-
Asked by maher123 to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 13 Nov 2013.
-
Adam Murphy answered on 13 Nov 2013:
Hey, I had to do a bit of digging to get the answer to this.
The best guesses I can find say that on average, a person has 100,000 hairs on a person’s head. So quite a bit less than a million.
One really cool thing about hair is that it’s made of keratin, which is a kind of strong protein. Nails are also made of keratin, and really awesomely, a rhino’s horn is made of keratin!
Nature finds loads of really cool answers to things!
-
-
Sinead Cullen answered on 13 Nov 2013:
There is not a million strands of hair on our heads. On average there is about 100 thousand or so. But it’s pretty cool blondes have the most hair and they have well above average with about 140,000 strands, brunettes average 108,000 and redheads average 90,000.
So if you have blonde hair you will probably have more hair then your brown haired or red haired friends 🙂 -
Eleanor Holmes answered on 20 Nov 2013:
This is something I have heard too and was quite surprised to find out it wasn’t true.
It just goes to show that we humans are lousy at estimating very large numbers. We go straight from the idea of thousands to millions and don’t make any stops in between.
I know if I hear that something costs a lot of money I immediately think €1 million. But €100,000 is a whole lot of money too. It’s way more than I have!
A cool thought experiment is to say to someone; “I will give you €100 today. But tomorrow you have to give me 1 cent. The next day you must give me 2 cents. The next day you must give me 4 cents. And so on, doubling every day for 30 days. Will you do that?”
What if you offered €1000? Your friend might consider your offer. But he would be a fool to take it because he would end up owing you over €10 million!
Comments