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Comment by bagels | Hacker News Reader

Why do some of the feet seem to have four or six toes?

Well, relatedly:

The median number of legs for a human being is 2. The average is slightly less. So most people have an above average number of legs.

But also, footprints with just four toes could also be because of one of the toes not carrying enough weight to make a legible print.

Wouldn't the median be 1? Most folks have 2 legs, but some have 1 or even 0. The median would be 2 if some people had 4 legs.

No. To illustrate:

[ 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ]

^^^

The 5th element is the median.

Say there's 8,000,000,000 on the planet, you line up starting at #1 with all the people with 0 legs, then all the people with 1, then all the people with 2, then all the people with more than 2.

Person #4,000,000,000 has 2 legs.

No, what you're getting at is actually exactly why the median is preferred to mean for this sort of thing. The mean is 1.something, it wouldn't round to 1, but you can see how that might happen and be undesirable in other cases.

The median selects the most 'middling' result, it's like the mode (the majority) except sorted and middled: if you had ~as many people with 0 as 2 legs (bimodal), then you'd end up with a median of 1.

If 50.1% of people had 2 legs and 49.9% of people had 0 legs, the median number of legs would be 2, not 1.

The median number of testicles in humans is 2. The mean is slightly over 1.

I didn't mean that 0 people had 1 leg, if 45% have each 0 and 2 legs, and the remaining 10% have 1, then the median is 1. I meant it just as a hypothetical adjustment to the real world, instead of almost 0 with 0, almost 0 with 1, almost everyone with 2; what if it were almost 50% with 0, almost 0 with 1, almost 50% with 2.

relatedly, the average number of brains in the human body is just over 1, so most people have below average brains

This is news to me — can you elaborate? Is this a cannibalism joke?

ever seen a pregnant woman?

Ah, fair enough. I think I prefer it as a cannibalism joke though lol

... or the movie Alien? Altho that's also a kind of pregnancy.

> The average is slightly less.

The Riddle of the Sphinx begs to differ.

There are petroglyphs depicting six-fingered hands in Chaco Canyon and, judging from an internet search, people can have six fingers.

Stands to reason six toes is possible?

Yes, some people do have more or fewer, but it is uncommon.

If it is genetic though (I assume?) it is reasonable some of the early humans to North America carried that gene with them.

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