
Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness - aatish
http://noticing.co/on-size-and-metabolism/
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vanderZwan
This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better
cooling system!

Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B.
West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and
puts them in a wider context:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc)

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tomphoolery
Note to self: when macbook gets too hot, submerge in ocean.

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pen2l
I used to go outside and sit my laptop on the snow when it used to get too
hot.

It... sort of worked. It cooled the laptop. Performance was discernibly
better.

Until one day water (melted snow) got in and laptop stopped working. Totally
serious, this happened.

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cpach
Haha :) Before I retired it, I sometimes put my Asus Eee netbook in the fridge
to cool it down. Somehow I managed to avoid getting ice inside the chassis.
Pure luck probably :)

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henryw
TLDR:

If you burrow down — all the way down — to a typical cell in an elephant, and
then compare it to a typical cell in a mouse — amazingly, the two cells behave
differently.

Elephant cells aren’t lazy. They’re always working, but compared to mouse
cells, elephant cells typically do their job a little more slowly, burn less
fuel to get the job done and, being more efficient, they run cooler.*

So that’s why elephants don’t spontaneously combust (and neither do we, much
to Calvin’s relief.) An elephant is built from cooler stuff than a mouse. Even
though an elephant has many, many more little heaters packed inside its body,
each heater runs at a much lower setting.

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pmalynin
Calvin's, Benson's and Bassham's relief -- I presume?

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me_again
Reminiscent of JBS Haldane's Classic essay "On Being The Right Size", which I
recommend to anyone who liked this. [http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-
size.html](http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html)

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legitster
Robert Krulwich has such an amazing way of explaining things. It takes almost
no time to recognize his writing.

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Fizzadar
Really enjoyed this - interesting read with awesome illustrations and
interactivity. Also love the Noticing.co name (bookmarked).

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Animats
Of course. For small animals, life is a struggle to keep warm. For large
animals, life is a struggle to cool off.

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daniel-cussen
For a human in Santiago or California, life is juuuust right.

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Vexs
This reminds me a lot of the works of David Macaulay, the art style and
writing style are very similar. He wrote some great books, amazing for curious
kids.

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nstart
This was a great post. Very easy to digest and lots of stuff to ponder on as
my head slowly wraps itself around a few counter intuitive learnings.

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oh_sigh
The volume/surface area problem is the same reason why you generally don't see
massive single celled creatures. Also, it's why smaller people can be pound-
for-pound stronger than heavier people (muscle strength scales with regards to
muscle cross section, whereas muscle needs to fill out the whole volume).

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dredmorbius
Leverages also have a lot to do with greater apparent strength in shorter
athletes, though that varies by lift.

For bench press, short arms are an advantage, as well as where specifically
the muscle anchors in the limb. Similarly for squats.

For deadlifts, the situation's slightly different: long arms help in that the
bar needs to be moved a shorter distance, though femur length still benefits
by being short. There's also femur-shin ratio, and how that plays with angles.

But yes, volume vs. cross section matters a lot.

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trhway
and on the same note of volume/surface ratio - Sun produces heat with the
intensity (J/kg) of a pile of regular compost.

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dredmorbius
The quote that struck me (via Wikipedia): roughly an amphibian metabolic rate.
1/2 to 1/5 that of a mammal's.

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richmarr
Interestingly according to this some of the species farthest from the line of
best fit (in both directions) are bats.

Pteropus Giganteus (Indian Flying Fox) appears to have an extraordinatorily
slow metabolic rate per kg, scoring 0.044, yet Rousettus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian
Fruit Bat) scores 5.508.

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captaincrowbar
The scrolling seems perfectly normal to me, but that huge fixed banner that
takes up 1/3 of the screen is just ridiculous.

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dredmorbius
That goes away (or is minimised) with JS enabled. Though there's still a small
fixed header. I've nuked that with Stylish (CSS management extension).

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thegoofromspace
Huh. I wonder how this works for warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded animals?

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eru
Cold-blooded animals have to get rid of excess heat, too.

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jonsterling
elephants scale after all

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of
really hard to read this because the scrolling is acting all weird on firefox

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abruzzi
scrolling is normal on safari. On the other hand, the unnecessary animations
gave me a headache and I had to stop reading halfway through.

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imh
Can we start getting a label/tag for sites that hijack scrolling? The way we
label pdfs and articles from previous years?

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aatish
Hi there. Sorry about this, I didn't realize it was 'hijacking scrolling'. I
tried a possible fix. Could you let me know if you still see the problem?
Thanks.

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dredmorbius
Generally, do _not_ hijack user experiences.

Scrolling, highlight/selection colour, fixed-position elements (I've ended up
nuking your site's header entirely), autoplay audio/video, mouse action, click
actions (either opening left-click in new tab, or center click in same tab),
etc.

All violate the principle of least surprise/astonishment. Quite annoying.

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gambiter
> highlight/selection colour

You can have your horrible purple/blue... I'll take people hijacking those
abominations any day of the week.

Otherwise, that's a good list. :)

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dredmorbius
If you don't like the defaults you can change it to what you want with a local
default stylesheet. The issue isn't that the default is sane but that changes
from default are jarring.

White text on a blue field works well for me.

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therealidiot
The scroll on this site is unusable - it kept scrolling too far or not enough.
The performance is awful too (low framerate on an i7-4790K + NVidia 980 Ti,
which should be able to handle some simple scrolling)

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aatish
Hi there - I'm a co-author of the post and put the site together. I'm sorry to
hear that the scroll is acting up. I'd like to fix that. Can you (or anyone
else seeing this issue) tell me if you see the same behavior on the other
posts on the blog or just this one? Thanks.

EDIT: I disabled the 'smooth scrolling' option in my wordpress theme settings
to try to fix this. Please let me know if that worked or if you're still
seeing the issue. Thanks.

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anon4
Almost unusable once the jumping can of beans was in view. On Firefox latest
stable, windows 8.1. Scrolling was happening in bursts and the entire browser
UI was frozen. Once I managed to scroll past it, it worked fine.

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aatish
ok, I think I see the problem. I swapped out that cocktail shaker animation
with an animated gif of the same. Hopefully it should work smoothly now.
Thanks for your help!

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tronaut
OT: Why do sites insist on hijacking scroll behavior? It annoys me to no end

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Klinky
The desktop experience of this site is pretty terrible. I have smooth
scrolling off because I don't like the lag. The scroll wheel on my mouse won't
work consistently when the mouse is over certain elements on the page. The
scroll bar is only a few pixels wide, so hard to use.

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TsiCClawOfLight
I use Firefoxes reading mode.

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luana_santos
teste

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luana_santos
test

