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xkcd #3283: Size and Lifespan (lemmy.nz)

submitted 4 days ago by xkcdbot@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world

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xkcd #3283: Size and Lifespan

Title text:

With their 13 years recording and performing together and two humans worth of mass, the White Stripes are sandwiched neatly between gray wolves and blue whales.

Transcript:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

Source: https://xkcd.com/3283/

explainxkcd for #3283

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[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 4 days ago (4 children)

The linear pattern of the things plotted here weirds me out. Is there really such a clear life-time / size trend? Or were specific things chosen to be listed because they follow a roughly linear trend on the log-log plot?

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 69 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Somebody already posted the famous phrase in another thread:

Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 6 points 4 days ago

It's like the opposite of a smith chart.

[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago

You know, I was going to say that tetration or busy beaver numbers would counter that argument, but then again I guess they’d pretty much just look like vertical lines if the stroke weight of the marker was enough to cover the curved behavior around zero.

[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

I can at least think of a few counterexamples:

Cats live longer than dogs.
Small stars live longer than large stars (by dramatic amounts).
Black holes larger than the ~10^10 kg mark shown here live a lot longer than any other object with the same mass. A hypothetical moon mass black hole can most likely outlive every single star in the universe.
Protons are smaller than anything in this chart yet are believed to decay over an extremely long time scale (>10^34 years).
Even smaller particles like electrons likely live forever.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Those particles are exactly the kind of exception I was looking for. Tiny things that last a long time. The opposite kind of exceptions are probably impossible since making large things takes a lot of time. You would need to have something the size of a galaxy that lasts from Monday evening to Thursday morning.

[–] ElBarto@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

The graph has a couple of those "counter examples".

[–] PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Small dogs live longer than big dogs generally too

[–] IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

he's only plotting things that fit on the trend, log log is very forgiving. but if protons were in there yhey would be far to the left and all the way up higher than stars

[–] ElBarto@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

Oh, protons! I misinterpreted the typo as proteins.

[–] ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago

Checkmate atheists