size matters

I am, of course, talking about matters of dimension.

I was talking to a friend today over the phone. Phoebe was singing happily in the background, and it was a beautiful sound. I wanted to record it, and lamented not having a recording apparatus at hand. Whenever I break out my laptop, my preferred means of recording sound, Phoebe gets distracted by it, and clams up. So no recording.

So anyhow, I was telling my friend that I’d like to get a solid state recorder, which is an electronic device that records into solid state memory. (“Non-rotational media,” as John said when I asked.) I just saw one that my advisor has earlier this week, and it was a nice compact size, especially compared to one I’d seen that another professor works with. I explained to my friend that the device was “about the size of a first-generation iPod,” and compared it to the larger recorder, which was “about the size of an old dial-up modem.”

Which made me realize what funny size comparisons I’d given, and reflect upon how such comparisons are so culturally-based. And in this case, sub-culturally-based. I mean, I just compared these items to two out-of-date pieces of technology. If I’d been talking to my mother-in-law, for example, these comparisons would have been meaningless. It can actually be pretty hard to come up with helpful size descriptors without resorting to actual dimensions in some sort of metric. I mean, do we really want to say “it’s rougly 10 by 6 by 1.5 centimeters” or “maybe 6 inches by 8 inches, and 2 or 3 inches deep”?

Anyhow, here are some possible item pairs to approximate the size of the devices I was describing. (My friend and I came up with some of them, and then John and I added some later, and then I’ve added a few more.) Of course, these are pretty culturally-dependent, too:

The larger item would be:

The smaller one is: