I fought the (Square-Cube) Law and the Law won…

Updated on July 10, 2007 By Ken Begg 6 Comments

I love stuff like this, even if I don’t understand some of it.

http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/

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  • Ed Richardson

    Attack of the 50 Foot Woman….Allison Hayes….sigh.

    If I were banished to the moon and granted one famous woman to take with me it would be Hayes. Absolute doll. Just watch the MST3K episode of Roger Corman’s 1957 stinkbomb, The Undead. Cult starlet or not, she delivers. It’s a given she was beautiful – women have to be in Hollywood – but she could act too.

  • Sandy Petersen

    It’s always easy for people to pooh-pooh extreme concepts by making them sound implausible.

    The fact remains that on Earth there used to be arthropods 10-15 feet long, so obviously they solved the issues sometimes brought up to ban them from existence.

    The largest dinosaur found was 40 tons at one point, and the square-cube lawyers opined how this was the biggest any best could be on land, and even then it would have to stay in deep water to buoy up its weight. Then they found that dinosaurs were fully terrestrial and found fossils of specimens weighing 100+ tos.

    The same applies to flying creatures. “Obviously” no flying animal could be bigger than a Pteranodon – it simply couldn’t fly. Then they found bigger Pteranodons. Then they found Quetzalcoatlicus with a 40 foot wingspan. They have also found a large carnivorous bird from post-dinosaur times which could fly, and had a body weight approaching 300 pounds. That’s a bird the size of a bear!

    So next time you read some killjoy trying to explain away cool concepts take it with a grain of salt.

  • Sardu

    VERY cool stuff!

    I got into a huge flame war once because I said that King Kong should be intelligent on a human level or greater due to his enormous brain size. I lost because it was pointed out that it appears (at least for now) that it’s relative size of brain to body and not absolute size that makes you intelligent. At least, after a certain point of absolute size is achieved. So, KK has the same brain proportionally speaking as any other gorilla and is of the same intelligence, giant or not.

    I really had thought I was on to something….

  • Flakey

    Sandy I think you may have read the article wrong. It not about you can not have giant monsters, but that it is impossible (and to my mind lazy), just to scale up an insect, or person, to double its size, or much more. Without changing its appearance to cope with the changes it needs to survive at the increased size.

  • Sandy, you’re killing-joying my kill-joying!!

    Glad to see you drop by, though.

  • The Rev. D.D.

    Allison Hayes….mmmm….yummy.

    Huh? Oh yeah…

    What fossil bird is that, the 300 pound flying one? I don’t recall that one. I remember eagles in Australia that had 10-foot wingspans, and I think some kind of ancient vulture that had a 12-15 span, but this one’s new to me…