Hair Thickness of My Friends

IntroI have a microscope. It can see hair. Humans have hair. Some of my friends are humans. How thick is my friends' hair? Apparently, if I go around asking my friends for a strand of their hair, about half will just give one to me, and almost all the rest will give one when I explain that I'm going to see how thick it is under a microscope. Your mileage may vary. My parents have not yet chanced upon the card with taped and labelled hair strands, but if they do then they might have some, uh, pointed questions. I'll just tell them I'm trying to diversify my clone army. Hey, at least it's not like that time a friend of a friend's ex once drew someone's blood at a party.[1] Unfortunately, I never got around to asking her for one of the blood vials she was known to possess. MethodsTo measure length, I broke off a tiny piece of a clear ruler and put it under the microscope with the hair. Then, I had Free Claude (from 2025?) write some code so I could compare two lengths easily by clicking points. Then I modified some Claude analysis code because I was too lazy to write it myself. Here's what mine looked like (At the time I had some black hair and some bleached bronze-ish hair, and both seemed about as thick, so I just used the latter): The reference is 1 mm, so my hair was about 85 microns thick. ResultsHere's an anonymized bar plot, where my id is 16. Id 5 and id 6 come from the same person, but the 6th was a sample of hair dyed red and the 5th was of black hair. The colors are according to biological sex (most are trans women because friendship selection pressures): The mean's 78 microns and the (Bessel corrected) sd's 12. That's in line with this international study[2] (I live in America and most participants were some flavor of white): And look, 5/16 or about 31% of my victims subjects are outside of one sd of the mean, and 1/16 or about 6% got quite close to two sds. I guess the statisticians weren't lying after all! Male group got mjx-container[jax="CHTML"] {