
Scaling: Why Giants Don't Exist - soundsop
http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/scaling.html
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AngryParsley
On Being the Right Size is in the same vein:

"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the
bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is
fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes."

<http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html>

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radley
This topic was investigated many years ago and was known as "The Physics of
Lilliput."

For those who are only familiar with _Gulliver's Travels_ as a movie, the 18th
century book also includes a visit to a land of giants (Brobdingnag) and other
places (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels>).

Thus the physics studied applied to both giants and mini-people (re:
@AngryParsley).

(only reference I could find:
[http://www.brookscole.com/physics_d/templates/student_resour...](http://www.brookscole.com/physics_d/templates/student_resources/003026961X_serway/optional/scaling.html))

~~~
jackchristopher
The overall field is called allometry. Kleiber's Law is another reason behind
our size and shapes: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law>

_"for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the ¾
power of the animal's mass."_

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Apreche
On a planet with lower gravity, the same rules would apply, but the ratio
would differ. A much larger human could exist there with the same proportions
as an Earth human.

Perhaps this is how Galactus exists. He lives in space, where there is
effectively zero gravity. Thus, he can be gigantic without any problems.

~~~
subud
On a related note, there are some geologists who believe the Earth has
increased in volume/mass over millions of years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_Earth>

For instance, dinosaurs grew very large because the Earth was much smaller
with less mass and gravity.

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tdmackey
Dinosaurs and Google. 'nuff said.

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nostrademons
I thought of Google when I read the article, when I got to the line about
large animals being made possible by the development of the circulatory
system.

It seems like there has to be a qualitative change to deal with scale. Moore's
Law has multiplied computing power by a factor of roughly a million over 30
years. In most of the industry, that capacity has been eaten up by
productivity enhancements. We have CPU cycles to burn, so we burn them in
interpreted languages like Python and Ruby and IDEs like Eclipse, for some
marginal increase in productivity.

Google chose to burn them by processing larger and larger data sets, instead.
And there're certain emergent phenomena that occur as the data set gets
bigger. Almost nothing in search or ads would work with the data available at
desktop-scale.

The interesting thing is that by pushing on data size instead of productivity,
Google's had to find other ways to scale productivity and the number of
engineers in the organization. I've mentioned some of the public ones in a
previous comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101443>); there're
some others that I don't think I can talk about. But I find this whole notion
of where you allocate resources fascinating. There's this conventional wisdom
of always putting them into developer productivity, but Google's succeeded
because they _sometimes_ (judiciously) choose to move them into processing
more data and find other ways to work around the productivity hit that
entails.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I've continued to be perplexed by the lack of other companies copying Google's
revolutionary style of data center operations. It makes such a huge difference
in Google's capabilities (and their bottom line), yet data center operations
outside of Google haven't changed much in a decade.

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mtw
it's because Google's data center are geared for one single purpose: crunching
massive amounts of data. They can get away with just one hardware platform,
fine-tweak it, then design the racks.

Most other companies (99% of the web companies) other there have different
needs. For instance, Facebook needs one hardware platform fine-tweaked for the
cache, another one for pics and video storage, another one for chat, plus
mysql etc.

It's the same for your regular web2.0 company, they want different kinds of
servers, so they will ask data centers specific hardware and different server
formats. It's therefore very hard, if not impossible, for a data center to
copy Google's design, since they have to host so many kind of hardware.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Even so there are many companies that own their own data centers outright.
It's intriguing to me that in an industry where a successful company can't
exist for longer than a week without being cloned 8-ways from Sunday Google
has managed to maintain its uniqueness over the course of a decade. In some
ways that's a testament to Google's excellence, but in other ways it's a
testament to the very dysfunctional nature of the state of the industry.

It's interesting how potent, and how rare, cross-domain expertise is in this
industry. Google deftly coordinates data center operations (including server
hardware) and software mastery, giving it a unique and enormous edge over its
competitors. Apple weaves together expertise in device hardware, software
development, usability, and aesthetics beyond anything its competitors can
achieve, giving them significant market dominance and enormous brand prestige.
Amazon combines competent large scale web-application hosting and development
with highly efficient warehouse and fulfillment operations. It seems as though
in this industry melding together expertise in related but seemingly far
separated areas is a good recipe for attaining a near unassailable advantage
over your competition.

~~~
mtw
good point.

I think it has more to do with the company's core values than the company's
expertise.

Most data centers have expertise in data centers operations, but they don't
know where to focus. Google is a master in optimization, so they took it to
the next level, even in data centers. Apple values design and user experience
that it sets the focus on future product development etc.

