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!?)
3 comments:
Right-handed products???
Yeah, like scissors and stuff. I guess.
Personally, I'd put quite a few pistols and similar objects of death in the "Right-handed products"-category, but I guess that would break the statistics.
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