Hi all! I’m Aleix Ramon, the music composer of the soundtrack.
Since some of you asked, here’s the soundtrack on Bandcamp: https://aleixramon.bandcamp.com/album/size-of-life-original-...
There you can download it in high quality, and it’s a pay-what-you-want: you can get it for free if you want, or pay what you feel like and support me. Either way, I’m happy that you enjoy it!
The music should also be on Spotify, Apple Music, and most music streaming services within the next 24h.
A bit about the process of scoring Size of Life:
I’ve worked with Neal before on a couple of his other games, including Absurd Trolley Problems, so we were used to working together (and with his producer—you’re awesome, Liz!). When Neal told me about Size of Life, we had an inspiring conversation about how the music could make the players feel.
The core idea was that it should enhance that feeling of wondrous discovery, but subtly, without taking the attention away from the beautiful illustrations.
I also thought it should reflect the organisms' increasing size—as some of you pointed out, the music grows with them. I think of it as a single instrument that builds upon itself, like the cells in an increasingly complex organism. So I composed 12 layers that loop indefinitely—as you progress, each layer is added, and as you go back, they’re subtracted. The effect is most clear if you get to the end and then return to the smaller organisms!
Since the game has an encyclopedia vibe to it, I proposed to go with a string instrument to give it a subtle “Enlightenment-era” and “cultural” feel. I was suspecting the cello could be a good instrument because of its range and expressivity.
Coincidentally, the next week I met the cellist Iratxe Ibaibarriaga at a game conference in Barcelona, where I’m based, and she immediately became the ideal person for it. She’s done a wonderful job bringing a ton of expressivity to the playing, and it’s been a delight to work with her.
I got very excited when Neal told me he was making an educational game—I come from a family of school teachers. I’ve been scoring games for over 10 years, but this is the first educational game I’ve scored.
In a way, now the circle feels complete!
(if anyone wants to reach out, feel free to do so! You can find me and all my stuff here: https://www.aleixramon.com/ )
The dynamic soundscape is delightful, as it subtly adds instruments and musical texture as you progress. And going back down the scale regresses it to simple again. Smoothly done.
It reminded me of Operation Neptune (1991): each level starts with just one channel, probably percussion, and as you progress through the rooms it adds and removes more channels or sometimes switches to a different section of music. It is unfortunately all sharp cuts, no attempts at smoothing or timing instrument entry and exit. A couple of samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LNaatyoQk is an hour of gameplay revelling in “the dynamic and sometimes beautiful music of Operation Neptune” using a Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesiser; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxEdQ4wx9s&list=PL3FC048B13... is the PCM files used on some platforms (if you want to compare that track with the MT-32, it starts at 28 minutes).
Hi there, I'm the composer of the soundtrack—glad that you enjoyed the music.
The idea was to have a single instrument (a cello) that builds upon itself, like the cells in an organism. It starts with a very minimalistic loop, and new layers of music are progressively added as the organisms grow in size.
Thanks for sharing Operation Neptune! I didn't know about it, but it's a great example of early adaptive game music.
I love how the music swells and becomes more intricate as life expands and grows more complicated.
Man I played Operation Neptune a lot when I was a kid. I wonder if it was the first game to do this style of adaptive music layering. It predates the iMUSE system used in LucasArts games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
For anyone curious, you can actually play it here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Operation_Ne...
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.
Interesting Space Invaders Trivia:
The game speeding up as invaders are eliminated was an unintended consequence of the hardware running full speed to draw all 55 invaders. As invaders are eliminated the draw calls finish faster and the game speeds up. There is no code in the game to throttle the speed. The 2 Mhz 8080 is always drawing full speed. It's delightfully serendipitous this happens to ramp up the difficulty as you near the end of each level in such a compellingly perfect way. (https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/space-...)
I've watched some interviews with the game's programmer Tomohiro Nishikado and, although translated (so subject to garbling), he seems to confirm this was a 'happy accident'. He indicates he set the max number of invaders based on what the hardware could draw but there was no intent to have the speed ramp up. Of course, he noticed that it did this during play testing but decided to keep it that way. Arguably, it's one of the most compelling aspects of the game. Modern emulators have to add code game-specific code to limit the speed or the game plays too fast. Leaving no CPU cycles unused is the sign of an elegant design.
