• Technus@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    What about people who have had limbs amputated?

    Do teeth count as part of the skeleton? If you’ve lost teeth do you only have 99% of a skeleton left?

    According to this, bones don’t start forming until the sixth or seventh week of gestation, so does the fetus technically not have a skeleton before then?

    So many questions

    • jettrscga@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      For the sake of this exercise we’ll consider skeletons rounded to whole integers. And air resistance may be ignored.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        Just goes to show how your prejudices affect your judgement without you realising. I just assumed everyone’s skeleton was a perfect sphere one unit in diameter and mass, at rest, on a perfectly level, frictionless, infinite plane and in a vacuum. Like mine.

      • BluesF@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        Well then the average is just 1 isn’t it. It doesn’t make any sense to integer-ise your inputs but leave your output rounded.

    • Sanyanov@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’d argue you still have one skeleton if you lose limbs or teeth.

      Amount of skeletons is an integer representing the anount of bone structures holding and protecting human body (or whatever’s left of it).

      The real question is, how much of which parts of skeleton can we lose with it still being skeleton instead of a set of bones?

    • jwhardcastle@dmv.social
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      11 months ago

      Everyone else is failing to count the number of babies (140 million per year) nearly all of whom have 100% complete skeletons and set that against the number of amputations of perhaps a few percentage points across a much smaller number of people annually (“more than 1 million annually”).

    • Instigate@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      I’d argue teeth aren’t skeleton because they’re not made of the same substance as bone - the outside is enamel and dentin whereas bones are collagen, protein and minerals (mostly calcium). Kinda like how hair and nails don’t count because they’re made of keratin.

    • Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      so does the fetus technically not have a skeleton before then?

      The cartilaginous pre-bones would still be a skeleton. Sharks have skeletons, but don’t have any bones for example.

    • gnate@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Will no one bring down the average? I guess they won’t be stepping up …

        • grayman@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I mentioned it because I say “The average person has less than 1 testicle.”… Also The average person has less than 2 legs… 2 arms… 2 breasts… etc. One of my favorite eye rolling stupid joke.

          • Rednax@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I have a ton of legs. Waayyy more than 2.

            What can I say? They were cheap, and I love chicken.

      • misophist@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        There are more women than men

        [CITATION NEEDED]

        Also, 1 is correct if we consider significant figures. It may be slightly less, but rounded to the nearest whole number is most certainly 1.

  • JustUseMint@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    It’s scary enough that we have one skeleton inside and now I have to worry about the potential for two of them?! How am I supposed to sleep

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    That is clearly a ball of some sort, possible fairly heavy as she uses two hands to hold it in place.

    • misophist@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Do you understand how averages work?

      If there are 8 billion people on this world and each one has one skeleton in them, then the average number of skeletons is one. If even one of those 8 billion people have two skeletons in them, then the average is slightly more than one.

      So the average is more than one for pregnant people, but also for all people as a whole.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble but this doesn’t make sense. The average person is not pregnant. Therefore the average person does not have more than one skeleton in their body.

    • Raab@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s the average amount, meaning that if one person out of the entire world was pregnant, the average would be technically more than one, even in the slightest degree.

      • AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think even on balance, considering fractions of skeletons in whole people, you’re going to end up with more than one skeleton per person despite some of those people missing bones or limbs.

        It’s like one sixth of a percent more than 1:1 if there are 135 million babies born each year on earth, but that’s not nothing.

        • Raab@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Yeah that’s kinda the point I was getting at. With a baseline of 1 and the 100% probability of 1 person out of 8 billion being pregnant, it will always technically be more than 1.