TV Viewers' Average Age Hits 50 331
Ant writes "Variety reports on a recent study that says TV viewership's median age is outside the 18-49 years demographic: "The broadcast networks have grown older than ever — if they were a person, they wouldn't even be a part of TV's target demo anymore." These totals exclude DVR users, and apparently the oldest since they started tracking it. Of course you know what the means ... TV is for old people! The internet has confirmed it.
"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Funny)
>>The internet has confirmed it.
Ah, but what does Netcraft say?
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Netcraft says the daily heroic killed TV (also relationships, pets, and occasionally a small child).
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Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Funny)
From what I hear, claim to be a Nigerian prince works just fine?
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't watch much TV either, but I do find I would rather watch something like "House" over the crap on MTV now-a-days. Although, the cable channels like Discovery actually win out in the end.
Most "TV" consumed in my house is first encoded to a disk drive, then watched in as close to 44 minutes per hour as possible.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Funny)
Two points -
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure MTV was cool for at least a week. Maybe longer.
Also, the OMFG crowd didn't come about until sometime in the mid 90s.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust me, the kids of the 90s didn't invent that type of person. They just gave them their own name. You'll find people like that in every generation. What else do you think bobby-soxers or teenyboppers were?
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget Valley Girls? Whose bizarre inflections have spread across America? So you can't tell if a teenager is asking a question or making a statement?
Hearing it makes my brain cringe? I can't imagine what it would be like? For a non-english-speaker to parse valley girl talk? Effectively?
-b?
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MTV might not have been cool, but it wasn't all bad in the early 90s, either.
I didn't watch it religiously, so I only remember the stuff I liked and thus watched -- Aeon Flux, MTV's Oddities, and actual music videos before the R&B/Pop/whateverthehellNickelbackis/rap music videos that are mostly unimaginative crap. (There is *one* rap video, with different jerseys and booty dancers.)
Then they hired that weird annoying scarecrow VJ, and the boyband craze started, and Britney and eight THOUSAND Real World
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I only remember the stuff I liked and thus watched -- Aeon Flux, MTV's Oddities...
Don't forget Liquid Television, 120 Minutes, and the fact that on weekdays they showed episodes of Monty Python as well as The Young Ones, back when non-music shows were the exception and not the rule.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Funny)
I got lots of stares those first few ears.
You know, if you sterilize the needles, you get fewer stares and go through fewer ears...
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Also, the OMFG crowd didn't come about until sometime in the mid 90s.
Since we're dating ourselves, he's more or less quoting the 1982 song "Valley Girl".
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Interesting)
Then came the Dark Times, when the DJs became bigger celebrities than the musicians (at least in their own minds.) And about then we graduated, so it was all over anyway.
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Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Interesting)
I was.
It (MTV) wasn't.
Except for Weird Al videos. I'll give you that one :-)
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Cool is 24 hours a day music videos with 90% mainstream and 10% "learn new stuff"/Bizarre/off the wall".
MTV was indeed cool. Through about 1988. Then it lost it and became crap.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite right. Maybe they're like my parents, who just get network TV on rabbit ears. Once I brought up the subject of satellite TV. My mom said "That'll be the day, when I pay for TV!"
In a way, I admire that. In another way, I like watching "Mythbusters."
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Insightful)
I pay so I can skip the ads
I torrent so I don't have to
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Interesting)
If every show was of that quality... as it isn't, it's a waste of money. I'd rather pay for my ISP and have all the fun of the net.
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I haven't owned a tv for over a decade (I'm 42, so well into the age range that is supposed to like TV).
Its the advertising really. I can't stand it. The time I loved TV was in the seventies. Since then my use of tv has waned, and now died.
Now I buy series on dvd if I decide I like them. Usually this deciding is via encountering them on the internet.
In this way I got to watch five seasons of Stargate without ever having seen an episode before then. It was awesome, much more fun then suffering years of waiti
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Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Informative)
You know there are more channels on cable that have programming geared towards the "older, wiser crowd", right? MTV isn't the only channel on cable. Channels like The History Channel, Discovery, TLC, The Documentary Channel, and well, CNN, CSPAN, and others provide way more interesting TV than most of the network shows.
