I'm loving the Kerm pose in that chart, which, good sir, is truly epic. Looking at that chart, it doesn't actually seem that we average above-average, which I find very surprising. Selection bias in my brain?

Added TheStorm. You people all make me feel short.
Averagers unite?

Can you add me too? I'm 5', 11.875".

Technomonkey, that's extremely precise.

I'll unite with the other people who are average. You can go chill with benryves in the "just barely below average" group

I imagine that's because it's just almost 6', which seems to be some sort of ideal, to be at or over 6 feet. Personally, I'd rather not stand above everyone in a crowd

Latest revision, reposted so it's on this page too.

Added Technomonkey.

[Last updated 20.2.2011, 17:19 UTC-0500]

About 6'5" for me too.

I'm 5'11" I think. I haven't checked in a very long time.

5½ ft ≈ 167.64 cm

Qwerty.55, high five for the 6'5" people! \o/ Tari, I'm curious what software you're using to generate that chart.

lol @nikky's height.

AHAHA nikky is going to be mad is he sees that

Put together by hand in Inkscape with some freely-licensed silhouette paths.

Adding Weregoose, tifreak, and Qwerty.55 now, so I'll update the image shortly.

I'm about 6'1" -ish.

Haven't had it checked in about a year or two, but I'm pretty much done growing, so I think that's pretty accurate.

Also Kerm, were you taking account age? I think I'd be surprised itf everyone here was done growing (referring to some of our younger users), so you may have to take that into account.

Also just added Mufin, post has been updated.

Quite true. Most of those who are below average seem to be those whom I take to be younger/still growing. The exceptions I know of seem to be myself, Weregoose, and benryves.

Overall, however, you'll probably find that the younger generations (such as everyone here) are taller than the older members of the population. If you were to generate a histogram comparing age (say, in one-year buckets) to height, I suspect it would show a significant right skew (a negative correlation of age to height).

There are a variety of possibilities for the cause of such a phenomenon (in addition to straight compression of a person over time), but one that I find particularly plausible is the improvement of nutrition in recent decades, so the youngest generations are able to grow larger than their predecessors.

Hmm, and I wonder if our ages could indeed explain our perceived above-average average height, since we're all younger than the average age, I think.

I was beginning to think that may as well also explain the "over average intelligence" part as well. No offense to some of our older members, but each generation will be progressively more intelligent than it's predecessor. Perhaps this could explain your theory, Kerm?

P.S. Thanks for adding me in so quickly, Tari.

MufinMcFlufin, possibly. I have an alternate explanation, though. I believe that those who have a genetic predisposition towards intelligence may be the product of above-average-intelligence parents, who have the means for both good nourishment for the child and good education, which could then support both superior physical development and mental development; the height and intelligence factors could thus both be a result of a third commonality.

I feel like much of the feeling of superior intelligence that us younger people feel is probably not actually true.

The general feeling of children and young (hence inexperienced) members of society that they have everything figured out (call it a sophomoric feeling or perhaps unconsious incompetence) is pretty well-known and recognized, and that likely plays some part in this feeling.

However, I also think the feeling comes from a difference in how today's young people approach problems. We're very used to quickly absorbing information and putting it to use through some means- such an approach to problem-solving would be very difficult to execute as little as 15 years ago, as common web access allows us to get nearly any information with a few keystrokes.
As a result, today's young generations have a different set of expertise than the older ones- specifically, I feel that we have learned how to learn, rather than just learning a variety of things in a rather specific field.

Some anecdotal evidence: I did some work on embedded systems for an internship last summer, working mostly with other middle-aged engineers. I hadn't ever worked with the exact toolset which was in use there, but I quickly picked it up by spending a day or two with the documentation and studying the results of some tinkering. The result of that was I had the software for a project finished in only several days, which was much faster than anyone else seemed to expect I would have it completed. To me, however, this seemed par for the course.

Basically, I think the increased intelligence of today's young people is an illusion. It's just the case that we have become very good at being consciously incompetent (rather than unconsciously incompetent) at many things by assuming greater depths to problems than may seem immediately obvious. When we know what we don't know, it's then easy to find a solution to whatever problem currently presents itself.

Some of that is probably just the tendency of our types (the programmer type) to present all of the above properties, but I think much of it is also the recent availability of information.

i think that the adaptability applies mostly to denizens of the wob. the influx of information has had much the opposite effect on some people. take, for example, the widespread epidemic of "Attention Deficit Disorder."

also, i take cemetech's ability to turn a "just for fun" thread into a debate of sorts as evidence enough for a correlation between active membership and intelligence.

Kerm: what exactly is the relation between health and height? food intake?

lastly, i love that i am a bald, pink man, but why is my name always misspelt? XD