Carrion Luggage

Strings Attached

An important breakthrough in science and pity from Popular Science:

    The world’s smallest violin is thinner than a human hair  
Don’t expect to hear any sonatas from it.

The phrase “the world’s smallest violin” is dripping with sarcasm and reserved for disdain, but for some researchers it’s a mark of pride. Thanks to the latest nanotechnology tools, a team at the United Kingdom’s Loughborough University recently crafted what is literally the world’s smallest violin.

Okay. I get how people think they can use "literally" for emphasis, or to really mean "not literally." I don't like it, but I get it.

What I won't abide is deliberately confusing an image of a thing for the thing itself. Cela n'est pas un violon.  

Don’t expect to hear any scaled down sonatas, however. In this case, engineers designed a nanoscale image of a violin instead of a playable instrument.

I didn't do the math, but I suspect that if it were real and could be played (one wonders where they'd get the hair for the bow, not to mention what fingers would dance upon the neck), the sound would be way too high-frequency for humans to hear.

The rest of the article goes into more detail about the image of the violin, why they'd do such a thing, and its implications for computer science or whatever. Don't get me wrong; it's pretty cool, but a bit outside my range.

But we all know why they chose a violin instead of, say, a guitar, or a cat: so they could say (however wrongly) that there exists a world's smallest violin, and it's playing just for you.