Alas, Poor Yorick...
June 2, 2008 – 12:26 am
Friday's column, where we figured out the weight of the air inside an airhead, made me think on the topic of the volume of a skull and what else could fit in there besides 17 featherweights of air. Fourteen-hundred cubic centimeters of volume in a human skull, 1.4 liters, 47.34 fuid ounces, 15.89% of a peck. Based on my experiments to determine how many pickled peppers are in a peck, the human skull would fit around 78 pickled peppers.
We talk about people having a head full of rocks, head full of air, head full of booze... And that's one that's easy to calculate, isn't it? Alcohol is measured by volume. So if we used Budweiser, which is 5% alcohol by volume, the alcohol would represent 1/20th of the volume of the skull (1400 milliliters). So if you drank a skull full of Budweiser, you'd get 70 milliliters of alcohol, or 2.47 ounces of pure alcohol. If you drank a skull full of 80 proof vodka... well, you'd die. That's just short of two 750 ml bottles, and just short of 20 ounces of pure alcohol. If you drank them quickly enough, you'd die.
But, just for argument's sake, let's say that when you drank a beer, all the alcohol went to your head, and you were an airhead (with an escape valve to release the air pressure as the alcohol entered). How much beer would you have to drink to completely fill your head with alcohol? 28 liters or roughly 7.4 gallons of beer. On the other hand, you'd only need 118.35 ounces of 80 proof vodka (roughly four 750 ml bottles and a 12-ounce can of vodka).
But what else could we put in a skull besides alcohol? Sour cream dip? A popular brand of sour cream dip has around the same weight to volume ratio as water, as they measure a 2-tablespoon serving as 30 grams, so a skull full of sour cream dip would weigh around 1.4 kilograms, same as if it was filled with water. But while a skull full of water would have zero Calories, a skull full of sour cream dip would have 2800 Calories.
I was going to get into the various characteristics of a skull full of SPAM®, the vibrant lunch meat from Hormel, but I couldn't easily find a factor for the weight to volume ratio of SPAM® and didn't have the time, energy, or intestinal fortitude to do the measurements in the Rough Equivalents labs (a.k.a. my kitchen) this weekend. On the other hand, I was lucky enough to learn that Sodium Nitrite is used to keep SPAM® pink. If they took it out, your SPAM® would turn gray and be unappetizing. Yeah, because when it's good and pink, no one can refuse the canned meat goodness of SPAM®
So if any of you are in the mood for a homework assignment, find out the weight to volume ratio of SPAM®, figure out how much can fit into 1400 cubic centimeters, and post the amount and some fun Rough Equivalents in the comments below.
