = () => { const div = document.querySelector('.animal-name') const name = div?.te…
I don't mind at all, your rewrite looks much more elegant. Thanks!
You could try posting both at the LLM and ask it to explain the stuff I changed, if you're interested in learning more Javascript. Assuming you aren't already deep in the JS trenches and only vibed bc you couldn't be bothered.
Re: Size of Life
#280Great job. I did a side project that helps with comparisons, but in a rather different way (e.g. how many African elephants does something weigh). Not as slick as this site, but someone might find it useful: http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/
Nice. Two quick UI thoughts. Upon loading, perhaps start with some unit selected, and a default amount 1, so there's immediate content to be seen? And to extend the experience, maybe add a "dice roll" button, so users can "see more neat things" click-click-click without the cognitive overhead of pathing the option space
That is a possibility, thanks.