[URL=“Could an attacking 50-foot woman actually exist? - The Straight Dope”]
Just wanted to say that once again, Slug Signorino’s tasteful and understated illustrations are an inspiration to us all.
It should be noted that Cecil assumes that weight increases as the cube of height, but body mass index squares the height; furthermore, here is a study that says that BMI underestimates the prevalence of obesity in taller people (BMI does work well for most people, but not at the extremes); in other words, at height extremes BMI scales at an even lower rate than the square of the height (many tall people claim the opposite though, but the study used real-life measurements, it also looked at disease prevalence and found the same correlation, BMI underestimates disease risk in tall people):
What if our 50 ft woman had a partial to full exoskeleton and a musculature that was a cross between a chimpanzee’s and a grasshopper’s? What if she had some limited ability to respirate through said exoskeleton? Does that open even a glimmer of hope that our 50 ft woman can stay on the offensive?
Seriously, what happened to Slug?
She’s got the giraffe skinny lower legs, the 32x oversized thighs, the bikini for cooling, and breasts. Because, ya’ know, breasts. 
That’s not an assumption, it’s a fact.
Height is one dimensional. A person’s size is defined by three dimensions: height, width (i.e. shoulder to shoulder), and thickness (i.e. front to back).
Weight is caused by the amount of matter in three dimensions. If a person’s form remains proportional, then as the height increases, so does the width and thickness.
Strength is defined by structural properties and cross-sectional area. Area is 2-D, so as height goes up, cross-sectional area goes up by the square. The structural properties of materials are expected to remain the same.
I was referring to a study that looked at real-life people, which closely followed (for most people) the relationship used by BMI - squaring, not cubing, the person’s height. In other words, the human body doesn’t scale to the cube like you would expect, so one would expect this trend to continue (in fact, at very extreme heights, BMI overestimates the normal weight, thus the scaling factor becomes even lower than a squaring, presumably because your organs don’t scale in size as much as your body, which may also explain why men (if they are taller than women) and taller people in general don’t live as long).
Sure, cubing the height is in general true across species, but not if you look at the human population, and one would assume that the same would hold true for a 50 foot tall woman (of course, not in real life, so we can disregard the normal height-weight relationship, which won’t work in any case because it would soon predict a negative BMI).
Where’s the art?
Dinosaurs were that large. T-rex was about 40 ft (and it did not stand upright). So it is possible.
I was thinking of the brontosaurus, but ISTR that’s not an accurate name for the critter, but yeah, it seems you can have large critters out there.
The point was not that an animal that size cannot exist; clearly they can. There are ways to address the problems such size presents. However, if you started with the human female form as a base and somehow bioengineered her into a creature that measures 50 feet in her largest dimension and is capable of surviving and engaging in independent movement, the result would be a creature that doesn’t look much like a human. (Unless, as Cecil suggests, she also became aquatic–but even that would involve some changes.) You could probably keep enough cosmetic elements that she’d be recognizable as human stock, but that’s about it.
I seem to recall going through this with a giant roach, once upon a time…
Actually I think you could make the result look pretty human, although it wouldn’t be very human on the inside. Go with the design that Cecil mentions in the column of skinny limbs supporting a good sized torso, then surround the core body with a foam or outright gasbag outer shell designed to match normal human proportions. She would still have the same size but a lot less mass to support.
No art displayed for me either, Sat. AM.
[quote=“Balance, post:11, topic:634682”]
The point was not that an animal that size cannot exist; clearly they can. There are ways to address the problems such size presents. However, if you started with the human female form as a base and somehow bioengineered her into a creature that measures 50 feet in her largest dimension and is capable of surviving and engaging in independent movement, the result would be a creature that doesn’t look much like a human.QUOTE]
Why?
Yeah, humans don’t scale proportionally. Shorter people tend to have shorter limbs in comparison to their torsos, taller people have longer limbs in proportion to torsos. That throws the cube scaling effect off.
Bone structural strength sets a limit on what the cross-sectional area can support, so for large sized bodies, you need more bone cross-sectional area. Ergo, as Cecil stated, the hips and thighs would have to increase above the proportional size to support the extra weight. Dinosaurs like Apatasaurus have very thick legs and hips, then thin necks and tails.
Blood pressure has to be regulated in a way to ensure blood can get to the head when upright. Gravity is the challenge. Adaptations might include vascular changes to help keep blood high when upright and then relieve pressure as the head lowers.
Muscles and tendons, like bone, have structural limits, so for bigger sized bodies, you need more muscle tissue in order to be able to move. The bigger bones are going to require more musculature, and then the muscles will have to increase further to offset the relative performance difference. Which means more weight for the bones to carry.
Etc.
Any advantages to a silicon-based woman?
So, given all the reasons Cecil gave, what is the maximum realistic height for people?
Since TPTB don’t seem to notice the problem with the art not appearing, I looked at the link, etc. and here’s what I found.
The link is
http://www.straightdope.com/images/art/2012\dope_120914_50footwoman.gif
when it should be
http://www.straightdope.com/images/art/2012/dope_120914_50footwoman.gif
The back/forward slash thing is confusing Firefox and Opera at the very least.
So enjoy Slugs artwork folks.
Interesting that Firefox should be so confused by a simple transposed slash. IE 6 and Chrome don’t seem to have a problem with it.
Firefox is not confused. Legal URLs contain forward slashes only. Backslash is an illegal character. Non-compliant browsers are always pulling this crap of “Oh, some idjit did x instead of y, so we’re going to accept y anyway.”
If your browser accepts "" in an URL, it is broken.
This particular issue is serious and important. URLs are a subcase of URIs and it is common to have non-http related data included in an address. Some of this data gets sent to scripts to handle, where "" might be used to escape symbols. And if the browser/script is broken, an attacker can feed a command to a browser to Do Bad Things. So the first line of defense is the browser not accepting poorly formed URIs.
Security means taking precautions at all steps in the process. Blowing off security in “merely” one step is all it takes.