SHRINKING PRIORITIES
By Carrington Vanston - February 25, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/shrinking

Just last week I wrote about how I knew we were living in a Science Fiction Atomic Age because of the automation technology we put into remote public washrooms. Then I made the simple, common sense request that we take some people off the urinal motion sensor projects and put them on the jetpack projects. It seems some of you took that too literally.

I didn't mean just the urinal motion sensors specifically, but all the gadgetry one might file under "To Do Right After We Get That Jetpack Thing Worked Out." I want all the cool toys, too, but let's have some priorities people.

Why do I bring this up? Because yesterday Panasonic announced plans for the world's smallest flash memory card. It will be called the "miniSD Card." (Don't even get me started about the use of capital letters in that one.)

What is the claim to fame of this miniSD Card? It's "about 40 percent of the volume of the standard SD Memory Card."

Yep, 40 percent smaller than those husky old SD cards. Ooh, what shall we do with all that free space once we swap our standard SD cards for these brand- (and monkey-) spanking new ones? I'm thinking of having a pool put in. Or maybe a place to keep my free range chickens.

I draw the court's attention to the size of a standard SD card, as illustrated in this graph.

[aside]

Imagine I'm holding up a graph, lovingly hand embroidered, that equates an SD card with something incredibly tiny like the portions in a French restaurant, my thumbnail, or The Big Print Book Of Every Reason To Make A Smaller SD Card.

[end of aside]

Standard SD cards are about the size of a postage stamp and they weigh two grams. Just to be sure we're all clear on this, I'm going to repeat that last bit: they weigh two grams. Let's play it safe and repeat the "postage stamp" part again, too: they are about the size of a postage stamp. And once more for that all important "two grams" bit: two grams.

Two grams. Two. Grams. When weighed in grams, the standard SD card clocks in at a whopping...two. When I first read about the miniSD card my sigh weighed more than that.

Don't get me wrong. I love gadgets and tiny technology. Smaller notebook computers are a good thing. Smaller MP3 players and cellular phones and PDAs are good too. I love my digital camera because it's small enough to carry with me always, and thus I take many pictures I would miss if I'd bought a larger model. I love my iPod because I can use it as a coke mirror.

I like small, too. I'm an aficionado of small. If small had a fan club I'd write for its newsletter.

But I'm also a fan of reason. Common sense and I go way back, and we both agree that the world did not need a smaller SD card. Nobody in this world had ever walked down any street thinking "this mobile phone is great, but it'd be even better if I could shave a third of a gram off the weight of that darn SD card."

And never once before this article, in the whole history of the world, has the sentence "the only thing between me and that confounded cure for cancer is an extra three eights of an inch width on my SD card" passed through anyone's mind.

But you know what? It gets worse. Of course it does. Why the hell wouldn't it? And what is worse than a team of highly trained whiz kids slaving for months over a flea penis reduction to the girth of stamp-sized SD cards?

I'll tell you what. At the very same time they announced the miniSD cards Panasonic also announced the cards would all be packaged with an adaptor that makes them fit a standard SD card slot.

Guess what size the adaptor is? Go on, take a wild guess. That's right: it's the size of a feckin' standard SD card.

So in a move right out of a Terry Gilliam movie Panasonic has announced the unnecessary shrinking of an already shockingly tiny thing, and bundled it with an all but required adaptor to enlarge it back to the exact same size as before.

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. And I did try, but my fingers figured out what I was typing and they poked me something fierce in the eye as a warning.

There should be a list somewhere that we consult before we embark on the difficult and expensive task of making dubious improvements to our ubiquitous gagetry. Before we get around to things like an even smaller version of an already ubertiny card, somewhere someone should be able to say "Jetpacks? Check. Cell phone that discharges its battery into the ear canal of anyone who answers it in a cinema? Check. Mirror that shows kids the expression they'll have in twenty years when they see a picture of the outfit they're wearing now? Check."

Hell, I'd even settle for "Toaster that works? Check." But I'm still pulling for that jetpack.

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]