Let’s Get Small

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I’m a small guy, at 5’5″ I think some people almost find it alarming how tiny I am, at least compared to how tall they expect me (or any adult male) to be. It’s me in the context of other people, the relative scale can be surprising.

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On my Galaxy Note 5, it has a one-handed small-screen mode, where the contents of the display shrink for ease of use with one hand. Turns out that this unthinkably-tiny display-within-a-display is almost exactly the same size as the iPhones I stopped using as recently as late 2013. To see that size of a display now, or to hold an iPhone 5 or earlier, is to hold something that suddenly seems impossibly, laughably small. It’s the context of having gotten used to 5.5, 5.7, and 6-inch displays that makes them seem so small, when they once seemed so, well, optimal.

Know what? Everything is small. Enjoy the zen-like experience of this Business Insider video (which I seem to be having some trouble embedding, so if it doesn’t show below, click the previous link), which shows the relative size of the micro- and macro-cosmos. It induces for me a kind of sublime separation from everything, and at the same time a kind of vertigo. But a pleasant one.

A more, let’s say, manual version of this kind of revelations-of-cosmic-scale can be found here. And of course you can also dizzy yourself with the immeasurable heavens.