Sorry, but I don’t think we’ll be going in that particular direction with this posting. At least I don’t think so. Sometimes these posts seem to have a mind of their own and there’s no telling where they might end up. I suppose the title should have been something like Concerns About Size but that doesn’t have quite the same grab value, as it were. I am going to try to make it all the way through this posting without falling into the prurient-humor trap I set for myself with that ill-considered title.
Anyway, my size related concern is in regards to my website. During my recent trip to Costa Rica I was separated from my gloriously large HD display that I sit in front of day after day, hour after hour, trying to think of things to write herein. I was working in the jungle and wanted to update some pages in the Blog section of my site. GASP! My website looked different on the laptop. The page didn’t fit properly within the window, scrollbars were replicating like rabbits, and everything that used to look so nice and tidy now looked like crap.
I was impaled upon the horns of a conundrum or something. Do I 1) – use my typical ham-handed, brute-force based web skills to redo all of my pages to some minimum expected size. This would be easiest but would force those of you with something approaching a modern computer to lose ease of reading and forego the sheer beauty of my design ethic. Or 2) – just say screw it and you get what you get. Or 3) – actually put some effort into it and make my pages dynamic. This would take a little work but it would result in the optimum browsing experience for all concerned. I had to think about that.
While I’m pondering the problem, if you have the time please click on This Link. You’ll be taken to a page where your own personal screen’s resolution will display – JFM, isn’t it? – and it will let me know the results. Of course, because of my privacy policy, no personal information, credit card numbers, passwords, your browsing history at work or the list of the email contacts that you really don’t want anybody else to know about (wink, wink) will be collected. Only your screen size, small though it might be.
This is a real-world size issue that just reared up and slapped me in the face, so to speak. My website design was based on the mistaken assumption that your equipment was the same size as mine. A terribly bad assumption on my part given that should yours be just a bit smaller than mine, then your performance would be seriously compromised. But, I thought, if I can make it seem like your performance is normal then you would go on happily unaware that I am working with equipment that could be, most likely, much larger than yours. You just wouldn’t be able to tell.
So I decided to start working towards a size-independent solution and did some research on the whole idea of comparative sizes. Comparative Size, it seems, even after our long climb up the evolutionary ladder, is still somewhat in dispute. That makes some sense given the various size concepts we use every day. But the thing that really knocked me back on my heels is the fact that absolutesize is also not really well defined.
By absolute size I am, of course, referring to measurable dimensions. An object’s length, width, and height which measurements yield derived properties such as area and volume. One object’s absolute sizes can be compared to those of another which yields the comparative properties of larger, smaller, or equal. There are also, I learned, absolute measurements – or concepts presented as being absolute – that have, in fact, no basis in reality at all.
One of the websites I frequent is ScienceDaily.com. This is a place where you can find synopses of all kinds of new science and scientific research without having to troll through such entertaining publications as the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik or the coma inducing Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Plus they try to spice things up with headlines like “Zombie Ants Have Fungus on the Brain, New Research Reveals” and “Wine Yeasts Reveal Prehistoric Microbial World”. Which all kind of sounds like the geek version of The Weekly World News but the site does produce some good articles.
However, they don’t have a clue as to how to report comparative sizes.
I recently read an article entitled “Spitzer Detects Shadow of ‘Super-Earth’ in Front of Nearby Star”. I initially thought that the former Governor of New York, who resigned after being caught entangled in a prostitution ring, had taken up astronomy. But I was wrong. The gist of the article was that the Spitzer Space Telescope saw a large Earth-like planet – i.e. not like Jupiter or Saturn – pass in front of the star it orbits. The article reported that the planet “measures 2.1 times the size of our Earth.” My question was immediately: 2.1 times what?Diameter? Volume? Surface Area? Disk Area? The article continues to state that the distant pin-prick planet has a mass 8 times that of Earth. Since “8” and “2.1” have nothing in common with pi – 3.1415… – the scientists figured the composition of the exo-planet was in fact not Earth-like and, in fact, nothing like anything in our solar system except maybe if Neptune didn’t have an atmosphere. In fact, if the reporting is correct it doesn’t seem to exist in our universe at all. The article quotes the research’s lead author as saying that the planet orbits “1900 times closer to its star than Neptune does to the Sun.” Which is the point where my brain-brakes lock up and I go skidding off the roadway of logic and crash into the ditch.