That reminds me of the music in the film "Inception", in which the extremely low-register bass-heavy music in the background of scenes from lower levels of dream-in-dream is actually the main score, played back dramatically (and semantically / thematically) slower and lower.
The music was breathtaking here - I'd absolutely pay for a version of it. Really solidified the experience
From the author on twitter[1] "The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon"
Glad you enjoyed it! You can get the soundtrack on Bandcamp: https://aleixramon.bandcamp.com/album/size-of-life-original-...
Tomorrow it should also be on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Oh noes, I explored with sound off.
It truly is, thanks for pointing it out! I just went through the entire site 5 minutes ago and it didn’t occur to me to grab my headphones and turn sound on first.
Anyone find an actual link for the finished track? Credits are mentioned on his site and twitter but I didn't find it anywhere when searching for the artist names.
So I guess Operation Neptune was the inspiration for UFO 50s Porgy?
I absolutely loved that looping music track, please authors make it available.
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
This is something you do when scoring a game too, wonder if the author ever worked on game programming.
Hi there, I'm the composer—I do! 99% of my work is making music and sound effects for games.
And you're right, the music following the player's actions is common in games; we call it "adaptive music.
The rest of the author's website is a bunch of games, so I'd say so.
Thank you for sharing this, I played Operation Neptune as a kid and never noticed the dynamic music!
Beautiful. It's clearly a labor of love.
The authors deserve our support. Buy them a coffee via the provided link.
Thank you for sharing this on HN.
He has many other cool visualizations!
Space Elevator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640226
He was also responsible for one of the worst web pages ever created: https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/
(It's utterly brilliant but monstrous.)
why did i click. ha, it's incredible how addictive simple dopamine loops are.
Thank you!
I'll just stick to Baldur's Gate II, thanks -- my favorite inventory management simulation
Send help.
Thabk god the page crashed after 15m
If it doesn't crash there is actually an ending
woo.. finally got there!
all achievements.. and i made stacks on bitcoin
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.
>for some reason
This is a pretty common fear, just look up thalassophobia (or don't! sorry!)
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.
> (even assuming we know we're just talking about earth)
This is a nitpick, but life on other planets wouldn't be called “animals”. Animal is a clade defined by common ancestry. The only way you could have an extraterrestrial animal is for it to have evolved on Earth and then migrated somehow, and I think we can fairly confidently rule that out.
Nitpic nitpic. I bet if we find animal like life on other planets people will call them animals. Langage use isn't that pedantic.
The dimensioning of DNA was an immediate turn-off for me. A common biochemistry demo is to show how long and macroscopically visible a chromosome can be. Saying DNA is 3.5 nm tall (long?) flies in the face of what is a pretty interesting and notable experience for a lot of people.
It essentially starts the whole project with a weird take on "How long is a piece of string?"
> In theory, you could create a polymer of infinite length (or height).
Works pretty well in practice too.
You really can't go wrong with any of Neal's fun projects!
Neal 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.
Not that I'm qualified to reply, but I think this is debated. I seem to recall reading in "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer that there is an argument that a virus is analogous to a spore stage of life, and the virus begins "living" when it plants itself inside a cell full of "nutrients", sheds it's skin and begins consuming and replicating.
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.
Viruses are to life as LLMs are to reasoning: they often behave like their category expects but not for the same reasons as the genuine article.
as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)
Once a virologist always a virologist I always say.
..er, a parasitic threat to life and happiness that become an endemic drag on global well being?
Every other living organism looking at human beings: yeah.
They do have genes and are subject to natural selection so to say the least they are a clear borderline case.
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.
I was taught in school they were something in between.
Hey, if they originated naturally and interact with the environment and reproduce, they are living beings. Mere human taxonomists can't just "classify" away the fact.
You are doing the same classification. It all depends on the definition of what a living being is.
Are crystalline structures alive?
The one that destroyed Data's planet was, I'd say.
