• Technus@lemmy.zip
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    1 year 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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      1 year 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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        1 year 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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        1 year 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.

    • jwhardcastle@dmv.social
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      1 year 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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      1 year 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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      1 year 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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      1 year ago

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