The Severed Head of a Horse

Watching an episode of the X-Files I was inspired by the mentioning of the weight of a severed head to find out the approximate weight of a male human upper-body. Why this instant leap? Anton wanted to know how big and heavy his Centaur character is. I don't know if you got an answer but here is what I came up with:

The human torso in itself weighs about 2/3 of the total body weight (from now on referred to as TBW). An average man's arm weighs about 6 % of TBW and the head with neck weighs about 5 kg.
For a rather large man, say 90 kg, that would amount to: 60kg (torso) + 2*5,4kg (arms) + 5 kg (head) = ca. 75kg (Yes, I rounded down. It's a nice and even number.).

So uhm, how much does a horse's head and neck weigh? No luck in my googling so I made a very rough estimation: Torso, once again 2/3 of TBW (seems reasonable, in my opinion). That leaves 1/3 for legs and head and neck. My guess is that the legs weigh more than the head and neck, but not by much, 3/5 as opposed to 2/5 of 1/3 of TBW? Let's go for that. That amounts to 2/15 of TBW. Anton was looking at big horses so big horsie it is. Nordsvensk weighs about 600-650kg (I think) so for that breed the head with the neck would weigh about 87 kg (let's make it 90). In that case a Centaur would weigh about 15 kg less than a horse with equal build (with an error margin of 100 % that's still only +/- 30kg).

In finding all this info I got stuck in a trivia hunt (as is often the result of combining late night with boredom and an internet connection). I will not wouch for the credibility of these following statements but I find them interesting (but mostly useless):

On average (a. from now on), women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Right-handed people live on a. 9 years longer than left-handed people.

The a. human can live up to 11 days without water, given a surrounding temperature of 60 F (about 15 C).

An a. person would die from total sleep deprivation after about 10 days, while it takes a few weeks to die from starvation. (That would mean that sleep is as important to the body as water, right?)

The a. human can lose up to 1/3 of her blood without dying.

The ashes of an a. cremated person weighs about 4kg.

The brain has no sensation of pain (not even if it is cut).

The only human body-part that never change size from birth to death is the eye(ball).

The thumb has its own control-center in the brain, separate from the rest of the fingers.

We filter out about 99% of our perceptions. (Imagine what we could do if we just changed that by 1-2%! More than that would probably lead to autism.)

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as replacement for blood plasma. (Could be useful, if a hemophiliac got stranded on a paradise island. But how do you define "young"?)

Intelligent people have more zink and copper in their hair. (Really?)

More than 2500 persons are killed every year from using right-handed products. (WTF!?)

Dog-Training

After having spent, I don't know, 4 hours trying to determine the constants A, B and C for which (5cosX+9sinX)^2=Acos2X+Bsin2X+C I had lunch. By then I was looking for something else to do but couldn't come up with anything. Then I realized that I would be doing everyone (I mean it, every single person on this planet) a huge favour if I could dicipline our dog a little. But seriously, how long can you go on with Sit! Stay! Lie down! Come! and Search! without geting bored? (About five and a half minute, since he already knows them fairly well, and our house is only so big) He obviously needed a new trick in the repertoire. So I spent an other 10 minutes practicing Stand! Ok, so it's completely useless, so what? It's cool. This dude has hind legs with the movability of an acrobat so he's pretty good at it. Sometimes when we're out walking and he wants to take a look around but the grass is to high for him to see anything he will stand up, balancing on his two hind legs, looking around for a few seconds and then fall back to all four. He looks a bit like an over-sized meerkat...

Perfect timing

I don't think that I have ever caught a train with so small a margin. Literally ten secconds after I sat down in the first available seat the train started moving! Mind note for next time: take the 7:40 bus, not the 8:00 for a train that leaves at 8:28. I was dead all the way home, sadly chance worked against me as circumstances forced me to remain awake for the entire day. Now I have caught up with my sleep and is reasonably alert. I even went up at 9:15 this morning!

I was hoping to be able to return to you guys on thursday but alas! Once again things are not going as I planned. My trip to Uppsala has been postponed to said thursday because my parents are going on a cruise monday-wednesday. Then it turns out that my precence is expected at my grandmothers' on saturday. With all this in mind my new ETA is 17:55 on sunday, July 20th, see you then, I hope. A humble suggestion on my behalf: bring swimwear!