MRS GREN would like to have a word with you :)
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
Definitely worthy the scroll!
Also: Banana - Although not technically living, it does make for a good size comparison.
It had to be added:
> Tyrannosaurus rex. One of the largest land predators ever, it had teeth the size of a banana
Makes a good profile description on certain websites.
If you’re interested to read something on that topic I highly recommend the essay "That's About the Size of It" by Isaac Asimov (in his book "View from a Height").
He argues that human perception of animal size is skewed because humans use themselves as a benchmark.
He takes a logarithmic approach to illustrate where humans actually fit within the overall scale of the animal kingdom. We are way larger than we think we are!
We are megafauna predators! We’ve wiped them almost all out, which makes it less obvious, but that’s our ecological niche.
It seems to be like some of the scales slightly off?
If you are looking at the ladybird (ladybug) with the amoeba to the left, the amoeba isn't an order of the magnitude smaller - it would actually be visible by the human eye (bigger than a grain of sand)? Indeed, the amoeba seems the same size as the ladybird's foot?
Similarly, this makes the bumblebee appear smaller than a human finger (the in the adjacent picture), which isn't the case?
Cool visualization, but I also noticed the switch from SI units to imperial. From micrometers to inches, which was jarring and hard for me to compare.
I'd suggest keeping the SI unit , or at least having both once we get to the level of inches.
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.
I'm seeing the amoeba as approximately the size of the heel segment of a ladybug's leg. I consider lady bugs pretty small in an intuitive sense, their legs quite small and the smallest end segment to be especially small. I think that leaves an amoeba on the fringes of distinguishable perception which seems right to me, unless I'm overestimating their size.
I came to the comments to express surprise that amoebas were so large. It appears they vary wildly in size (as small as 2.3 micrometers... but up to 20 cm, or nearly 8 inches).
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.
Thank you for that info/correction!
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."
The males of dicopomorpha echmepterygis are even smaller, with wide sexual dimorphism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicopomorpha_echmepterygis
I never knew about these either.
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.
But if scales were perfectly respected, how could you see both a neuron and a human on the screen?
The tardigrade vs. ladybug gave me pause. So a tardigrade is about the side of a ladybugs eye?
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).
The T-rex appears taller than the giraffe, but it isn't and the scale in the website itself shows it.
Reminds me of https://scaleofuniverse.com . I think confining it to just living things removes the perspective of "Wow, we're really small compared to the rest of the universe".
There is another visualization from the same author, that starts at an astronaut and ends with the observable universe https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
Somewhat related!
Pretty glad the 9 foot long Arthopleura centipede went extinct 300 million years ago. No one wants to deal with that thing.
We've still got this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois
Thankfully they don't live on land.
That's fresh nightmare fuel all right
Not really bothered by snakes, sharks or spiders. But those things (and cave centipedes) look terrifying.
It was a millipede, not a centipede, which probably ate fungi or decaying plants.
So it was not a dangerous predator, though it could have been poisonous, like many modern millipedes.
No.fun in the cookie dialogue. Had to click 26 (sic!) switches to opt out of being tracked.
It is encouraging to know that I am not the only one who does that (sometimes, on interesting sites. otherwise I just leave).
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.
Consent-O-matic works fantastically to select exactly what you want.
Honestly I don't really see cookie banners anymore because I have a dismiss feature built into my ad blocker.
Always afraid that auto dismiss results in auto allow-all on thus type of dialog.
uBlock seemed to have handled it for me.
Not on mobile..
Firefox on mobile can install ublock
On Firefox mobile with unblock, here. Experienced nothing intrusive. It works, apparently. :)
One of the books that got me introduced to this fascinating aspect of our natural world is John Tyler Bonner's Size and Cycle. It has features amazing log-log plots of how different organisms from grow with time: from eggs to full-grown organisms. This kind of visualisation gives you a different perspective on growth and scale
For example, Sequoia gigantea Sequoia is the largest tree and can be effectively compared to the annual plant shown above. Fertilization and the early growth to the seed stage are essentially similar, but because of the cambium and the possibility of secondary thickening, the size of the tree can increase enormously. As can be seen from Figure 1 in the text, the sequoia does not begin to set seed until it is sixty years old and eighty meters tall.
