The way I understand it, the square-cube-law relates changes in strength (related to muscle cross-section, thus "square") to changes in weight (related to volume, thus "cube"). That would suggest the hobbits would be relatively twice as strong, and consequently indeed more athletic.
When it comes to energy, you're probably onto something. They wouldn't be able to exert their full strength as long as we can, because reserves have to scale down with volume. Good point!
edited 12th Dec '10 8:55:46 PM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.to elaborate by square-cube-law I was referring to the strength of the bones to withstand stress not the muscles, reasoning something that small would not have a significantly greater advantage in that area. Then again I am just going on memory here.
Edit: Emphasis added for T-rex vrs mouse debate.
edited 12th Dec '10 9:28:49 PM by GiantSpaceChinchilla
Well, all the advantages are relative advantages, or course. Absolutely speaking, a thinner bone is of course more fragile.
To illustrate, consider a mouse and a T-Rex. I can crush the mouse under my foot, but not the T-Rex, because it is absolutely more robust. Then again, if the T-Rex trips while running, it's likely to break its neck, which could never happen to a mouse, because it is relatively more robust.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.I'd like to see the fight, but it's a little uneven. Maybe Three Hundred T-rexes vs a SEA of mice...
... wierd, this syncs up with some of the world building I've been doing.
Another thing to note, as you get smaller, is body heat. Your hobbits will have a larger surface area for their volume and so will lose heat fast. I'm not sure whether the difference will be big enough to be noticeable, though.
The thing about mounts - the trouble with riding things like wolves and big cats is that their back bends much more when they run than a horse's does. The spine of the horse is very rigid, and I think that's the reason they're a safe and practical mount. A big cat would be very uncomfortable to ride, and I'm not sure how you'd fit a saddle to them.
edited 13th Dec '10 2:13:14 AM by LoniJay
Be not afraid...It was mostly an afterthought for me, to be honest. I want predator-riders now and probably winged people later on, and it suddenly occurred to me that making the people smaller goes a long way towards removing some of the main practical objections to both.
Good call, hadn't thought of that. As it happens, that, too, works well in my setting. Yay.
I agree. The predators I have in mind are semi-intelligent and would only consent to be ridden occasionally and briefly (communal, mutually beneficial hunting, mostly), so I think I can get away with it. But it does make them less suitable for something like long-distance travel, no doubt about it.
ETA: Oh, regarding saddles, I'm envisioning the predator wearing a harness consisting mainly of a sort of collar and a sort of belt, with something like gauntlets attached to the former and something between stirrups and leather stockings attached to the latter. The riding posture would then be similar to bareback horse riding while the beast is moving slowly, sitting upright and holding on mainly by leg pressure. Once the beast begins to run or climb, the rider inserts their hands and forearms into the gauntlets, their feet and crura into the stockings, and takes almost all their weight off the animal's back.
Okay, there seem to be plenty of aspects I haven't fully thought through. Let's take it as a given that they're as brainy as we are: I'm not interested in writing them as a bunch of dimwitted savages. The question becomes if I need to make their heads bigger in relation to their bodies to make that plausible, and how much that throws off their balance.
How about real-world pygmies, do they have relatively bigger heads than taller peoples?
edited 13th Dec '10 3:06:08 AM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Pygmies are a group of people who grow to less than 5 feet tall, what you're talking about is people maxing out at about 80-90cm, so yes, you are going to run into brain-size issues, especially if you want to keep human proportions at that size. You could ignore it of course (so many do),but if you're looking for something totally accurate...
I didn't mean to imply that my hobbits would be similar to real pygmies. But looking at whether there actually is a correlation between brain size and intelligence for humans (on the ethnicity level, not the individual one) might be instructive.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.I was looking more toward statisticians. The IQ-scale has many flaws, but it's better than nothing.
Scratch that, I have a better approach: We can look at closely related animal species of significantly different sizes, and see if they do exhibit significantly different levels of intelligence.
For example, let's consider a wildcat and a tiger. Or a dolphin and a blue whale. Or a goat and a buffalo.
If there is a correlation, I certainly wouldn't call it significant. That's good enough for me, for the time being.
edited 13th Dec '10 8:27:12 PM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Humans are intelligent due to the surface area of our brains
Whales have huge brains, but they aren't flying into space, now are they? ;P
Provided the brain has a lot more folds, you shouldn't need a significant increase in head size
I wonder what a strip tease from a creature made of souls would be like?Re hexapods: No, I wasn't going to throw basic anatomical principles out of the window. Think bats (maybe feathery-winged, depending on whether aesthetics or plausibility triumphs), not angels.
I thought of something else in the meantime: How would their size affect their pace of life? Should their biological processes (pulse rate, to pick the most obvious) be faster and their life=span shorter? If yes, what's a reasonable factor here? 2, 8, or something else?
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.

Cool title, huh?
It occurred to me that, in an Earth-like fantasy setting, there are many advantages to shrinking humans (in the sense of the humanoid species to which the protagonists belong, whatever it may be called) to half our size. Keeping the proportions intact (if you think this is a bad assumption, feel free to argue), such people would weigh 5-10 kg.
What advantages, you ask? Well, for one thing, it makes it a lot more plausible (physically speaking, not evolutionarily) to have a winged sub-species capable of flight, since e.g. large eagles do indeed fall into this weight range. Along similar lines, these people's mounts could weigh as little as 50-100 kg (10% is commonly taken as an acceptable load for a large animal to carry on its back for extended periods without too much strain; horses, with up to 20%, are an exception), which means interesting species like wolves, lions and ostriches, to name just a few.
Before someone objects, yes, there were 75-kg birds and 750-kg predators once upon a time, so doing this with normal-sized humans is not impossible. But we know far less about their behaviour, and they were certainly a lot more ponderous than modern animals, so I find that approach less appealing.
Also, it makes the world a lot more hazardous (always welcome). A normal human with a spear (and the skill to use it) pretty much takes the apex spot in any terrestrial ecosystem. Shrink him, and the predators look a lot more intimidating. Now, all the man-against-nature stuff writers loved to tell tall tales of in the good old days becomes entirely realistic: Eagles CAN snatch children. Crocodiles and pythons CAN swallow adults whole. A cave bear is REALLY bad news. Yay!
So, I hope I've made my case. What I want to know about is in how far I need to take a diminished physiology into account when writing action sequences.
What seems obvious is that they would be better jumpers and climbers and less likely to sustain injuries from falls (all distances reckoned in terms of body size). This should be so because they are stronger, relative to their own weight - and if you've ever observed a beginners' class in rock climbing for children, you'll know exactly what I mean. Surely, there's more, though...
ETA: Oh, I just thought of an entirely different aspect: They'd only need 1/8th the amount of food we need, so a given area can support 8 times as many people. That, however, would be perceived as a doubling of population density, since this is an areal, not a spatial, measure. I wonder if this is too simplistic, or if it really works like that in the natural world? There are many examples that would seem to support this idea, but a few, like Wildebeest herds, that don't fit at all.
edited 12th Dec '10 7:12:33 PM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.