Digital Scales

My friend Renn gave me a nice digital scale last year that does body fat and water analysis, has a nice big readout, and a memory for your stats so you don't have to input them every time.

He got a whole stack of these things from Wal-Mart when they had them mis-entered into their scanners, and the $40 scales were ringing up for something ridiculous like $4...He bought their entire stock, then didn't know what to do with a dozen digital scales, so he started handing them out to friends.

What can I say, he's a quirky guy. Who am I to talk?

So I was trying to weigh my head the other day, and I realized that digital scales are not all they are cracked up to be: My head is evidently too light to register.

"Why?", you are probably asking.

The very obvious and logical answer to this question is: "I don't know." I just got curious about how heavy the human head is. Nothing gruesome like "I wonder how heavy the basket was after a day at the guillotine?"; just general curiosity.

I normally would have just looked it up, but I don't let myself have Internet access at home (I have to have some non-geek life). Now that I have your curiosity up, I found this online:

------ http://danny.oz.au/anthropology/notes/human-head-weight.html -----
I couldn't find any references for this online, so I asked around my workplace (the Department of Anatomy & Histology, University of Sydney). The most convincing response came from the service room where the technical officers actually cut up the bodies:

"An adult human cadaver head cut off around vertebra C3, with no hair, weighs somewhere between 4.5 and 5 kg, constituting around 8% of the whole body mass."

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2.2 lbs/kg means about 11 pounds.

So now you know.