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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you read the whole article, it turns out that Americans are often too tall to donate their bodies to science, too: the limit is 6'. The reason is pretty simple: the anatomy labs have tables that accommodate bodies of a certain size. In the good states, if you donate your body but it can't be used, they'll cremate it at their expense and return the ashes. A lot of hedging and hemming aside, I think I've pretty much captured the whole article.

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Not sure if the data I just found is reliable, but according to that, only about 13% of males and 0.03% of females in the US are taller than 6 feet.

The second figure cannot be right. I'm just a hair under 6' and I see women taller than me way more often than that would suggest. I'd maybe believe 0.3%, but 0.03% can't possibly be correct. 3 in 10,000? Got to be higher.

I think that it is easy to think that someone is taller than you that are the same height or even slightly shorter than you.

Also, many women wear heels making them seem taller.

It’s in the ballpark of .1%. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/...

If you’re seeing a lot of women over six feet, you’re either around a lot of Dutch women or they’re wearing elevating shoes (heels, tall flats/clogs.) Or perhaps you slouch. :)

This is why you don't generalize based on personal experiences.

Are tall women evenly distributed? I don't really know, but I wonder if having a hard time finding a partner in small towns would in some way push them towards cities, or something like that. Maybe there's something about the place you live, or the people you tend to be around.

> I see women taller than me way more often than that would suggest

How often do you see women not wearing any shoes? Unless you have a beach lifestyle it can't be that often?

You might be forgetting about the existence of your forehead. Your eyes will look up to a person who is the same size as you.

I am 6’7” and I rarely see people my height, but when I do I have aa strange feeling because I am typically the tallest person in a room. When we are the same height, they feel taller to me because I am not familiar with looking up to the top of someone’s head.

Your argument doesn't make much sense. Looking at this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...

The average American man older than 20 years of age is 5'9 and if you dig deeper into the source at:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03-046-508.pdf

Less than 15% of men (aged 20 and older) are 6' or taller.

Once you factor in women, only about 7% of the population is 6' or taller.

His explanation makes sense to me, and I don't think it was an argument to begin with. 15%, 7% - that sounds like a problem one would encounter "often" to me. It sounds like you're actually both in agreement.

The weight issue has gotten bigger because, well, people have gotten bigger while the infrastructure for storing bodies remains the same. This all seems relatively straightforward and unsurprising. We have the same type of problem with other old infrastructure built to hold human bodies -- like airplane seats.

Today I learned that I'm apparently too tall to donate my body to science. Now that's surprising!

Americans aren't getting that much taller, but they are rapidly getting fatter and fatter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

Singling out a statistically spurious reason to dismiss a major factor is weak.

I don't see anyone dismissing anything. I did see an explanation as to why things are the way they are.

The dismissal is in the last sentence:

>A lot of hedging and hemming aside, I think I've pretty much captured the whole article.

The article is not hedging or hemming anything, it's making it very clear that the main reason why bodies are being rejected is due to obesity as opposed to people being too tall. Furthermore, the article is arguing that this is a problem that is only going to get worse since people are getting more and more obese, but not more and more tall.

No, that isn't a dismissal. I think it's clear you're fundamentally misunderstanding the points being made.

You're arguing against stances that no one here has taken.

That is a dismissal and the fact that you have failed to clarify any point whatsoever and are keeping your statements vague and ambiguous suggests you're either trolling or are genuinely ignorant.

My original comment was to add precision to what was an otherwise fairly open-ended claim; to turn the "often too tall" into a precise figure of 7%. The article is not about that 7%, which is a figure that has likely remained fairly consistent for decades. Instead, the bulk of the article is about the 40% of Americans who are too obese. You have decided to dwell on a detail that 7% is actually significant (ignoring the fact that there's a lot of overlap between the 7% of Americans who are over 6' and those who are obese) and in doing so have turned this into a petty semantic argument.

What exactly do you think it means to claim that an article is hedging and hemming? If you're actually arguing in good faith instead of trolling, you should be able to provide a clear answer to that, but something tells me you won't and will instead continue to repeat the same semantic drivel over and over again.

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