The Scale of Life | Hacker News Reader

The Scale of Life

thescaleoflife.com

101 pointsbookofjoe34 comments

BioNumbers[1] is a database of reference numbers in biology. So much more specialized, and less pretty, but potentially fun.

[1] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/Search.aspx?task=searchby...

I suddenly feel very, very small, but not in a bad way. Things are changing so much all around us. It's quite beautiful to stop and think about it.

I feel dizzy, specially with the stuff happening at my body.

Not to speak of the speed you’re moving through space. ;)

The speed seems to be relative to the CMB, by the way.

There are 28.5 million uber trips per day (~10 billion trips / year) but Uber's gross bookings are ~$37 billion. Which means the average booking is $3.70 ? That feels... weird? I paid $71 to get to the airport yesterday. Where are the $1.00 trips that offset stuff like that?

May be it's not US? For $3 I can ride half of my city. Transportation costs are wildly different around the world.

Fair enough, but to average $3.70 there would need to be literally 100 $3 rides to "offset" my trip to the airport. I guess it must be true, I'm not here claiming Uber is lying in their quarterly reports. I'd be really curious to see more detail on price per ride, and volume of total rides broken out by country (or even in more detail tbh).

edit: I had made a mistake, see my other comment

Very anecdotal, but I feel like Uber in Costa Rica is criminally cheap. Many $4 rides.

$4 is still above their claimed average ride price though, so there must be a really high quantity of even cheaper rides coming from somewhere...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit: I had made a mistake, see my other comment

Wow dumb mistake on my part - it looks like the $37b is the quarterly gross bookings, so instead of $3.71 per ride, it should be ~$14.80

Sorry!

This is fantastic!

Building awe and respect and rational instincts through data!

The next wow for me was to consider some ratios, e.g.,

- whatsapp messages to emails: I'm shocked whatsapp is even comparable

- cars to smartphones:

- youtube's scale is scary: it's like the lingua franca. What's the comparable

Update to display those?

I'd also like the ratios to themselves be scaled by the lifetime of the underlying data. E.g., births and marriages, smartphones and cars both have different lifetimes. Similarly for red blood cells vs neurons.

If you had a user entry where people could enter proposed ratios or lifetime-adjusting calculations, and then let others rank those by popularity, you'd segregate the user population into viewers, contributors, and creators, and then perhaps measure techniques for expanding the funnel. Instead of global db/rank, you might propagate contributions to other contributors, with rank by count of links, for decentralized pagerank.

This is amazing. Either some of it is wrong or my sense of scale needs a vast adjustment!

Like, I’m a little surprised that smoking is more popular than YouTube, but that’s probably correct. But the numbers on meat relative to corn seem a little high.

I wonder if that's including the corn used for animal feed or not

In terms of elapsed time, YouTube might be more on par with smoking.

I’ve wondered whether life could exist without the neutrino flux. Maybe it plays an important roll in base level entropy generation.

Very interesting, but anyone know why the number of births is so much higher than the number of newly married couples? I would assume that mostly everyone get married and that therefore the number of married couples should be roughly 1/2 of the number of babies born, right? But it seems a lot lower than that.

You're probably making a lot of assumptions based on your peer group. A lot of people behave differently.

Even if we assume you’re right when you say everyone gets married, perhaps the married couples have an average of 2 or even 1.5 children each.

Every second a million lbs of coal gets mined? Hard to fathom.

Yeah, let's think about that.

In this video[0] of an open-pit mine, Sempertrans claims their conveyors move 6 meters per second,and elsewhere[1] they claim to move 18,000 tons an hour, ie 5 tons per second—just under 1 ton per meter of belt? It must be pretty dense, something like ~800kg/m^2? That checks out for cubes of lignite.

So only 198,000 such conveyors are needed in world.

0. https://youtu.be/b0JqGy-rs2I

1. https://easyengineering.eu/interview-with-sempertrans/

Not sure what math gets you to 198,000 belts needed?

If this belt can do 5 tons per second, that's 10,000 lbs per second per belt

So to reach 1,000,000 lbs/s globally, you would do:

1,000,000 lbs/s divided by 10,000 lbs/s/belt = 100 belts

No?

Makes sense. Can't tell you what I was thinking, since the cache has cleared. ;)

Let's see what that means. There are ~2000 lbs/ton, so 500 tons/second. Search returns "On average, a ton of coal produces 21 to 22 gigajoules of energy." That'd imply about 1 TW worth of coal.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants/ says it's 2 TW currently generated, which is (barely) within a factor of two of this.

There are ~3e7 seconds in a year, so 1.5e10 tons/year. If a ton is a bit under a cubic meter, this'd be very roughly a cube of >2km on a side.

This is as satisfying a read as Harper's Index.

"Meat produced" - why not just say it how it is? "Animals killed" ...

Fantastic. But needs support for URL parameters to change things like the default units.

Oh this is well done. I've made things like this but this just gave me an idea. Brb.

My version: https://scroll.pub/blog/counters.html

How can 10x the number of children be born per second than the number of marriages?

Out of wedlock? Large families?

From a bit of cursory googling the birth numbers seem right but the marriage numbers are low. I wonder if they're only counting marriages in countries where marriage data is available.

That would be my guess too. Strange I got downvoted for that question.

Why is that surprising? You don't have to be married to have a child. A couple isn't restricted to one child.

And the number is 5-6x not 10x.

Remember to keep in mind this data is based on global statistics.

In various different cultures and subcultures the ratios may be different

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