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leora March 17 2006, 00:04:50 UTC
Taller people also tend to have better health, because bad health stunts your growth. I didn't eat or sleep enough while growing. Lately we've discovered this appears to have stunted my growth by five inches. It's not surprising that I'm shorter and can't go to graduate school - they're both linked to my health sucking, which probably links to not sleeping for 9 years, many of which were growing years.

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bridgetester March 17 2006, 00:15:00 UTC
*nods* Nutrition/health and social pairing/genetics are the two usual explanations given for height increase over the generations.

How do you determine that your height has been stunted? o.0

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leora March 17 2006, 00:21:12 UTC
It's hard to be sure, obviously... you can never really know. But different body parts grow at different rates, and I started not sleeping much at age 12. My feet are unusually large for my height, my legs are the same length as someone 9 inches taller than me, and the big indicator - when I spread my arms and measure them from fingertip to fingertip, my arm-spread is 5 inches more than my height. They're supposed to be the same. This also explains why I can reach far, far higher than a friend of mine of almost identical height ( ... )

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bridgetester March 17 2006, 00:24:49 UTC
:o

*fixes your health*

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zesty_pinto March 17 2006, 01:56:07 UTC
Hasn't the correlation between short and tall people also been linked with nutrition? Naturally, a child that was brought up under proper conditions would thrive more than one that was brought up within less ideal scenarios, I would imagine. While I'm not saying that children still suffer the same as they did during the Dark Ages were women were anemic and nutrition was poor, but a family that grew up within conditions that understood the value of balanced diet would probably be more likely to breed taller children as a result of it.

I still can't forget that what caused genocide in Rwanda was a bunch of colonials telling a bunch of taller cattle owners that they were better than the short people. I wonder what other cultures may adhere to this issue of height being proportional with benefit.

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hmmm codemonkeym March 17 2006, 15:31:35 UTC
Interesting. :-)

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Wondering... orb2069 March 17 2006, 16:24:14 UTC
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about any other languages to see if the tall=good/Short=bad correlation that appears to be in the english language ("Looking [up to/Down on] someone", "A head above the rest", "Coming up short", etc...) is replicated in other societies. Of course, the chicken-or-egg question inherent in this is something it'd probably take a linguist/sociologist to unravel fully.

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