Monday, February 13, 2012

When your number's up

I have a cousin who had one of his ears bitten off by a horse. Even if he was the only one-eared man in the world, this would shift the arithmetic mean; the average person worldwide has slightly fewer than two ears. So in at least one sense, the vast majority of us can take pride in being above average. Then there's this: Somebody went to the trouble to figure out that the total weight of the entire human species is well over 400 billion kilograms, roughly one trillion pounds. Of course, a lot of that is fat and gristle.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...and sometimes not that much brain.