In an interesting piece titled How Big is Your City, Really by Samuel Arbesman for The Atlantic, readers are shown to look at scale and context in how they view the world.

Interesting factoids noted include the first moonwalk by the Apollo 11 crew occurred in an area no larger than a baseball diamond and that a super-dense neuron star would fit within the Boston metropolitan area.

“We often have a certain sense of cities’ importance and size, but this is too often founded on a fairly parochial context; our perceptions of cities are based on other cities we are familiar with or that are around it, and we neglect to recognize how big or small cities really are.” States Arbesman.

The story goes on to mention that Cleveland, for example, has a metropolitan population greater than that of Dublin, Amsterdam, and Brussels, but that it pales in comparison to importance in global affairs.

Read the entire feature here.