Re:Intelligence is not like height
by throwaway9917 on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @07:18PM
(#41374321)
Standard deviation of human height (within a single sex) is about 7cm. If human height changes over the course of a day by 1.5cm, assuming it linearly declines over the day, that's a stddev of about 0.6cm. You also can reasonably assume that people are normally going to be measured at the doctor/researcher's office during business hours, so it's probably more like 0.4cm. The measurement error of just standing up straight or not and reading the numbers is probably more.
You grow and shrink about 1% per day, as you get compressed when you stand up and decompress when you sleep. That is about 1.5 cm, and with a human height standard deviation is about 6cm you get around 0.25 standard deviation variation when measuring the height of a single human at different times of day, or about 4 point difference if we have 15 points per standard deviation.