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Le Zombie, whole no. 53, May-June 1943
Page 9
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EMERGENCY FLARE by Harry Warner, Jr. No, it isn't really an emergency this time, except in the sense that I still haven't thot up a decent title, and this one serves as well as anything to lead off more purely personally piffle. I think that I can question a couple of Widner's findings in the fan-psychometric research report, as published in the last LeZ. I know nothing about the average shoe or hat sizes, and shall let those two research results lie for someone else to pounce upon. But, concerning the height and age expectancy discoveries: I think the inch of extra height attributed to fans can be very easily accounted for, without getting mixed up in the are-fans-slans ? argument. Because over-estimating one's own tallness is a very common masculine weakness, brought about by that mysterious belief that height lends extra dignity to the male of the species. Take my own case. While I was growing up, a process which in its physical sense lasted some 17 or 18 years, and mentally is, I hope, how beginning, my female relatives watched me breathlessly to see whether I'd reach the giddy stratum of six foot. When I finally stopped expanding vertically, they all breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that I had achieved the desideratum. That made me think I was a six-footer , naturally, but I know shoes add about an inch, so I put down 5', 11" for Widner. Then in March, I was crated up in a bus with several dozen other lambs going to an induction center for the slaughter, and was carefully weighed and measured in the course of the draft exam. My official height turned out to be 5' 10". See what I mean? If everyone made the same sort of mistake, the figures of extra height prove nothing. Now for the life expectancy findings. I don't understand where and how Widner got his life expectancy figures for the nation as a whole. I suspect that he made the understandable mistake of simply digging up the first figures he could find that showed how long a baby born in the U S may be expected to live. He says that it's from 60 to 63 years; the latest edition of the World Almanac to which I have access, using 1930 census calculations, states it to be 56. However, the discrepancy there isn't the basic thing. It's this: Widner calculates on a basis of the ages of fan's grandparents. And to become a grandparent, one must reach a certain age; therefore, the life expectancy of a grandparent is automatically higher than the "normal" of an infant, because men and women who die in the first fifteen or twenty years of their life are automatically excluded form the grandparent ranks, and therefore don't drag down the average. So, while the World Almanac shows the average life expectancy of an infant to be 56 years , it also reveals that a person at the age of 22 may expect to live 44 more years, which accounts exactly for Widner's ten years. However, there's some evidence in Widner's favor. The average fan is young enough to be apt to have at least one grandparent still alive, and that means the gps' average age of this fan will be eventually a yr or two more than 73. On the other hand again, i believe life insurance statistics show certain other evidence about the ages of grandparents , that would take care of such rebuttal; but I'll not enter into that angle of the subject, because this is complicated enough already. In any event, someone should get the exact averages from the 1943 World Almanac, since the life expectancy of the average American, and the average
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EMERGENCY FLARE by Harry Warner, Jr. No, it isn't really an emergency this time, except in the sense that I still haven't thot up a decent title, and this one serves as well as anything to lead off more purely personally piffle. I think that I can question a couple of Widner's findings in the fan-psychometric research report, as published in the last LeZ. I know nothing about the average shoe or hat sizes, and shall let those two research results lie for someone else to pounce upon. But, concerning the height and age expectancy discoveries: I think the inch of extra height attributed to fans can be very easily accounted for, without getting mixed up in the are-fans-slans ? argument. Because over-estimating one's own tallness is a very common masculine weakness, brought about by that mysterious belief that height lends extra dignity to the male of the species. Take my own case. While I was growing up, a process which in its physical sense lasted some 17 or 18 years, and mentally is, I hope, how beginning, my female relatives watched me breathlessly to see whether I'd reach the giddy stratum of six foot. When I finally stopped expanding vertically, they all breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that I had achieved the desideratum. That made me think I was a six-footer , naturally, but I know shoes add about an inch, so I put down 5', 11" for Widner. Then in March, I was crated up in a bus with several dozen other lambs going to an induction center for the slaughter, and was carefully weighed and measured in the course of the draft exam. My official height turned out to be 5' 10". See what I mean? If everyone made the same sort of mistake, the figures of extra height prove nothing. Now for the life expectancy findings. I don't understand where and how Widner got his life expectancy figures for the nation as a whole. I suspect that he made the understandable mistake of simply digging up the first figures he could find that showed how long a baby born in the U S may be expected to live. He says that it's from 60 to 63 years; the latest edition of the World Almanac to which I have access, using 1930 census calculations, states it to be 56. However, the discrepancy there isn't the basic thing. It's this: Widner calculates on a basis of the ages of fan's grandparents. And to become a grandparent, one must reach a certain age; therefore, the life expectancy of a grandparent is automatically higher than the "normal" of an infant, because men and women who die in the first fifteen or twenty years of their life are automatically excluded form the grandparent ranks, and therefore don't drag down the average. So, while the World Almanac shows the average life expectancy of an infant to be 56 years , it also reveals that a person at the age of 22 may expect to live 44 more years, which accounts exactly for Widner's ten years. However, there's some evidence in Widner's favor. The average fan is young enough to be apt to have at least one grandparent still alive, and that means the gps' average age of this fan will be eventually a yr or two more than 73. On the other hand again, i believe life insurance statistics show certain other evidence about the ages of grandparents , that would take care of such rebuttal; but I'll not enter into that angle of the subject, because this is complicated enough already. In any event, someone should get the exact averages from the 1943 World Almanac, since the life expectancy of the average American, and the average
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