Size of Life

The arcade classic Space Invaders had a primitive soundscape in that every time the remaining invaders advance, it plays a short bass note. As fewer and fewer invaders remain, it takes less time for them to advance, and the note repeats faster and faster, it adds a remarkable amount of increasing tension as each level progresses.

So not exactly the same, but perhaps prototypical. I think Asteroids did as well.

From the author on twitter[1] "The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon"

[1] https://x.com/nealagarwal/status/1998788695449808920

From the author on twitter[1] "The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon" [1] https://x.com/nealagarwal/status/1998788695449808920

He was also responsible for one of the worst web pages ever created: https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/

(It's utterly brilliant but monstrous.)

Deep Sea one is scary for some reason. It just gives me shivers to think about how deep the sea is, and what horrors lurk down there. I know that I'll never encounter such a being, but still kinda creepy.

I love Neal's work so much. He's constantly making some of the coolest stuff on the web. I'm utterly delighted every time I see his domain on the front page of HN.

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.

I would have definitely left normally. Just wanted to see the site.

And I know this also likely not Neil's idea of fun, and mostly the silly EU rules that are to blame but still, dialogs without a directly available "refuse all" are the worst

Yes, you are not the only one.

Not on mobile..

Always afraid that auto dismiss results in auto allow-all on thus type of dialog.

It is always going to be controversial but after discovery of prions - needle shifted to "self-replicating means nothing and viruses are also dead". Then scientists also found viruses large enough that they get infected with other viruses, and parasitic cells that are missing most parts required for metabolism, so it is getting more fuzzy again.

as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)

..er, a parasitic threat to life and happiness that become an endemic drag on global well being?

You are doing the same classification. It all depends on the definition of what a living being is.

MRS GREN would like to have a word with you :)

Are crystalline structures alive?

I found that jarring as well. There's a toggle in the upper right to switch to metric.

Even with setting it to metric, it progresses through units based on the scale. I realize that scientists love to work in scientific notation, and progressing from nanometers to micrometers, mm, cm, and finally meters sort of follows that kind of logic. I wonder how it would feel if the whole thing was in constant units or at least there was an option for that.

It is not right to call the xenophyophore that is on the last row, and which can have a size of up to 20 cm as an "amoeba".

Only the next row above it, with Pelomyxa, is indeed an amoeba and one that is very frequently encountered and which usually has sizes not much less than 1 millimeter and sometimes it can reach a size of a few mm.

The true amoebas are much more closely related to humans, than to xenophyophores (giant marine unicellular living beings) or to plants.

Besides the true amoebas there are also a few other kinds of unicellular eukaryotes with shape-shifting cells, e.g. foraminifera, radiolarians and others, but already in the first half of the 19th century it was recognized that those other groups change their shapes in a different way than the amoebas, so they were classified separately, even if the term "amoeboid cell" has always been used about any cell with variable shape.

The true amoebas are related to the group formed by animals and fungi, and there are some amoebas that have a simple form of multicellularity, so it is likely that some of the mechanisms needed for the evolution of multicellularity have been inherited from a common ancestor of animals, fungi and amoebae.

The multicellular or multinucleate amoebae that belong to Myxomycetes (one of the kinds of slime moulds) can reach much bigger sizes, e.g. a diameter of up to 1 meter, because they do not have the size limitation that exists for simple unicellular eukaryotes.

On the other side, wasps could be so tiny. like you could put thousands of them inside an amoeba volume.

"Megaphragma mymaripenne is a microscopically sized wasp. At 200 μm in length, it is the third-smallest extant insect, comparable in size to single-celled organisms. It has a highly reduced nervous system, containing only 7400 neurons, several orders of magnitude fewer than in larger insects."

I got surprised by that too, and while comparing its size to the next organism (Tardigrade) I learned that every member of the same species of tardigrades has the exact same number of cells [1], which was even more surprising for me:

> Eutelic organisms have a fixed number of somatic cells when they reach maturity, the exact number being relatively constant for any one species. This phenomenon is also referred to as cell constancy. Development proceeds by cell division until maturity; further growth occurs via cell enlargement only.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutely

Actually the tardigrade used as an example is quite big at 500 micrometers.

Most tardigrades are not much bigger than 100 micrometers.

Tardigrades, together with nematodes, rotifers, mites and a few more rarely encountered groups are among the smallest animals and they are smaller than many of the bigger among the unicellular eukaryotes. That is why they have been discovered only after the invention of the microscope.

The tardigrades have evolved towards smaller and smaller sizes very early, already during the Cambrian. It is interesting that they are segmented animals, like their relatives the arthropods and the velvet worms, but they have very few segments, because in order to achieve such a small size they have lost all intermediate segments, so the segments that now form their body were originally the segments of the head, and now they are followed immediately by the original segments of the tail, without the original body that connected the head to the tail. Thus they have been miniaturized by losing their body and becoming a walking head (the legs of the tardigrades are what in arthropods have become appendages of the mouth, e.g. mandibles and maxillae).