Thursday, March 08, 2007

Different or the same? (2)

Going back to our binary categorisation of humans. Suppose by some celestial coincidence we picked the dividing line between tall & short exactly on the median height of the population. So exactly half are tall & half short. Same for weight, intelligence, sporting ability etc etc

And suppose by another celestial coincidence we have found a population of 1million people*, each of whom fits, exactly, one of our categories. We have 1,000,000 people each of whom is unique.


Only one who is tall + fat+ intelligent + a sporting rabbit+.......

Only one who is short + fat + intelligent +a sportstar.............

And so on.

But each person will share each single characteristic with half of the population


*OK, really I mean 1,048,576. Just keeping it elegantly simple
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