Missing a mushroom from Oregon [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
I like it, but the switch from metric to inches is confusing, and I think introduces a bug - there's no way a sea snail is 5-6 neurons high.
Some of your neurons stretch from your brain to your big toe. 1.5m, or more in a tall person.
There's no way a tardigrade is half a sea snail.
Correct, but not the one on the site.
You can change the units in the top corner. It defaults to metric for me, but if your browser language is "en-US" you get imperial by default.
Tools 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...
Hey that's cool! I like that idea
Totally agree! Even as adults, the sense of scale hits differently when you interact with it. Your daughter will probably love discovering it too.
I felt like I was at a museum exhibit. It is fantastic.
> Human: A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
Thanks for the laugh!
Going to make this my LinkedIn headline
The music is so moving, tear inducing. One of the best links I've seen posted here and I've been here 15+ years. Well done Neal. I wish credit was given to the music, anyone know who created it?
The following from clicking on the i on the top-right after starting the show:
> Created by Neal Agarwal
> Illustrations by Julius Csotonyi
> Production by Liz Ryan
> Music & SFX by Aleix Ramon
> Cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga
Beautiful work.
If you click the "i" info button in the top right, it'll list the full credits, including those who worked on the music.
> Human A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
This was awesome! Also, I couldn't stop my child brain from anticipating "your mom" at the end.
Reminds me of the classic Scale of the Universe flash toy by Cary Huang (now available in HTML 5!):
Maybe it's a stupid question, but how does the poliovirus "work"? Like at this scale, the DNA strand is still pretty visible and a decent-ish percentage of the polio virus in size.. is it just a ball with DNA inside and not much else? How does it pack enough DNA to replicate itself into it's own size at that scale?
You’re pretty close actually. It’s a single strand of positive-sense RNA 7.5kb long, and a protein capsule. +ssRNA is treated as mRNA by the host and is directly translated into proteins.
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.
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.
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.
HUMAN
A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites. :)
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.
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).
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)."
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.
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.
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...
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.
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites
> Velociraptor > Smaller than usually depicted, the Velociraptor was actually only about the size of a turkey.
This is an interesting fact.
Why haven't I seen a Tardigrade with my eyeball? It seems like they are the size of a spot on a ladybug from the pics.
The spot on the ladybug is black against red, usually (there are many varieties); it's very conveniently highlighted. We're better at seeing "bold colour on bold colour" than "semi-translucent thing in water".
Because you clearly haven't spent enough time closely looking at pond and river water!
Our local parks department has several annual events where they ask for volunteers to help perform benthic macroinvertebrate surveys. It basically amounts to meeting up at a local park with a couple people in waders dragging special nets along the bottom, dumping scoops of material into buckets and large, shallow, white trays, and others sitting at picnic tables with spoons, magnifying glasses, and muffin tins sorting out the critters that get caught in the nets.
The cool part is that at the end, you can score the creek based on the quantity and types of larvae that you find: Caddisfly, mayfly, and stonefly larvae are very sensitive to factors like runoff from agriculture and road salt, sediment, water oxygenation, and other factors, beetles, crayfish, dragonflies, and scuds are moderately tolerant, while leeches, worms, midges, and flies will grow in anything. Thousands of these surveys happen every year, so you can compare the relative frequency and quantity of various species and determine the relative health of the stream.
I don't know how many tardigrades you'll find just scooping 4-8mm nymphs and larvae by eye, but I've brought my microscope to a couple and put random droplets of water under a cover and slide: there are an astonishing number of tiny critters swimming around at any zoom level.
You have seen a tardigrade with the naked eye (without microscope), that's as large as a spot on a ladybug?
No, sorry if that wasn't clear, I've not identified one by eye without a scope. Maybe your fine vision is better than mine, but all the tiniest things in a drop of water are just about indistinguishable without magnification. The kinds of water that have sufficient density to contain a tardigrade just look like they're full of grit, I don't think you could identify which speck was a tardigrade and which was just dirt.