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I'm not sure how long its been since you watched TV, but TLC stopped showing educational programming around the mid-90s, and for the past 5 or 6 years at least has been pretty much exclusivel
'Target Demographic' Spends Money (Score:3, Insightful)
The important part of the target demographic isn't the quantity of viewers, it's the quantity of buyers.
Advertisers don't care if they show it to 10,000,000 people and 50,000 follow up with a sale or 500,000 are shown and 50,000 follow up with a sale. A Sale is a Sale. Sales per $ of advertising is one of the most important metrics. If they have to direct marketing past 60% of the audience which isn't interested that's fine--they weren't going to buy anything from them anyway.
Network television reaches
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's not just that. The Internet has helped, sure, but the biggest problem the networks face is declining viewership as cable channels do better and better jobs at hitting more specific niches. You have channels for everything from sci-fi to home improvement. The Internet merely takes that one step farther and creates channels for everything from nude archery to watching people's feet as they walk past aisles of clothing at J.C. Penney.
The point is that as the availability of options increases, the interest in individual options decreases, and younger viewers are far more likely to find those new options and take advantage of them than older viewers simply because they are more connected with other people. You hear about things on TV, the radio, email, around work, etc. Retired people have much more limited ways to find out about these things, and thus are much less likely to end up watching the Smurfs With Green Moustaches Drawn On By Monkeys In Tutus Hour. Therefore, the older demographic will be much slower to transition away from legacy technologies like broadcast TV and towards more niche-oriented content like cable channels, towards more on-demand technologies like iTunes, and towards more peer-generated services like YouTube.
I predicted the death of broadcast TV back in 1995. IIRC, I gave it 10-15 years. It may take a little longer, but I suspect I was a lot closer than the folks who read my essay suspected....
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Hey yeah, when are they going to show that again anyway? Man, that was teh shizzle!
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I predicted the death of broadcast TV back in 1995. IIRC, I gave it 10-15 years. It may take a little longer, but I suspect I was a lot closer than the folks who read my essay suspected....
That's a worthless prediction. Mediums generally don't die because there's a newer one. Radio was supposed to kill newspapers. TV was supposed to kill radio. But newspapers and radio had both changed in response to its "replacement". Their audience did diminish (and are still diminishing) but they aren't dying. If you really want to push it, given that eventually most internet use is at least one stage broadcast wirelessly, the model of broadcasting only changes, but it's still broadcasting.
With the a
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...and this is different from the analog broadcast situation how exactly?
Many of us (probably most of us) have been subscribed to cable for 20 or 30
years for no other reason than the fact that local broadcasts are unwatchable.
Digital makes broadcast TV watchable from where I'm at (outer suburbs). Otherwise
I might be able to get one or two really grainy channel if I am lucky. With Digital,
I can tune into 35 channels with 15 that are actually of some interest to me.
Tuner quality matters though. My $2000 HDTV
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1. The internet came along with it's wide variety of diversions.
2. TV companies decided to have hundreds of channels of crap, rather than a few good ones.
3. People are watching TV programs online now.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Funny)
3b. Internet Killed the TV Star
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Interesting)
Come on, mods!
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Three things have killed TV. ...
2. TV companies decided to have hundreds of channels of crap, rather than a few good ones.
A few good ones? Back when there were only a few channels, the only good channel was PBS. The rest sucked, but we were too young to realize it. You try to watch some of that awful stuff now and you'll cringe. How did we ever make it out of the 70's?
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm impressed with what the big broadcasters did with Hulu.com. Shows stream with no strings attached, and the ads are extremely short and unintrusive.
Plenty of nerds boast about cutting ads out, but the sad truth is that they pay for the content. It's nice to see an ad scheme subtle enough not to cause people to subvert it.
Re:"The internet has confirmed it" (Score:4, Interesting)
Top heavy population (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Top heavy population (Score:5, Insightful)
We 'retired people' are on the web too. (Score:5, Funny)
Broadcasters can lick the sweat off of my balls.
Getting any media off of the air is so passé.
Re:We 'retired people' are on the web too. (Score:5, Interesting)
unless your wirelessly watching that tv show on your cell phone.
Re:We 'retired people' are on the web too. (Score:5, Informative)
in Korea, only old people do that.
the young people are RECORDING broadcast television on their cellphones while they are watch something else, and they do this while they are on the subway.
and yes. i really have recorded the starcraft channel on my cellphone, while watching the other starcraft channel. its a cultural experience i will never forget.
Re:We 'retired people' are on the web too. (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno, have you compared the encoding quality of HDTV OTA channels vs. cable lately?
Re:We 'retired people' are on the web too. (Score:4, Funny)
I hardly think this is the place to be pitching your new website idea.
Re:Top heavy population (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention, retired people don't like to pay for excessive things like extra TV signals. They'll take the channels they can get via rabbit ears and read the newspaper.
You do realize that current 50-somethings and 60-something aren't in that category, right? In the past, older people didn't pay excessive things because they grew up with the Great Depression and World War II, and were taught not to be wasteful.
The 50 and 60 somethings of today are Baby Boomers -- the so-called "me" generation. Most of them are so self-absorbed, that they can't imagine a world without luxuries they've taken for granted for many years, including cable TV and, at least for some, the Internet.
`
Re:Top heavy population (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you one of these boomers? Considering these things non-luxury is a bit of a stretch (especially online dating).
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I think you meant to be funny, because it sure wasn't insightful. The 50-60 demographic (baby boomers) have more disposable income than most any two of us combined and enjoy their creature comforts quite a bit. They have HDTV and cable and broadband for the most part.
Even the older demographics mostly have a lot of those things. Again, I *hope* you were trying to be funny, because the alternative is ignorance.
the digital switch of DOOM! (Score:4, Funny)
They'll take the channels they can get via rabbit ears
6 months, and counting...
Excellent! (Score:4, Funny)
So how come the AARP keeps pestering me and the stores offer me the "seniors discount?"
[1] Thanks very much, $HERSELF's boobs here are still very worth watching.
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I read the article, and I've only seen one of the shows they talk about - Scrubs ... and even that, I haven't watched in a year.
What I found interesting was that Faux News has the oldest viewership - that explains John McCain, in a weird sort of way. they're just serving up material for their target demographic - the Polygrip set.
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Funny)
Me too (Score:2)
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So since I don't watch the boob tube
Obligatory [theonion.com]
WTF IS A TV? (Score:2)
You mean that thing with the buttons and goofy controller? My GRANDMOTHER gets her media from one of those!
TV is for watching the Red Sox... (Score:2, Interesting)
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And all those Red Sox and Celtics road games on the Boston superstation, WSBK TV38...
Hey, wait a second. Those all moved to NESN and what's now known as Comcast Sports Net New England (formerly Fox Sports Net New England, formerly SportsChannel New England).
It used to be you had the option of seeing the home games on those two as pay channels for $20-$30 a month, 1/15 or so took them up on that. Now everybody with expanded basic service gets them, but the bills went up $3-5 a month as a result.
1. Have sport
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Average live median age? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Average live median age? (Score:5, Informative)
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I thought Slashdot was bad using average in the headline and median in the story, but then I RTFA:
I would have thought that on slashdot of all places this wouldn't have to be explained. The word average can reffer to mean, median or mode. While the media, and as a result, most people with average math skills (or less), often talk/write as though the only definition of the word average is mean, all three are correct. (and as such neither the article nor the summary did anything bad)
Re:Average live median age? (Score:5, Funny)
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It changes to the channel which has the most shows on it.
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From what I gather RTFA, what they mean is that the took the median ages for each of the five networks and averaged them together. In other words, "average live median age" is actually correct as the figure is indeed the average of the median ages for each network. (The headline of the article is confused though as this says nothing about the average age of viewers.)
Re:Average live median age? (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I'm sick of this. Some pedant who probably doesn't know UMVUE from UMP always chimes in when someone mentions the words 'average' and 'median' within 1000 syllables of each other.
I have a Master's degree in Statistics, a BS in mathematics, and work as a statistician.
There is really not strict mathematical definition of 'average'. There is a concept of averages as measures of central tendency. However, I've just consulted three of my theoretical statistical inference texts, and not a single one of them has an index entry for the word 'average'. They of course have index entries for 'mean' and 'median'.
Both mean and median are types of averages, neither inherently 'better' than the other. You won't find the word 'average' used in much technical literature because of this. You specify your statistic more precisely than that.
