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An inch is 25.4 millimeters, or 25400 micrometers, so capillaries are '''about __0.02__ hundredths of an inch'''. An inch is 25.4 millimeters, or 25400 micrometers, so capillaries are '''about __0.2 thousandths__ of an inch, or __0.2 mils__''' or 200 millionths of an inch. Inches are a weird archaic unit, so it is unsurprising that a particle physicist (trained to work with vastly smaller metric units, not mixed engineering units) doesn't notice this error.

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Page 125: "shrew's heart" ... and ... "whale's heart" ... "This is pretty amazing -- just think of the enormous stresses on the walls of the shrew's tiny aorta and arteries compared with the pressures on yours or mine, let alone those on a whale's. No wonder the poor creature dies after only a year or two."

Scale

The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Geoffrey West 303.44 WES 2017 Beavertin Library

Great ideas. A fat book that should have been leaner - though it could have been more explicit about unsolved problems and open questions.

A couple of math goofs:


Page 119: ... "our capillaries are only 5 micrometers wide (about a hundredth of an inch), which is somewhat smaller than a hairbreadth"

An inch is 25.4 millimeters, or 25400 micrometers, so capillaries are about 0.2 thousandths of an inch, or 0.2 mils or 200 millionths of an inch. Inches are a weird archaic unit, so it is unsurprising that a particle physicist (trained to work with vastly smaller metric units, not mixed engineering units) doesn't notice this error.


Page 125: "shrew's heart" ... and ... "whale's heart" ... "This is pretty amazing -- just think of the enormous stresses on the walls of the shrew's tiny aorta and arteries compared with the pressures on yours or mine, let alone those on a whale's. No wonder the poor creature dies after only a year or two."

Scale (last edited 2021-06-25 18:46:11 by KeithLofstrom)