the.com/mean
the average that smooths a thousand stories into one tidy, often misleading number
means In mathematics, the mean is the value you get by adding up a set of numbers and dividing by how many there are — the everyday 'average.'
from This 'mean' came through Old French 'meien' from Latin 'medianus,' meaning 'in the middle,' itself from 'medius,' 'middle' — a relative of English 'mid' and 'median.' The idea of a midpoint between extremes slid neatly into mathematics as the central value between numbers. It's a separate word from the 'mean' that means cruel and from the verb 'to mean,' which trace to different roots entirely — three unrelated travelers who happen to share a spelling.
- outlier prone
- one billionaire makes a whole town rich
- three flavors
- arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic all disagree
- old root
- shares ancestry with medieval and meditate
- central limit
- sample means trend normal regardless of source
- not median
- the average rarely equals the middle person
mean girls — 2004 film starring lindsay lohan about high school cliques
mean street — 1973 martin scorsese film set in new york city
the mean machine — 1974 burt reynolds nascar film