Size does matter, at least when it comes to cellphones

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/06/2018 (2962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t want to cause widespread panic, but I’ve been having an ongoing problem with my cellphone.

This was the phone I bought about a year ago because it was the largest phone I’d ever seen in my life.

You could prop this phone up on your front door, walk to the end of your neighbour’s driveway, and still be able to read text messages on its massive screen.

When I cram this phone into my front pocket, it looks as if I’m trying to smuggle a big-screen television in my pants.

“Hey, is that a 55-inch Samsung in your pocket?” is something strangers will frequently say to me when I’m standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.

Because of the fact I am a regulation guy of my particular gender, size is important to me. In modern times, a guy’s place in the masculine pecking order depends largely on the size of his electronic devices, especially TVs and smartphones.

Back in prehistoric times, cavemen selected their leader based on which Neanderthal had the largest and cheesiest painting of a woolly mammoth or sabre-toothed tiger etched on the walls of his cave.

So size matters — and I was thinking about this the other night when my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, and I got together for dinner with our dear friends Nick and Debbie.

As I sucked down a plate of fettucine in chili sauce — a surprising amount of which ended up decorating my one good shirt — I complained to Nick that my oversized cellphone has been driving me crazy.

The problem is, despite its impressive dimensions, my phone apparently has a teeny-tiny brain, which means whenever I attempt to do something like take a photograph, a warning pops up on the screen stating that I am out of storage and should probably do something about it.

What I did about it was, in between bites, thrust my phone across the table to my buddy Nick, whose own brain is far larger than mine and who knows pretty much everything there is to know about computers and modern technology.

Nick frowned at my phone, fiddled around with it for a few minutes, took a sip of wine, then smiled at me and said: “Doug, your phone is too small!”

I rolled my eyes in mock terror. “Shhhh!” I snarled, glancing furtively around the packed restaurant. “I don’t want everyone to know my phone isn’t big enough.”

To be clear, what my buddy was saying wasn’t that my phone wasn’t physically large enough. What he was saying was that my phone’s memory capability was way too small.

A look of pity in his eyes, Nick pulled out his own smartphone and showed me that his device had at least three times the digital storage capacity of mine. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Doug, but my phone is bigger than yours,” he said, a slight hint of masculine superiority in his voice.

As you can imagine, I was immediately struck with feelings of inferiority. Another member of the tribe had examined my cave painting and found it wasn’t all that impressive, so to speak.

The importance of the issue of size was driven home the next day, when I lay in the tub randomly reading news on my oversized cellphone and stumbled on a deeply disturbing report.

According to a story headlined “Sextinction” on Inverse.com, which features news about sex and science for millennial guys of my gender, having a big, um, cellphone can be an evolutionary disaster in the sense it can wipe out your species if you become too big for your metaphorical britches.

Speaking of metaphors, I am now using “cellphone” as a creepy metaphor for a medically important male appendage that we do not normally mention in family newspapers unless it is to report that a professional hockey player has been sidelined after getting walloped in this sensitive region by a puck travelling at the speed of light.

Getting back to the relative importance of size, it seems scientists from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History studied 6,000 specimens from 93 different species of ostracods, which were near-microscopic, clam-like crustaceans that lived 65 to 85 million years ago.

We are, of course, talking about guy crustaceans, which is scientifically determined by the fact that these tiny clams spent most of this evolutionary period lying on the couch and yelling for female clams to bring them sandwiches and beer.

The thrust of this story’s gist, so to speak, was that some of these tiny crustaceans survived throughout the entire 20-million-year span the scientists studied, whereas others were only able to hang on for a few thousand years, which is a drop in the proverbial bucket.

What did all of the short-lived crustaceans have in common? If you guessed that the clams with bigger cellphones died off much sooner, you would be correct.

In fact, these scientists found that in species where the guys had (ahem) larger cellphones, the extinction rate was 10 times higher than that of the species with the smaller cellphones.

According to the science website: “The team of scientists believes these little guys were putting all of their evolutionary energy into having killer crustacean sex, that they were ignoring every other aspect of survival. Similarly to a hot ‘n’ heavy casual hookup, it’s really fun in the moment, but if you don’t put the work in for a long-term relationship, it’s not going to last.”

What am I and this team of scientists trying to tell you today? OK, I’m not completely sure, other than it appears bigger is not always better and sometimes slow and steady wins the race, at least when it comes to evolution

In other words, it’s not the size of your cellphone that truly matters; no, it’s the amount of digital storage you can afford to pay for. Unless, of course, you happen to be a clam looking for a date.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca