http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/10/galton_was_a_he.html In Graphics of Large Datasets: Visualizing a Million (about which more in a future entry), I saw the following graph reproduced from an 1869 book by Francis Galton, one of the fathers of applied statistics: According to this graph [sorry... en-us <p>In <a href="http://www.springer.com/west/home/statistics/computational?SGWID=4-10130-22-147124632-0">Graphics of Large Datasets: Visualizing a Million</a> (about which more in a future entry), I saw the following graph reproduced from an 1869 book by Francis Galton, one of the fathers of applied statistics:</p> <p><img alt="Genius.png" src="http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/Genius.png" width="264" height="438" /></p> <p>According to this graph [sorry it's hard to read: the words on the left say "100 per million above this line", "Line of average height", and "100 per millon above this line"; and on the right it says "Scale of feet"], one man in a million should be 9 feet tall! This didn't make sense to me: if there were about 10 million men in England in Galton's time, this would lead us to expect 10 nine-footers. As far as I know, this didn't happen, and I assume Galton would've realized this when he was making the graph.</p> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/10/galton_was_a_he.html <p>hmm. galton never meant much to me. did he appear on a stamp?</p> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/000772.html#045461 <p>me: I don't know that most people would get your Public Enemy reference...</p> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/000772.html#045497 <p>Hey, I'm just glad that anybody caught the reference...</p> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/000772.html#045540