Nymphs are larger (that's why they call them "macro" invertebrates), but it's always good to have at least a magnifying glass if not a loupe or microscope on site.
As a non-native speaker, TIL that "magnifying glass" and "loupe" are not synonyms. According to Wikipedia:
> [Loupes] generally have higher magnification than a magnifying glass, and are designed to be held or worn close to the eye.
Do you set aside the tasty-looking ones and wrap it up with a seafood boil?
Great 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:
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.
Reminds me of the video game Everything. Its a really cool game where you explore the various scales of the universe. It has its quirks (somewhat phoned in graphics like animals walking) but the concept and execution are great IMO, would love a sequel. Also bonus points for featuring Alan watts as a core character.
1 nitpick: The Dwarf Lanternshark is not found off the coast of "Columbia" but "Colombia!"
Came to say exactly the same thing :)
Onl missing a Wikipedia link on each page!
Reminds me of the classic "powers of 10" video: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0. Someone ought to remake that but as a gaussian splat reconstruction, so you can freely move the camera as well as zoom.
Great webapp. There is a similar app that I love to scroll through from time to time. Its free and needs no internet connection. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263... The range of size in the universe, from the tiniest particles to the epic galaxies - we take you on a journey of size that lets you explore it all with a single swipe.
Absolutely loved that the intensity of the music is synced with the swiping. Fantastic job as always!
If 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('.animal-name'); return animalDiv ? animalDiv.textContent.trim() : ''; } function pressKey(keyCode) { const event = new KeyboardEvent('keydown', { key: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight', keyCode: keyCode, code: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight', which: keyCode, bubbles: true }); document.dispatchEvent(event); } function autoScroll() { const currentName = getCurrentAnimalName(); if (direction === 'right') { pressKey(39); // Right arrow if (currentName === 'Pando Clone') { console.log('Reached Pando Clone, switching to left'); direction = 'left'; } } else { pressKey(37); // Left arrow if (currentName === 'DNA') { console.log('Reached DNA, switching to right'); direction = 'right'; } } } // Start the interval intervalId = setInterval(autoScroll, 3000); // Log start message and provide stop function console.log('Auto-scroll started! To stop, call: stopAutoScroll()'); // Expose stop function globally window.stopAutoScroll = function() { clearInterval(intervalId); console.log('Auto-scroll stopped'); }; })();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?.textContent.trim() if (name === 'Pando Clone') s.dir = s.left if (name === 'DNA') s.dir = s.right s.dir() } s.left = press(37, 'ArrowLeft') s.right = s.dir = press(39, 'ArrowRight') s.start = (ms) => s.ival = setInterval(step, ms) s.stop = () => clearInterval(s.ival) } scroller.start(5000)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.
It claims a banana isn't technically living, but a banana has living cells so I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm not sure when they're all considered 'dead' after harvesting though - maybe some wiggle room there.
My understanding is that picked fruits and veg are still alive [1], and often respirating [2]. This is a big component in figuring out how to refrigerate them at the optimal temperatures and atmospheric makeup.
1. https://healthland.time.com/2013/06/21/theyre-alive-harveste... 2. https://agriculture.institute/food-chemistry-and-physiology/...
I think the banana was mostly added as a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker#%22Banana_for_...
I got the reference, it's just the 'not technically alive' part that I was calling out
CGP Grey does a similar video — spanning the sizes of our entire observable universe — called "Metric Paper" [0]
[0] https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
Even if you've never taken a mild psychedelic, this video hits in a similar manner (as sober metaphor).
----
I still drive with Neal.fun's Internet Roadtrip (same OP link author), every time I'm out in my workshop.
These are all riffs on "Powers of 10", a film made in the 70's for IBM by Charles and Ray Eames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
Star Size Comparison 3, simply a stunning visualization.
All hail web based apps!
We really dont need playStore and appStore to run beautiful things like this.
So many new facts to learn and I like how popular a post about the natural world is here
I find it amazing, that we can build microprocessors with transistors the size of a DNA molecule
[edited] - It's incredible to think that it starts from DNA, is 3.5nm tall and the solid silicon fins in our phone's transistor is twice that.
