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On Being the Right Size (1928)
- jonah-archive 9y agoThis is a great essay. If the topic interests you, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic work On Growth And Form is also a worthwhile read: https://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom https://archive.org/details/ongrowthform00thom
- Sharlin 9y agoSomewhat related: Feynman’s classic lecture ”There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, given in 1959 (gosh, sixty years ago!) http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html Sadly, at the time it didn’t get the attention it deserved.
- clpo13 9y ago> An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts. Here's an idea for a surreal illustrated Bible.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoOld style Angels were already surreal. Like a pillar of fire, seven heavens tall.
- gowld 9y agoWhy Elephants Have Big Ears is a nice book that covers similar topics.
- gowld 9y agoThe article's closing point about socialism is strange. It is likely conflating "socialism" with "command economy". As we have learned in the past Century, democracy has trouble scaling to 300million people as well. The problem is the single leader for a large population. Confederated/Federalized systems may do better, and those can be "socialist".
- nordsieck 9y agoSocialism: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. I think you're confused. Socialism competes with capitalism as an economic system, not democracy as a political system.
- boxed 9y ago“or regulated” covers modern democracies fine.
- hyper_reality 9y agoAfter reading the article I did some research into the background of the author. I was surprised to learn that he was a diehard socialist and later Communist, describing Stalin as "a very great man who did a very good job" as late as 1962.
- sram1337 9y agoSurface area to volume ratio. As something gets smaller, it has more surface relative to its volume. It explains why shoestring fries are so tasty. More fried surface, less potato