So the next time you see the word 'average', don't freak out about it. If someone doesn't specify what they mean, ask them, that's an important question, and something you should think about. You're just arguing semantics and come off as uninformed, if not a bit annoying.
Re:Average live median age? (Score:5, Funny)
My God, they're right! The Internet is replacing television!
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"I thought Slashdot was bad using average in the headline and median in the story..."
"Average" is a category of statistics which can include the mean, median, mode, etc.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average [wikipedia.org]
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So as my parents go off into the good night... (Score:4, Insightful)
I usually get up in the morning and read news.google.com first to see if the world has blown up and than peruse the RSS feeds from Eureka Alerts [eurekalert.org] before downloading my custom top 50 stories unto my Sony Ebook Reader [amazon.com] which I recently upgraded to from my old Palm M500. On the light rail I read the news like people used to read newspapers, completely on most days unless a slew of unwanted stories is downloaded. I find reading things that may not interest me at first can become a pretty enlightening experience and I am now as of a few months ago becoming more familiar with new economic movements such as crowdsourcing [wikipedia.org] and Wikinomics.
Welcome to the future (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to the new demographic, at least for the next 25 years.
Where did the content go? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody notice something missing from the broadcast (over-the-air) channels from the last few years?
10-20 years ago... you would find nearly half of your local NBA, MLB, and NHL games on broadcast, and as time went on the other half (mostly home games) would show up on HBO-like pay cable. Now, nearly all the games not on national TV are found on one basic cable network at least partly owned by the team. And cable bills went up a few dollars a month when that network moved from pay to basic status or got started in the first place.
News coverage has been cut back too. The idea of having a studio in every country we had friendly relations with has gone by the wayside. Longform presantations of things like the political conventions have been shifted to basic cable networks.
There used to just be "The People's Court" for court shows. Now there's enough syndicated judge-personality shows on broadcast to fill an entire daytime lineup. Cheapest to produce wins, the only thing cheaper is Jerry Springer and his knockoffs.
It's said what our seniors are getting for television signals these days, no wonder why those of us that can afford it get cable or DBS.
Miami Vice, et. al... (Score:2)
There isn't any REAL content on broadcast any longer that compares even with that of even the early 80s.
Desperate Housewives? Gimme a break.
When they can show South Park and real Soprano's episodes, I may tune back in.
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Nice rose colored glasses, but "Love Boat" and "Laverne & Shirley" were hardly the pinnacle of popular entertainment.
The best network programming is probably as good or better than ever. But there's 1000x more filler content and it's mostly terrible.
No, you just don't measure the young viewers (Score:3, Interesting)
That sums it all up. The younger generation have quickly adapted and taken advantage of time shifting and DVRs. The older generation is less likely to use new technology for watching television. Therefore, the studies are now skewed towards the higher age. Even my three year old knows to fast forward through commercials on our HTPC.
Re:No, you just don't measure the young viewers (Score:5, Informative)
No. From the fine article:
When live-plus-7 DVR viewing is factored in, the nets (except CW and Univision) drop by a year -- which still reps the oldest median age ever for the nets.
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100% of the people in nursing homes? (Score:2)
Lots of reasons the demographic is skewed. Does the internet have over 50% penetration in the over 50s yet? I would think a very small percentage of people over 40 were exposed to BBS/internet service when still at home with their parents not to mention the nonexistence of those fancy Star Trek communicator cell phone thingies. So what is there besides TV to feel comfortable with if you don't grow after childhood?
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I don't think it's all that unusual for us old farts to be long-time Internet users. I'm well into the demographic and have a similar history to yours when it comes to being online. I had a dial-up Unix shell Internet account in the early Nineties, back before the WWW became popular. Same deal with my wife before we met.
BTW, my father, who's in his eighties, uses the 'net every day.
Re:100% of the people in nursing homes? (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting point -- but who created the internet and home computers for you?
Yep -- we are all now in our 50's and up.
But we didn't grow up on TV either -- the first TV in our family was used to watch the moon landing in '69. But there was no "cable"; we could only receive three stations. Wasn't worth watching, most of the time (except for exceptional events, like the moon landing).