The chip is not smaller than 3.5nm; but a component on the chip is that small.
I am sure everyone has their own mind blown moment, and for me it was there being an animal about the size of a red blood cell.
Never before have I seen the message "Firefox has been terminated by the Linux kernel because the system is low on memory". Thanks for a new experience!
I do like the visualization.
The OOM killer strikes again.
Great visualization! It would have been nice to zoom out to a view of the world from space at the end, since this is really the max size of life as we know it (n=1 so far).
Amazing!
I always thought that the best we could do for targeted drug delivery was an adenovirus. But after seeing that parasite being only slightly bigger than a red blood cell, I think we can do better...
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.
“Compressible rodent” was not a phrase I thought I’d ever hear but I’m glad I did. Worth the price of a couple of coffees.
For comparison: ASML machines print chips with precision up to 2nm.
https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...
And the atoms in the proteins and DNA that are exactly replicated to the atom each have a feature sizes resolved at fractions of a nanometer in 3 dimensions (and likely in time/dynamics too).
Not 13?
He always makes great content, I love it.
Beautiful site. Also very pleased to see the mitochondrion being referred to as the powerhouse of the cell, as is law.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Tyrannosaurus rex’s tiny hands were depicted so accurately. As far as I recall, scientists are still puzzled about why it even had hands. Apparently, they were too small to be useful for anything, not even scratching its face.
I like the stuff un the sute but the number if partners and affiliates in the consent window is very off putting.
It's only 141 TCF vendor(s) and 69 ad partner(s), with no way to reject all, and you have to manually click on every "vendor" to remove consent.
It's the second or third time I see this "managed by Google compliant with IAB" (note: not with GDPR)
This is super infuriating. I wish there was a way to offshore the effort and work needed to toggle each option off to the culprit website. Perhaps when website A presents you with such hostile prompts, take their contact email, and subscribe it with automation to each of the vendors. I'm just too tired of this shit.
Did a great job keeping the scale jumps fresh. Every step had a little twist instead of just a commonly known larger animal on the next slide. Wild that the Japanese spider crab is basically the same size as an orangutan.
My main takeaway was that I had no clue how large Krill can get. To think that Antarctic Krill is as long as the Bee Hummingbird is tall is absurd to me.
Beautiful! I love the human feet always visible in the background! It helps me set perspective.
Wonderful. The music, illustrations, and sliding sound effect reminded me of the game Braid.
the slinding at some point made me wonder what if i was playing Tinder
You’re telling me a white blood cell is only ten times longer than mitochondria?
How is that possible? Doesn’t it contain at least thousands?
(Uninsightful comment but I’m gonna put it here anyway) The US spelling of haemoglobin is all kinds of wrong. Love the site. Would love some algae in there though. Perhaps a desmid or diatom?
This is simply beautiful, and will definitely inspire me with some arty projects I'm working on.
Great work -> the minimalist UI, art and music fits amazingly.
One thing I noticed: the site's images fail to load if the brave adblocker is on
On a desktop screen, you also see a 'Compare To' button which puts the current and the compared one beside each other!
I didn't know tardigrades can be big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Apparently big enough to be seen but not big enough to be recognised without magnification.
Crazy how something so simple hits so hard. Always wild to see how much meaning people can pack into a minimal format.
I don't understand how the location of a 377 foot tall tree could be kept secret. Wouldn't that type of thing be visible in satellite imagery at the very least?
It's not sticking straight up from the ground in Kansas. Hyperion has many siblings nearby and is on rocky terrain which conceals its overall height.
From Wikipedia:
"The exact location of Hyperion is nominally secret but is available via internet search.[12] However, in July 2022, the Redwood Park superintendent closed the entire area around the tree, citing "devastation of the habitat surrounding Hyperion" caused by visitors. Its base was trampled by the overuse and as a result ferns no longer grow around the tree.[13]
Measures to protect the Hyperion tree were officially implemented in 2022 when the National Park Service (NPS) closed public access to its location in Redwood National Park.[14][15] Anyone who gets too close could face up to six months in jail and a $5,000 maximum fine.[13][16][17]"
It isn't a secret. The location can easily be found if you Google it.
