Allometry: How things scale and should scale.
A child has much larger head relative to his body than an adult (this even applies to GMO biologists). I am adding this slide to Tuesday’s lecture on scaling and cities. It shows how the relative size of parts scales differently as the unit grows. There is abundant work on this by physicists (G. West of Santa Fe), but what I am adding to the picture (and the research) is the link to fragility, how fragility is necessarily tied to scale, which comes out of the notion that fragile=nonlinearity (concavity).
A restaurant has a scale beyond which it transits into something horrifying, fast food. Same with wineries, etc. This applies to all corporations (there is a sweet spot of fragility) but academics haven’t noticed yet. And of course the same to political units, etc.
More generally, our society under commoditization and pseudointellectualization lost control of our natural intuitions on how things should grow (especially economists who see GDP growth as a mission). But somehow the Ancients did, with this obsessive “metrion”, the balance: a man should not be too strong (leave it to an ox), too fast (leave to a horse), too tall, etc.