Mexican Dwarf Bullfighters

October 26, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Difference in body-size has intrigued people throughout the centuries. Dwarfs were amongst the most popular gladiators in Rome and famous little people like General Tom Thumb, Sebastiano Biavati and He Pingping still capture the imagination. Another example is documented in the book The Enanitos Toreros…

Preformationism & the Homunculus

October 21, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

In 1694 Nicolaas Hartsoeker, in his Essai de Dioptrique produced an image of a tiny human form curled up inside a sperm cell, He referred to it as petit l’infant, the small infant. This image, depicting what historians now refer to as the homunculus, has become iconic of the…

Children’s Shrinklit.

October 19, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

There is a lot of of children’s literature involving little or shrunken characters. These stories sparked our imagination as a child and in many cases continue to do so, consciously and subconsciously. In the Netherlands we have Pinkeltje and Wiplala, in Sweden it’s Simon Small,…

Megalophobia

October 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Quite often the  primary response to The Incredible Shrinking Man’s ambition to downsize the human body is the fear of being exposed to animals. As we’ll shrink, our environment and everything in it will appear a lot larger. The fear of large animals and objects…

The Research Puppet

October 11, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

This is a photo of my mother in the mid 80’s holding a self-marionette, more or less the size of our projected future people. The Incredible Shrinking Man is developing tools to investigate what it would be like to be 50 centimeters. One of these tools…

The Methuselah Gene

September 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 3

The strong correlation between size and the aging process has been discussed here before. However the connection between the two is a very complex puzzle of different ingredients, all playing a role in the aging/growing process. A type of gene mutation long known to extend…

Gravitational Time Dilation

September 25, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Einstein’s theory, that short people grow old slower then tall people, has finally been proven scientifically. In an experiment using the most accurate atomic clocks ever invented, researchers of the National Institute of Standards and Technology showed that clocks run faster if they are raised…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…

Koro Syndrome

September 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The Incredible Shrinking Man is interested in mapping shrink desires that already exist in society. But we shouldn’t close our eyes to the opposite; the fear to shrink. One of the more curious manifestations of this fear is the Koro Syndrome, the pathological fear that…

Degrowth: Small is Happy

September 15, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In the influential collection of essays “Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered” first published in 1973, the economic thinker Fritz Schumacher proposes the idea of “smallness within bigness”. For a large organization to work it must behave like a related…

An Act of Rebellion

September 14, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

In The Tin Drum, one of the great postwar literary classics, the protagonist Oskar Matzerath decides to stop growing at age 3. He explains to the reader that since he was born with a fully developed consciousness he could observe adults, and their ways. Since he…

Is there a better human size?

September 9, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

43 years ago, in 1967, R.J. Hansen and M.J.Miley, two civil engineering professors from MIT, published an article in Technology Review, on the advantages of smaller human beings. They ask themselves if we can afford to NOT consider, in all it’s aspects, the question of…

The Sugar Climate

August 29, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

We eat 2500% more sugar then we did about a century ago. In his book Pure, White and Deadly John Yudkin associates this increased intake with a number of serious health risks.  He also points out a relationship between the increased sugar consumption and increased height. Yet…

Is Global Warming Shrinking our Brain?

August 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

This study by Jessica Ash and Gordon G. Gallup Jr. suggests that human cranial capacity as an indicator of brain size grew dramatically during our evolution, and that variations in global temperature as well as progressive shifts toward global cooling account for as much as…

World of Dwarfcraft

August 21, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

One of the goals of The Incredible Shrinking Man project is to archive existing forms of the desire to shrink. It’s difficult to know how many people have this  desire. But maybe online behaviour and the public games we play shed some light on this.…

There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom

August 17, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

Richard Feynman’s groundbreaking lecture at Caltech in 1959, There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom,  introduced the idea of nanotechnology. Since then we are as obsessed with miniaturizing our tools, as we are with growing tall. It seems strange that our tools keep getting…

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

August 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

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…

Short Baseball Players Live Longer.

July 31, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

The Baseball Encyclopedia provides statistical data on thousands of professional baseball players.  Apart from stating batting averages and field positions etcetera, it gives information on height and weight. If a players dies during his professional career this is also mentioned.  In a study conducted by…

Transport Retrofit

July 18, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

Airlines have tried to compensate the increase in passenger size and weight by adding extra taxes and designing larger and more fuel efficient airplanes but surely there are limits to how big our vehicles can become. Shrinking on the other hand would open up a…

Court Dwarfs: Curiosity & the Tiny Caretaker.

July 11, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Dwarfs, throughout the ages, have aroused curiosity. Some, like the American circus artist General Tom Thumb, even achieved great wealth by cleverly turning smallness into a spectacle. Certainly one of the most remarkable stories in this category is that of the Italian dwarf Sebastiano Biavati.…