Size of Life

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Thank you!

I hope he never stops making these art pieces - everything he creates brings joy, regardless of whether it's educational or funny or whimsical. I'm in awe of his creative output, his manner of communication, and his ability to steal hours of our time playing ridiculous little games that make us question the fundamentals of life and society.

He's right up there with XKCD in my mind.

--

This is probably the only time I'll use my super pedantic mode on Neal's work, and it's only because I love biology -

> DNA

> The genetic instructions for life

> 3.5 nanometers tall

DNA has a lot of dimensional metrics. It gets complicated. The people that study this stuff really care because it's essential for how our enzymes work, and small differences in spacing tolerances would totally break all of the machinery.

This "3.5 nm" figure is roughly the height of one turn of the helix for one form of DNA (B-DNA). The figure is showing multiple turns in the cartoon illustration.

In theory, you could create a polymer of infinite length (or height).

B-DNA is 34 Å per turn, with 10.5 bp per turn (table 1) :

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6545/

> Blue Whale

> King of the animal kingdom, it is the largest animal to have ever lived. It can eat up to 40 million krill per day during peak feeding season.

Please fix this one, Neal! We don't know that the blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived (even assuming we know we're just talking about earth).

Blue whales are perhaps the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. But we simply do not know. The fossil record is woefully incomplete.

We even have new papers coming up all the time that challenge this:

https://www.science.org/content/article/whale-whale-may-be-b...

Then refutations:

https://www.science.org/content/article/have-blue-whales-reg...

This is undoubtedly the last time the claim to largest will ever be challenged. Even if we dug up no new fossils, the estimations of previous finds change all the time as we learn more.

Also - what does "largest" mean? Mass? Length? Surface area?

It's okay to say that they're the largest (by some metric) that we know of. But it is not correct to say that they're the largest to have ever lived - at least as far as we know or could ever know. And by setting an absolute, inquiring minds memorize the point and stop wondering.

It's very probable that we'll never know the definitive answer to this.