I did nine hours of community service this morning, then worked 4 hours. Tomorrow, I have to do it AGAIN, except I work five hours this time. And then I work 8 to 5 on Sunday, and then I have to do it AGAIN, getting another seven hours of Community Service on Monday morning, and then do DIRECTLY to court...
And. Motherfucking. Graduate.
I am already a zombie, by Monday morning, I am literally going to be Undead. Must. Continue.
Hans, man, that's not the taste of flesh you're craving. It's the taste of freedom. So. Close. You can do it, man!
Also, I just submitted a question to xkcd's What If? I know it won't get answered, but hey, I asked anyway. Why the hell not? ^_^
I've always wanted to do that. So many questions...
Out of curiosity, what was the question?
Dear Randall,
Since we're on the topic of the T-Rex devouring people, I'd like to propose a "What If?" revenge question. What would it take for a human to punch out a full grown T-Rex?
[Signed with a semi-fake name].
In my role as "Mad Physicist" might I be allowed to have a go an answering?
Right... so, to knock out a T-Rex with a punch, you are going to be applying forces in a linear and rotational fashion to its head - large forces. Large enough to create an acceleration to casue the brain of the T-Rex to impact its skull.
According to LiveScience, Pro Boxers can exert around 5000 N of force when they punch, which is more than enough to knock out a human, or even kill them - medically, there is not that much difference. The thing is, harly any of that 5000 N is going to make it into the brain - elasticity in muscles in the hand and head, the skull defelcting force away from the brain and energy being dissipated all over the place see to that. Incidentally, ths same site also states that human bone is ridicoulosly strong - a 2.5 cm cube of bone could take around 9000 kg of mass on it before breaking. Thats 4 times more mass than an equivalent cube of concrete.
Anyway, back to the force.
Again, according to LiveScience a typical punch to the head that accelerates a human head from 0 to just over 40000 rpm in 1 sec will have a 25% chance of knocking someone out. For the dimensions of a typical human head, we can arrive at an estimate for this acceleration to be just over 300 m/s^2. Of course, the fist wont be exerting its force for 1 whole second - that is silly, and if it were, it would result in the brain being acelerated to mach 1 inside the skull. Applying basic mechanics, we can show that to cause an acceleration of this magnitude on an object with the mass of a human brain would require a force of just under 500 N - a tenth of the force a pro boxer can produce - but then as we already know not all of the force they produce will be transferred into the brain, thanks to gloves, the skull etc. This is probably a good thing, or otherwise pretty much all fights would end up with someones brains punched out all over the wall ater a few blows, just like in DF.
So, on to the T-rex.
Wikipedia informs us that the T-rex had a remarkable brain for a big dumb dinosaur. Small for its body mass when compared to mammals, but impressive for a dino. T-Rex brains were long and cylindrical in shape, probably more like the brain of a Croc, Gator, or Kimodo dragon - smooth, without the neocortex that makes us so delightfully human, or much in the way of a limbic brain like other mammals. As a result, I would expect it to be denser and slightly heavier.
Work done by Harry J Jerison for Encyclopedia of Neuroscience based on moulds of dino brains suggests that dino brain size scaled with body mass in exactly the same way that it does for modern lizards/reptiles (incidentally, that paper is fascinating). As a result, for a typical 7 ton T-rex, its brain should have been around 200 g in mass - 7 times less massive than a human brain, with a volume similar to that of a Gorilla's brain, but more dense as it lacks the bumpy foldy mammal bit.
So, applying the same mechanics to this as a boxers brain, to create enough acceleration in a dino brain to give a 25% chance of knocking one to the canvas would take only around 70 N of force to reach its brain. The bad news? Well, one ITS A FUCKING T-REX, so it is probably eating you, and secondly, its skull was remarkably thick and strong. This in part evolved as a means of coping with a hugh biting force, and might be linked to how narrow its skull was - the narrowness allowed T-Rex to have remarkable binocular vision based on the lobes of its brain responsible for vision. A human skull is .65 cm thick, comapred to the between 3 and 6 cm of a T-rex. So our pro boxer, producing 5000 N of force probably wont even register on the T-Rex - its simply not enough to get through the meat and bone around its liltte brain. A conservative estimation of how much force you would need to get through the mass of bone and muscle to jolt the T-Rex brain with 70 N of accelerative force is probably around 50000 to 70000 N, which is the sort of thrust produced by a smallish jet or rocket motor, or getting hit by a swinging wrecking ball. Such a force is probably also capable of damaging or destroying the bone and muscle structure of the dino head. I strongly suspect that the difficulty in punching each other out is what caused the arms of a T-Rex to atrophy away.
Jet powered dino boxing, anyone?
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