The previous generation (take my mother-in-law - she's in her '70s) didn't see a TV until their late twenties/early thirties -- it certainly isn't a formative part.
Still, census disagrees with me a bit -- TV penetration in households in the USA was nearly complete by 1960 (I guess our family was a hold-out):
http://www.tvb.org/rcentral/mediatrendstrack/tvbasics/02_TVHouseholds.asp [tvb.org]
It may be that viewers born 1960 (and before) to 1970 (ei. those who did NOT start with cable) view TV programs as an "event" rather than as disposable entertainment, which may drive that demographic to watch first airings.
(Ob: Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!)
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It's the soc degree in me. Anyone under the mid-sixties with a college degree has very likely had to use email and at least cruised the intra/internet at work. Whether they bother at home is another question. But I always remind myself that not everyone has a college degree or at least an office job.
Under Forty-ish seems about right for the average milestone of "growing up at home with computers". I first connected to CompuServe at 300 baud Thanksgiving weekend of '86.
Technically, I had my toddler mind
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What? My mother is approaching 70. She uses the internet, email, has a digital camera, a cell phone, drives a car, etc.
Your notion of old is very young.
hope beyond hope (Score:4, Insightful)
TV probably died in the year 2001. It is to be expected that, just like radio, it will hang on with it's one bony hand until it relegated to the backwoods of cheap motel rooms, where internet acess is not available.
Fat Chance! (Score:3, Funny)
So does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
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Simple demographics (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that the trailing edge of the baby boom turns 48 this year, I would have to guess that this statistic is a result of the demographic bulge. So the reason that these numbers are starting to skew higher is that there is now a higher percentage of the general population over 50.
In other words, move along there's nothing to see here.
Simpsons did it! (Score:3, Funny)
counter example: (Score:2)
The entertainment mediums are a changin' (Score:4, Interesting)
All my friends (myself excluded), spend 80-90% of the time they could be watching TV, playing video games. Hell, my boss who is in his mid-thirties, and well educated, spends his would-be-watching-tv time playing video games too. Same with many of my co-workers.
And then there are people like me (read cheapskates), who only have extremely basic cable because it comes at next to nothing w/ cable modem service. Netflix on-demand, for like $9 a month, gives me a plethora of documentary programming, and some decent movies, fills in the gaps that free television websites (southparkstudios.com, adultswim.com), do not provide.
What I have been saying for the last couple years is that cable companies should allow people to pick 10 networks, and be able to watch any of the content at any time, and stream it over the internet. Hell, I'll even provide the computer, it is easy enough to hook one up to a television nowadays. Some cable companies do it now with set-top boxes, but WTF do I want Style Network, Lifetime Network, and 20 other shitty channels just to be able to get their "premium" tier of service (on-demand). At a cost of like $80 a month w/ a cable modem. I'd gladly pay half that for what I just mentioned.
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It's not unusual for people in their mid 30s to be gamers instead of TV watchers. Don't forget, those in their mid 30s were the *vanguard* of gamers - they grew up with the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro etc. - the Spectrum alone had over 8,000 titles available by the late 80s.
TV Show Seasons on DVD (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for sports (which we use an antenna), nobody in my family has watched live TV for several years. We get Internet for our news (usually more in depth) and for TV shows we wait until the end of the season and then when the season's DVDs come out, read the reviews on Amazon and talk to friends.
Cost wise, over the course of the year, the season sets for a dozen shows (say $50 average each for sake of argument) is less than the cable/satellite options which have the specialty channels with CW, HBO, SHO & SciFi shows as well as the network shows. Having the DVDs allows very comfortable time-shifting and being able to re-watch of shows.
I know quite a few people do it this way (with some swapping of sets although with the recipient usually watching an episode or two and then buying a set for themselves if they like the show).
Maybe it's *my* demographic, but it works and the content owners are being paid for their product.
myke
no television in the Star Trek utopia (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Technophobia (Score:4, Funny)
what are old people not afraid of?!
Matlock
Re:Median number of legs... (Score:3)
But you are correct in your assertion that 99%+ of the population have more than the average number of legs. When you include amputees and other unfortunates the mean number of legs would be somewhere around 1.997, and when most people think of average they are really thinking of the mean.