Talk:1338: Land Mammals

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 09:05, 5 March 2014 by 108.162.215.46 (talk)
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Is it mass or weight? --173.245.53.119 06:38, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

It says weight. Since most land animals live on the... land, there is not much difference. I suppose if a lot of aninimals lived near a prime pole vaulting location it could skew the results. 108.162.246.117 06:40, 5 March 2014 (UTC)


I'm really curious, what are the other, unlabeled groupings? Author's website 108.162.215.46 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

On page 186 of Smil's referenced book, there is a bar chart with the following values in millions of tons (*=not used in Randall's graphic):
elephants 0.8
horses 40
pigs 100
cattle 450
people 280
*whales 80
*all wild vertebrates 30
*all domesticated vertebrates 650
108.162.215.46 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I think that this graph is actually more illustrative of how much support humans need to maintain themselves (the amount of cattle is astonishing). lcarsos_a (talk) 07:58, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

According to [1] there are 525 million dogs, assuming 20 kg as average weight, this should give 10 squares in the diagram. I can't find reliable numbers for cats, but there are more cats than dogs, but they don't weigh as much, so their total weight could be similar to that of the dogs. --108.162.254.160 08:42, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The blob of 13 under the word Livestock may very well represent both dogs and cats.

Does anybody see a reason for the particular layout of the blocks? My first impression was a globe but obviously it doesn't correspond to any ontinents, etc. 108.162.254.66 08:44, 5 March 2014 (UTC)