Sublime

Bainish examinait Klimrod et le trouvait changé. Non par la taille ou la corpulence, quoiqu’il eût peut-être pris quelques centimètres encore et quelques kilos. Mais il avait toujours cette même silhouette de faucheux, la même apparente lenteur d’allure, le même regard sans fond. Le changement était ailleurs : une dureté plus grande et surtout, com

These are the scales of modern human networks, and it’s Dunbar’s number multiplied by millions. In these large-scale communities, standards and self-governance can’t be maintained by people simply running around and talking to each other. Instead, the builders of these networked products must create features that nudge the interactions in the right

“Dunbar’s number” is a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships humans can maintain at one time. According to Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, humans have the cognitive capacity to keep track of somewhere around 150 close personal connections. Beyond this limited circle, we start treating people less like indi

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

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What seems to be happening is that as species are forced to increase the size of their groups to cope with the particular demands of their environment, they create larger groups by, in effect, combining groups.