Sooo... the argument is that Barbie detractors who say she is unrealistically proportioned are wrong because if she were scaled up to human size the proportions would have to change because they are unrealistic for a human. Ummm... I'm no Einstein, here, but I'm pretty sure that argument actually proves what it claims to disprove.

Silly Flo! We all know girls can't do math, and therefore can easily be proved wrong with the simple addition of a square root sign!

Barbie apologetics

It's Raining Florence Henderson nailed it.

Well, some of the things I got out of this article were:

1. Small things have different proportions than large things.
2. So the fact that a small thing, when scaled up to human size, doesn't have human proportions does not mean it has the wrong proportions for a small thing.
3. There's an interesting quirk of human cognition that makes this a widespread cognitive blindspot for most of us, much like our inability (without practice) to interpret and compare numbers with very large magnitudes.
4. It's probably related the fact that my father - who I consider an excellent estimator and very conscious of units and measures - had a very hard time absorbing the fact that halving the dimensions of an image will cut the file size down by a factor of 4. Also the fact that people frequently badly misjudge how much they'll be able to carry (choosing a far too large container for books or liquids, for example).
5. In the case of Barbie in particular, the small version isn't too narrow-waisted, but is unrealistically busty.

I found all of this interesting. I didn't get "We all know girls can't do math, and therefore can easily be proved wrong with the simple addition of a square root sign!" out of it, nor even the idea that anyone's trying to prove them [girls, collectively] wrong.

Yes boys, the database does work. No, you cannot play with it because you will fuck it up.

Yeah, the whole premise of that theory is wrong, in my opinion. The criticism of Barbie is that, as a scale model of a human, Barbie is not accurate because the proportions are not accurately scaled. However; Barbie is not really a scale model of a human, she is a model of a human. To say that the detractors are wrong because you have to change the scaling of different body parts by various amounts if you want to scale her up to human size is actually agreeing with them, because that would not be scaling her up to human size in any real sense. Scaling already structurally flawed objects up or down is never going to work properly.

Interesting article, though - the box thing is food for thought.