Those who know Austin know that he is really tall. It’s a running joke that at company events, he ends up half a mile ahead of the group because each of his steps is quite a bit longer than the rest of ours. If he and I want to see eye-to-eye on something, I literally need a step stool.

But for those who haven’t run into him at a convention or event, this picture should put things into perspective.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

32 comments on “Austin and Ben, to Scale”

  1. Won’t smaller objs require fewer rays to render? So nice of you to let him borrow your pants.

  3. Ha, ha, nice try! But we all know that’s just this old optical illusion, caused by the non-parallel lines in the background. : )

    (BTW, my prediction seems to be right: There will nevermore be a post here, without a comment including the word “ray”…)

  4. For the 99% of the worlds population that uses logic units, i.e. the metric system: 3’7″ is about 1,10m, whereas 6’4″ is 1,93m.

    I thought that at least programmers in the U.S. use a logical unit system. Well obviously I was wrong.

    1. X-Plane is metric internally, but as an American it just feels weird to talk about human height in meters. Like “oh, he’s almost two meters”..doesn’t _sound_ tall to my ears.

      1. Well you could always express human height in centimeters if you want that extra ‘oomph’ effect ;). Then it would be “Wow, he’s almost _200_ centimeters!” Not much to envy tall people about though, I’m almost as tall as Austin and there aren’t that many benefits. Sure I can reach the top shelf in stores myself but here in the Netherlands a lot of people are as tall as me and many more are even taller (over 200 centimeters!) so I do not even get the benefit of overseeing the crowd (this is a lot different when visiting many foreign countries though).

        Then again I have to sit with my legs in my neck way too much (if only I could), especially in airplanes, continually shifting around to feel a little better for a minute for hours on end. When you are smaller you are always flying 1st class from my perspective. Heck, if you really where 3’7″ you could always fly world business class by just booking 2 economy seats next to each other. Seeing the small people in the airplanes and public transit in the recent movie “Downsizing” really made me smile.

        1. Raymond Groenendijk, tall people have better salaries than short people. So, there’s that to envy. Until we completely remove the physical aspect from the recruiting process, there will always be a physical bias. Taller people are generally more intimidating and thus are more naturally selected to management positions (or so I’ve read). Maybe that offsets the need to fly business class, not sure 🙂

      2. “Give him 2.4cm, and he’ll take 1.6km” just doesn’t have the poetry of the imperial system.

        2. We say, “give him one finger, he will take the entire hand” 🙂
          The giant in one of our fairytales still walks on seven league boots, when a place is impractical to get to, we say “mijl op zeven”, when a story goes on and on (like this one) we speak of an “ellenlang verhaal” (el – distance from hand to ELbow)

          In other words: find a better excuse 😛

          P.S.: People generally don’t like change, which is ironic, because our ability to adapt is one of the things that made us successful as a species 🙂

      3. Sounds REALLY tall to me! I have no friend that is even close to two meters. Regarding measurements in feet, arms, foot, inches, legs or nails – this is just a very strange old British way of measuring things. Please use standard logic units. I have absolutely *no* idea how little or much this 4’2,4″ etc is – it’s just a *really* confusing way of describing a length. Hard to understand how *anyone* in modern world would use such a system in 2018.

        1. Although I, too, prefer the metric system I can understand how difficult is must be for our friends from the US to adjust to SI units when they’ve been using imperial units for their entire life. Just imagine how weird it would be change to degrees Fahrenheit instead of Celsius or even Kelvin. I honestly wouldn’t know whether to grab my winter coat or my swimming shorts if it was 50° F outside. (Bad) habits die hard.

          1. To be fair (as beeing born in the metric and Celsius world), we have to admit that Fahrenheit makes more sense from a scientific and mathematical point of view.

            For the sake of science I would accept learning the meaning of 50° F.

            I would also consider kicking pi for tau, but that’s another story…

          2. It’s easier than you think. My country changed currencies (from escudos to euros) when I was around 20 years old. Some of my colleagues were telling me they would first convert every amount to escudos, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to have an idea of the “size” of the amount (if it’s cheap or expensive, depending on what you’re talking about).

            One year later no one was thinking in escudos anymore.

          3. As a Canadian, we have to work in both metric AND imperial. So close to the U.S. We have metric and imperial tools for the different things we need to fix and build. It’s easy when you do it your whole life. 🙂

          4. It is not as hard as you’d think. Since i’m retired I fly a lot! Since I ended up converting temps to C for the plane I eventually just started using it myself. For the record where I live now, 50° F would be considered cold, however, where i was born, its considered shorts weather

          5. jörn-jören jörensön says:
            September 4, 2018 at 10:35 am

            To be fair (as beeing born in the metric and Celsius world), we have to admit that Fahrenheit makes more sense from a scientific and mathematical point of view.

            For the sake of science I would accept learning the meaning of 50° F.

            I would also consider kicking pi for tau, but that’s another story…

            Honestly, I fail to see how Fahrenheit makes more sense in a scientific/mathematical way. The calibration points used by Mr. Fahrenheit are pretty much impossible to reproduce accurately(freezing point of a specific solution and the temperature of the human body).
            Celsius at least relied on pure water and its physical properties(freeze and boiling point). Establishing an interval from 0 to 100 with increments of 1 seems to be very convenient and reasonable, too. At least for humans and our preferred decimal system.

            My real gripe with F is that there’s no simply way to convert to and from C°. At least not as easy as cm to in or km to mi.

      1. “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade — which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” Josh Bazell

  7. Love this thread.

    +1 …metric system, the only system… you supposedly got rid of the British when US of A was established…

    BTW, Greeks are not very tall people, yet 1.94 (6.4″) is not super tall in my eyes. It is definitely a large person’s height (I am 1.80), but I don’t think many male Americans are under 6 foot tall (from personal experience).

    So he probably just hires people less tall than him. 😛
    (also takes interviews sitting in a large chair behind a large desk?)

  8. Hi Ben has Austin ever called you a low down bum, in thinking you pinched one of his super ideas you were speaking about two months earlier while propping up a bar, anyway if you really were that short you’d be a movie star and wouldn’t have to worry about pixels and optimizations.
    Regards

  10. Nice picture 🙂 Plus a seriously disturbing realisation of how perspective can lie (not to mention that Pascal’s edit of the picture makes things look very “lord-of-the-ringsey”:)

    I also find it peculiarly strange (i.e. “strangely strange”:) that while flying, I have absolutely no trouble thinking about feet and miles and whatnot – but in everyday life, for “short distances”, it shows a serious mental struggle … for me “a foot” is a short distance … and even having anything below 10-100 of them feels somehow “small” – until I actually do the conversion and realise that that isn’t usually the case.

    Weird world.

  11. Hey Austin, If things should suddenly seem, well, like you just need a change? King Kong is coming to B’way and we need people in the monkey suite. (I don’t mean management, although, according to commenters you would have a good shot at that too–since your so tall)_

  12. The Boss is doing a 50,000 MT and putting his hand in high-altitude physics.
    Whereas Ben is doing a VFR.

  13. Hi,
    I’m al for decimal system, but then, don’t we still have circles with 360 degrees, each with 60 minutes divded into 60 seconds? and days with 24 hours again with degrees and seconds? Wouldn’t it be more consistent to use gradians for angles and arcs and also some new decimal unit for time?

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