“1900 times closer to its star”, “1000 times finer than a human hair”, “5 times smaller wavelength” all of these misguided terms are completely and utterly wrong. It all comes down to basic addition and subtraction. If a property of one thing is more than the same property of another thing, bigger, further, heavier, whateverier, then those two things are compared additively. Saying that “this bag of sugar is five times bigger than this other bag” is perfectly OK. It’s even understandable to say something like “my house is five times further away than yours”, as long as the from place being referenced is understood.
However, saying “this bag of sugar is five times smaller than this other bag” or “your house is five times closer than mine” is not only unclear but completely wrong. This is because comparing properties from a lesser one to a greater is subtractive and when you subtract a larger number from a smaller you end up less than zero which, in terms of distance, size, volume, or area, is meaningless. It is impossible to drive minus 1.5 miles to go buy a negative-quart of milk. That’s not the real world. But we happily drive to the store that’s twice as close as the one three miles away to buy a carton of milk that’s twice as small as a half-gallon.
I think one of the reasons that we’re so happy with these positive-negative comparisons is that, if we didn’t use them, we’d have to deal with fractions. And fractions are almost universally despised. I’m sure most of you, at the very mention of the word “fraction” – which in fact is the first time you’ve even run the word through your brain this year – are immediately sucked back in time to Mrs. Bayberry-Soap-Smell’s Third Grade arithmetic class where she had just written something like “1/23 + 3/68 + 34/264 = ?” on the blackboard. You’d break into a cold sweat and pray that a fire drill would happen within the next two minutes. That the answer was a simple 2792/12903 never crossed your mind because you were dealing with fractions, and fractions make us all panic. So the scientists are being quite wise in not saying that “the exo-planet orbits at 1/1900th the distance from the Sun to Neptune” because we’d see the fraction, panic and stop reading.
The other reason is that our brains handle big numbers better than very small numbers. When our ancestors were foraging across the veldt and came upon a couple of trees, one of which had one apple and one of which had 1,900, we didn’t not go to the one with one apple because it had so many less. We went to the other one because it had so many more. As a result of this evolutionary programming our still primitive brains can wrap themselves around “1,900 times fewer”, which makes no logical sense, much easier than “0.0005263 times as many”, which is exactly accurate.
Another item my research turned up is the concept of a “serving” as an absolute measurement. This is frequently used as an indicator of size in such descriptions as “single serving bag” or “servings per container”. However when I look at, say, a bag of Lay’s potato chips, I see that a “serving” on the nutrition label is “1 oz.” whereas their “single serving bag” holds an ounce and a half. Similarly McDonald’s sells three different sizes of French fries: small, medium and large. They contain 2.5 oz., 4.1 oz., and 5.4 oz. respectively. Each is listed in McDonalds nutrition information as one “serving”.
Which all in all does not help me in the slightest in determining how best to proceed with straightening out the whole problem with your equipment being a different, most likely smaller, size than mine. I mean, you have a monitor and I have a monitor. Those are basically the computer equivalent of a “serving”, one thing, two different sizes. Those monitors have a physical size of height, width and area, plus they also have a virtual size based on the number of pixels per inch they are able to display. So even if your equipment is, most likely, smaller – even if it’s not 1900 times smaller – than mine it is possible you can think of it being larger, in terms of the number of pixels, much the same way that one “serving” of fries at McDonalds can be larger than another.
The end result of all this research and pondering is that I now have the concepts and tools to make my website look like it was designed for your particular piece of equipment regardless of how large or, more likely, small it might be. I’ll just go through every page on my website, make a couple of changes and PRESTO!, each and every one of those pages will appear correctly on your diminutive displays while at the same time giving you no clue about exactly how inadequate your equipment is.