this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Interesting proposal, but I'm thinking it might not be necessarily so. Life expectancy is an average, and averages do not need to be exactly at 50% of the population. That's the median, you are thinking of the median. It is quite more complicated than that, as there are hundreds of factors that alter life expectancy, thus there are many life expectancy tables depending on gender, lifestyle, cohort, race, income, etc. It will not amount to 50% of the population, specially for populations with a lot of outliers. People who die soon after birth or live exceptionally long lives will skew the average deviating it from a true central tendency. As people live longer and less people die early, then the median (the age at which at least 50% of a cohort, people born the same year, dies) will shift away from the average and occur later. If a lot of teenage and young people die, but the survivors live long lives, then the median will occur sooner. The technical terms are skewness and kurtosis of a probability distribution.
This changes in statistic sources will alter probabilities and thus life expectancy will not correlate directly with the median.