It is literally a secret. The location cannot easily be found with Google. Go ahead, try and find it.
And if you do, don't post it.
There are a lot of 300 foot trees in the general vicinity, so you'd need to actually measure to be precisely sure
Is banana a life? If yes, then hundreds of other lives are not included in this project.
A simple idea but fabulous execution!
Nit: the tool-tips on the action icons in the top-right aren't consistent.
When music is playing the tool tip is "unmute" which is a verb. It should either be "mute" (to indicate what clicking will do) or "unmuted" (adjective) indicating the current state. Similarly, when the music is muted the tool-tip should either be "muted" or "unmute".
I'm not sure _which_ is wanted (verb or adjective) because the ruler tool-tip uses "Hide Ruler" and "Show Ruler" (verb), while the units tool-tip uses "Units: imperial" and "Units: Metric" (adjective). The info tool-tip ("Info") is also an adjective.
For consistency, I'd use a verb-phrase in all the tool tips:
- "Show info"
- "Switch units to metric/imperial"
- "Hide/show ruler"
- "Mute/unmute music"
I mean, I know this is pedantic nit-picking, but the site is so perfect, what else am I going to do?
Fun to see the Jerboa. I recently read a family history written by my uncle and he believes this is the source of our family name.
EDIT: Nevermind. Perhaps it was an ad that I clicked on. Lots of comments here indicating they don't see it, and some that did.
My Original comment here (too late to delete):
Beware. When you reach the end there is a "more projects" button. In there is a cute IQ test (possibly appealing to the HN crowd). When you reach the end of the test it asks for email, and then ultimately wants $1 to get your results. If you pay by credit card due note that there is an auto-checked box for some $29.99 per month subscription for... something.
This is definitely not something Neal would ever do. Can you share the URL you're talking about? There's no IQ test in his projects list at all. https://neal.fun/
Are you sure about that? for me it just leads to neal.fun, which is a well loved by HN list of projects, but no IQ test nor begging for money.
Link? couldn't find the IQ test in more projects. And super skeptical neal.fun is trying to trick people into $30/month subscriptions
edit: I turned off my ad blocker and discovered the site is showing some ads. Guessing you clicked on an ad?
also it's pretty ironic because one of his projects is showcasing dark patterns: https://neal.fun/dark-patterns/
For what it's worth, there are AdSense interstitial ads on the site, so you probably got duped by one of those ads.
Saw this too on mobile - I think it's an ad - I requested a paid ad-free version elsewhere in the comments
I can't seem to find the IQ test. I see captcha and other "games"
Ironically this sounds like a piece of satire Neal would make.
this has more of an indie gem feel compared to the blockbuster that was stimulation clicker. as others have mentioned it reminds me of scale of the universe flash animation. I think borrowing some ideas from that, including zooming in and out rather than side to side, could have benefits here.
So wonderful. Thanks for making this so open. I'll show it to my kids. The artwork is very good and the soundtrack too.
It was great until Sea snail appeared in inches. Transitioning from micrometer/milliliter to inches is pretty rough
For me it appears in millimetres, but I'm in Canada not the US. I'm guessing the default is chosen based on your browser's language. You can change the units in the top right.
Edit: I checked the page's code and it does indeed set the units based on language. If your language is "en-US" you get imperial by default, everyone else gets metric.
Minor thing that bothers me is that I can't scroll through the things like in the deep sea or space elevator.
So many loving comments, I have nothing more to add to them, and nothing to subtract from them.
Very beautiful. Love this.
If it helps, AFAIK (I do atomic force microscopy of DNA), DNA's height is closer to 2nm than 4.
This is absolutely incredible. Thank you.
>Music & SFX by Aleix Ramon >Cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga
Got a link to the music?
The people on the page look really scary with DarkReader enabled.
double clicking makes the animation jitter. ive had to deal with matching derivatives of smooth slopes in rendering as well. the animation seems to be finite time (and so variable velocity) and mashing click is just updating the final point without matching the current derivative.
