Presidential Heights Revisited

[Trivia: can you name the 3 races in the [edited 1/6/23: StarCraft] video game series?]

A while ago I wrote about presidential heights and how it was a neat case study for watching a line of best fit explain a trend that your eye alone couldn’t be positive was real or not. I showed off this graph from Wikipedia:

But I never liked how it only went as far as #44. So I revisited the topic, using the figures from that same Wikipedia page, and put together my own.

Here’s all 46* heights. From Franklin Pierce (#14) onwards, I color-coded by party, not that much of a pattern emerges. (Pierce’s predecessor was the last to be neither a Democrat nor a Republican.)

*Blah blah blah Grover Cleveland number of presidents does not equal number etc.

And here’s the scatterplot of heights with a few lines. The red line is mathematically equivalent to the line of best fit from the first, obsolete graph (i.e. same y-axis intercept and slope); the black line is the new line of best fit, with the 2 newest data points incorporated. What’s striking is how little change on the data set 2 more numbers that are pretty much of a piece with the previous ones can actually have.

We’ve also got a nice horizontal line in forest green up there, representing 182.88 cm, in other words 6 feet.

There’s plenty of topics I began writing on this past year that I intend to circle back to with more—especially about free speech and the coronavirus—but this felt like a nice thing to put a bow on . . . until, perhaps, just 2 years from now, at which point even this might well need updating.

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Answer: the Protoss, Terrans (people), and Zerg. The Xel’Naga are extinct.