Monday, November 19, 2012

I'm taller than you

These are doors at the Rockville, Maryland location of the restaurant Matchbox. They are facing restroom doors near the bar. The one on the left of this picture is the door to the women's room. The one on the right is door to the men's room. Notice the scatterplot wear pattern of hand placement on each door. Men, generally taller, have worn away the paint on the door higher than that worn by the, generally shorter, women. Accurate measurements of the heights of the center of each wear pattern would give us estimates of height of hand placement on the door, likely to be about shoulder height as customers push on the door. Of course, being restrooms accurate measurements would just be weird! As it is, standing their with a camera was weird enough!

Similar door scatterplots can be found here and even another restroom door here.

7 comments:

LoveStats said...

That is so very cool!

LoveStats said...

That is so very cool!

Tuti Purwaningsih said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tuti Purwaningsih said...

beautiful mind! cool (y)

Laura J. said...

I love this example! The wear patterns are so distinct for the 2 different doors.

I wonder if there might be another factor here too...could the different wear patterns be caused by both height and people having to push with their left vs. right hand? It looks like the doors have the opposite direction. What are your thoughts?

Unknown said...

Since you cannot assume none of the women were wearing high heels, you cannot conclude anything else than "men are taller than women on average".

Unknown said...

They are facing restroom doors near the bar. The one hälsporre on the left of this picture is the door to the women's room. The one on the right is door to the men's room.