Comments

  1. Bruce says

    The graph should have shown the top of a head peeking out like Kilroy Was Here for Indonesia. Then the same size head slightly raised for the others.

  2. StevoR says

    H – Homo floresiensis

    in that or something / what?

    Natch. That is. Brain, sleep-deprived, typing always sucks, me, here,. fucks sake. Sorry folks.

    Also what a very random selection of nationalities there.. Wonder how Aussies, Kazakhs, Japanese, Germans, etc.. comapre and who chooses which groups feature here..

  3. Pierce R. Butler says

    What about the average adult male height?

    I don’t measure myself much, but decades ago I stood at 5’10”, and read that was the average US adult male height.

    Recently, a medically-required remeasure shows I shrunk an inch – but now I’ve become an inch above average?!?

  4. pilgham says

    I’m never sure whether scaling an image of 3-d objects in a picto graph deceives the mind as the square of the facot used or the cube. The largest man pictured might weigh 200 lbs and the smallest might be 20 lbs. Truly a graph a propagandist would love.

  5. bcw bcw says

    Need another chart illustrated the same way with non-zero axis for average body weight.

  6. Evil Dave says

    Larry @11:
    The earliest (2022) version of the article on the Internet Archive shows the deceptively scaled graph. It was corrected sometime in 2023.

  7. Rich Woods says

    Obviously the reason why the Dutch are at least 25% taller than everyone else is that they are the evolutionary consequence of a group of human beings choosing to live six feet below sea level.

  8. mathman85 says

    Oh, dear, the scale. The scale! I’ve taught statistics far too many times to be able to let that kind of a graph crime go unanswered.

  9. mathman85 says

    It’s also supposed to be a bar graph, but it’s using pictographs instead of bars, and it scales the image up in two dimensions rather than stretching it in the vertical dimension only. Ugh. I hate it.

  10. chrislawson says

    @15– There’s an evopsych paper right there! I can already see the headline in The Economist.

  11. Ridana says

    I don’t see the point of using human figures for the plot, since they don’t really match the purported measures. Even the “corrected” version has the figures levitating 4″ above the baseline, yet the 6’0″ figure still doesn’t reach the 6′ axis mark.

    I think I like the giants graph better. There’s something uncannily creepy about the later version, that I can’t quite put my finger on.

  12. moarscienceplz says

    All this time I thought Land of the Giants was a sci-fi TV show, and it turns out to be a documentary about Asian people living in the Netherlands.

  13. Dave says

    This explains how the Dutch were able to conquer and colonize Indonesia. Guns, germs, and steel? Nah, it was dem giants!