The Austrian economist and political scientist Leopold Kohr opposed the “cult of bigness” in social organization. He inspired the movement for a human scale and the Small Is Beautiful movement. His most influential work was The Breakdown of Nations. In 1983, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. In the series Kohrisms we want to give attention to some of […]
Seeing Jane Fonda’s clumsy striptease in the opening scene of the sci-fi classic Barbarella arouses laughter rather than anything else, but it does trigger a desire to break free from gravitational inhibitions. Weightlessness is defined by the absence of stress and strain resulting from externally applied forces. The desire to experience such freedom is deeply rooted in […]
. . The Disproportionate Restaurant investigates the relationship with food and ingredients from the perspective of a human species of 50 centimeters tall. It maps possibilities that today’s chefs can only dream of, even in the age of molecular gastronomy. There is the relatively predictable resizing of portions and ingredients. A chicken might feed up to a […]
For some people the most exciting consequence of shrinking the human body is not that we’ll save resources, or the new abundance of space and the challenge of redesigning most of our things. What keeps them busy is if at 50 centimeters and 2 kilograms it may finally become possible to fly. At the end […]
The final velocity of a falling body is the product of its acceleration and the time the body is accelerating. The smaller the person the smaller the risk of getting seriously hurt. Kinetic energy increases as length raised to the fifth power. If a child half your height falls unsupported to the ground, its head […]
The second law of thermodynamics, also called the entropy law, says that the disorder of a spontaneous system is a function of its mass and energy. Entropy is a measure of disorder, decay, or chaos within a system. More mass and energy mean more possible states a system can be in, and are thus more […]