What about that 3.5 sq mil fungi
yes indeed, fungi are under-represented here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
Why not "microinches" while you're at it?
Like all of your projects....thank you for sharing
Cool, but a little more thought on the content rather than the presentation would improve it. For example starting with an arbitrary segment of DNA double helix and saying how "tall" this arbitrary segment is, is just silly.
Instead, it should show how _wide_ it is. And for extra coolness, keep it in frame, coiling longer and longer as you go, and eventually have the same strand, which has been with us all the time, as a specific example (e.g. human chromosome 7 or some such) by _length_
Are there supposed to be pictures? I passed a human silhouette, but that was it.
The Japanese spider crab being the same size as a tiger shocked me.
The music is phenomenal. Really, really phenomenal.
Always awesome with by Neal.
Arthropleura is missing shadow.
Wow! That's very interesting.
An obvious benefit of "humans adapting to create websites"!
Beautiful website, love that it's using vue.
Blood cells are huge!
Always a joy to see neal.fun on the HN front page.
What surprised me most was how large a single neuron is.
In generalized, abstract sort of way it's probably accurate, but in reality most neurons don't look much like that and many have dendrites orders of magnitude longer than the one in that image. Stringing all your dendrites end-to-end they can probably easily go to the moon and back.
I've got a sudden strong urge to play Katamari Damacy.
You are an artist, a good one .
A week ago, I learned that animals weren't bigger in the past.
Sure, there were dinosaurs that were quite big, but they weren't living all at the same time. So there was maybe a big one, that died out, and the next big one would evolve much later.
As this project shows, the biggest animals and plants are living right now.
Also, we're living in the time with the biggest spiders in history. Somehow they don't get that big on average. Turns out, the high oxygen levels in the past didn't affect arachnid sizes as much as insect sizes.
>microns to inches
absolutely foul
This is what the web should be
If I see a neal.fun link on HN, I click.
if anyone that made this sees this, you made a typo on the Dwarf Lanternshark, its not Columbia, its ColOmbia
Why not the super cluster?
beautiful illustrations, beautiful site
I always click when I see neal.fun.
Neurons are huge
!! super nice thanks !
Just delightful, thank you Neal.
That was fun, neal.fun.
Nice that the back button works.
it seems strange E. Coli can fit 70,000 ribosomes
Illustrations are fantastic
looks like they don't show up with an adblocker
awesome that there was a banana for scale!
beautiful soundscapes
Why would th3 website switch from metric to usa units out of nowhere m
Visually this is nice, but navigation-wise I absolutely hate the UI.
I don't want to have to keep on scrolling to "discover" new images.
Great use of sound!
cool and artistic app, how did you make this
amazing job
The first page looks like a book. It's awesome. Thanks, so refreshing. No fucking inhuman cookie banner.
Neal is him
What made the DNA?
Well made!
The visual scale seems off, especially on the smaller end of things. Also, are Velociraptors really that small? Jurassic Park lied to me.
Spielberg took a Deinonychus and called it a Velociraptor because it sounded cooler.
No, Michael Crichton did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus#Cultural_significa...
where is Solaris?
nicely done.
My kids will LOVE this
Banana, ha ha.
I wish Neal would do behind the scenes, how he built this art. I wonder whether LLM assistants like Claude Code make such an interactive show more feasible.
He previously did a game "Infinite Craft" which leveraged Llama models. However, I was only able to find an outdated blog from 2019.
I think you'd notice a pretty big difference in an LLM clone of this site. The art, music, and other small wouldn't be as consistent or hang together as nicely.
If I could download the LLM clone, and share it, I think I'd prefer it. This is just a website that could at any moment disappear, it isn't like a book.
Sorry to say that my first reaction was that this is heresy. . . all this talk of science is a hoax.
But then the music calmed me right down and I wended my way through, not understanding 99% of what I saw but in awe of nature and Neal's art nonetheless.
Did you just escape from a religious sect living inside an underwater cavern or something?
Interesting things from this:
- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.
- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.
- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.
- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds
- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.
- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)
- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.
Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.
Thanks Neal for these projects!