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: shrink fears. One of the more curious manifestations of this fear is the Koro Syndrome, the pathological fear that the genitals…

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 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.…

Sunlight and Vitamins

July 11, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

Dr. Julian O’Dea proposes an interesting theory as to why ethnic groups living in the rainforest are often very small. Adult Pygmy males, for example, are less then 150cm on average. According to Dr. O’Dea this could be because of the near absense of ultraviolet light in…

Growth Hormone

July 6, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Tuning down the amount of growth hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in order to decrease human size is easier said then done. Growth hormones are responsible for a number of important processes in the body including the increase of calcium retention and the strengthening…

Dwarf Worship

June 27, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

At the end of the 19th century R.G. Haliburton ‘hunted’ for a secret dwarf tribe he believed to live somewhere in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. It aroused quite some interest as this article in The New York Times dated 27 september 1891 shows. The…

Big Small Possible

June 25, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

Two short films titled Faktor 4a and Faktor 4b (perhaps related to a faktor of how much more of everything people would have if they were consierably smaller) created by Graw Bockler give a rare insight into a possible future when people of even extremer…

20% = 73%

June 23, 2010 By arne hendriks 8

The Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes found that when a body increases in dimensions and retains its geometric similarity, its volume and weight increase much faster. This means that an increase in human heigth of 20% equals an average increase in body mass of 73%…

Lotus Feet & the Ilizarov Procedure

June 11, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

The dramatic swing in the size-ideals in China is represented in the contrast between the widespread popularity of tiny Lotus Feet, as a result of foot binding, and the contemporary practise of leg prolongment using the equally painful method developed by the Russian physician Gavril…

Shrink Mankind, Stop Working.

June 2, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

According to this article in TIME Magazine children with unemployed fathers are shorter. This is probably the result of what auxologists call environmental insults like an unhealthy living situation and low quality food. The article also states that taller people are healthier people. Or to…

Outsourcing Brain Capacity

May 22, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

“But what do we do with the brain?”, was the first question a neighbor asked when he heard of the ambitions of The Incredible Shrinking Man to shrink the human species to 50 centimeters. It’s a good question.  Although not proven beyond a doubt, there…