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by goldscott 3588 days ago
I was here back in February. You can walk through some of the excavated tunnels, but most are closed off.

Wikipedia has a good image showing the sizes of different pyramids compared: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparis...

Note that Cholula has the largest base, but isn't the tallest.

4 comments

Tangent: that's really cool that wikipedia has interactive graphics and not just static images. In fact, and maybe I'm stupid, but I had no idea that svgs could be interactive until this moment. I thought they were just a vector image format.
SVGs can contain CSS and Javascript, and even without that, you can make all kinds of animations completely in SVG markup, using SVG-SMIL. I'm just saying this as trivia, and emphatically do not recommend that you go down this collapsing rabbit-hole.

Ignore that the Wikipedia page currently calls it "a recommended means[1][2][3] of animating SVG-based hypermedia" (lol). It's a complex feature that browsers have been dragging along for years while nobody's using it. Though it seems that Chrome is finally taking the initiative of dropping support, or at least discouraging its use.

They aren't interactive, but since their XML can be directly embedded in an HTML document they can be manipulated through the DOM.
It is interactive. Hovering over different pyramids fills in the shape of just that pyramid, and you can interact with any of them by clicking on it to bring you to the Wikipedia article on it.

I too didn't realize that this was possible in SVGs. It's awesome.

It's just CSS.
CSS styles
I wish that image included La Danta at El Mirador in Guatemala. It is possibly the 2nd largest by volume after the one in Cholula. Although because neither are excavated, there seems to be disagreement on which is larger.
The Transamerica, the Shard, and the Ryugyong are considered pyramids?

Is there a common definition those buildings fullfill? Or are they on the graph for scale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid:

"A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis)[1][2] is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_(geometry):

"In geometry, a pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. [...] When unspecified, a pyramid is _usually_ assumed to be a regular square pyramid"

Note the _usually_.

> The Transamerica, the Shard, and the Ryugyong are considered pyramids?

If you shrink a side elevation of the Shard to 10% of its actual height, it looks like an eight-storey tall pyramid: http://imgur.com/a/Vslkl

It'a amazing that more than half of those are in the BC era.