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Chartjunk. It took near-zero effort to find better ones all around this interesting and heavily researched topic, and their real papers too, per standard HN preference.

- https://www.zianet.com/wrucker/the%20energetic%20cost%20of%2...

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258884042...

- https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1350

FWIW, the original version of this chart is what Steve Jobs was referring to when he first used his “Bicycle for the Mind” analogy. There’s a clip of him talking about it somewhere on YouTube at an early computer fair.

I have questions.

Why have they animated the chart? It adds nothing, as far as I can tell.

Why all the tiny points? Is each one a data point (seems unlikely)?

Why is there only one swimmer?

Why is there a walker/runner area to the left and below swimmers? What is in that area?

Is this article just shilling for Big Velomobile? ;0)

The average salmon weighs more than the average rat. Am I missing something?

Pure efficiency in locomotion is a terrible measure, is a person on a bicycle more efficient traversing a forest?

Trying to say that a dog is incredibly unefficient is misleading at best - especially when we're trying to make a statement about nature's most efficient traveller.

It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.

Seeing how this is related to physics I'm surprised they left out the Spherical Cow [1] since it would probably score high marks when it comes to efficiency.

[1] https://www.sphericalcowblog.com/spherical-cows

I'm curious about why helicopters are located where they are. A powered sailplane case study: pipistrel snius weighs 700 lbs and gets 47 mpg. A comparable weight helicopter (mosquito XE) gets about 7 mpg.

Let’s not forget that you also need a paved road. The condor doesn’t need that.

I don't think the average horse is heavier than the average cow.

The first illustration has no legend or explanation of what the axes are (if you scroll it, you can find it), but if you scroll down, you're going to see it again. A bit annoying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what's cool to see is that vehicles created by humans the most efficient of all

What about a bear on a bike?

Ah. But sorry, no. It's straight from "how to lie with charts".

How much energy is it going to take a human to cross 40000 km (circumnavigate the Earth)? A human on a jet will require around 2 tons of fuel and around 40 hours of time (fuel economy of about 4L per 100km of flight).

A human on a bicycle will roughly take about a year of travel (assuming a fairly reasonable 150km a day). In other words, about 1/50-th of a productive human life needlessly wasted that could have been used to improve the world.

Carbon footprint in the US is about 20 tons per year per person, so that's another way to look at a year of missed opportunity that you would spend by cycling instead of flying.

This aspect is almost completely ignored when people talk about bikes or public transit. Yes, they are efficient, but their efficiency comes at a cost of several wasted lifetimes of time every day for a large city.

What's the unlabeled yellow point?