[Diederich]

<mostly offtopic> My 16 year old son is flying through 5feet 10inches in height. I'm 5-7, and my wife is 5-10. He obviously gets his 'tall' from his mom.

Anyway, he's been complaining a lot about sitting in the back seat of our car. The car in question, a Model S, is, as I understand it, known to have fairly good back seat legroom, and we don't ride with the front seats far back.

The point is this: in so many ways, it's fucking glorious to be short.

I can sit on Caltrain or a jetliner and work fairly comfortably with my laptop. That's an epic, life-long advantage.

In trade? Well, I have to ask my wife or son to get things down from the top shelf.

Totally worth it.

[thaumasiotes]

> My 16 year old son is flying through 5feet 10inches in height. I'm 5-7, and my wife is 5-10. He obviously gets his 'tall' from his mom.

The contribution of tall mothers to height in sons is deceptively large, because women are quite short compared to men. Using your figures and some stylized assumptions:

American mean male height 70 inches.

American mean female height 66 inches.

Father 67 inches = 70-3

Mother 70 inches = 66+4

Heritability of height 0.8

Expected value of son's height is (70) + ((-3+4)/2)*0.8, or 70.4 inches, taller than either parent.

Reversing the heights of the parents gives the same result for the son (it's a substitution of (0+1) for (-3+4)), but people are much less surprised by a son who's slightly taller than his average father than they are by a son who's much taller than his father and even taller than his very tall mother.

[thaumasiotes]

Followup comment: this assumes that the standard deviation of height is equal for males and females. In reality, the male deviation is larger, which means that an inch of mother height contributes more than an inch of father height does.

[dsfyu404ed]

The back seats of some cars are fine. The back seats of others are like being hauled around in a stagecoach, even with enough leg room. I'm not sure where rear seat comfort fell on Tesla's priority list. On one hand you expect a premium car to feel premium regardless of what seat you're in but on the other it's not marketed as a family hauler.

I've never encountered anything worse than the back seat of a 4th gen Altima. Something about it it just nauseating Given a choice between an old pickup with no AC and manual steering in the summer and rear seat of a 4th gen Altima I'd take the truck almost every time.