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The Thought Show: The Story of Average; The Cartoon Mouse God; Not Just Blind

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Factual: Life Stories

The story of ‘average’

14/04/2016 GMT

The Story of Average; The Cartoon Mouse God; Not Just Blind

BBC World Service - The Thought Show, The Story of Average; The Cartoon Mouse God; Not Just Blind

How astronomers found the average from a group of numbers and defined “the average man”.

How astronomers found the average from a group of numbers and defined “the average man”, the cartoon mouse god Lord Dinkan popular in India and what it means to be blind.

We tell the story of how astronomers started to find the average from a group of numbers to help sailors read their maps with a compass. By the 1800s, one Belgian astronomer began to apply this to all sorts of social and national statistics – and the ‘Average Man’ was born. Tim Harford reports for More Or Less.

Dinkoism is a new Indian religion whose followers worship a cartoon mouse with superpowers. More than 40,000 people like the group’s worldwide Facebook pages but Dinkoism was really set up by rationalists in the state of Kerala to parody organised religions and many people have found it offensive. Would you want to attend a Summer Safari Waterpark? Many people who signed up on Facebook for attractive events were disappointed to find they didn’t exist, so were  they were invented just to collect people’s personal data? BBC Trending investigates. 

Why does blindness comes to define the identity of people who have little or no sight? People in Kingston Jamaica, Accra in Ghana, in Edinburgh Scotland and California in the US explain how they navigate a world which seems to see them in two ways, as either inspirational or deserving of pity. Or both. Lee Kumutat reports for the Why Factor.

(Image: Illustration of an observatory. Credit: Shutterstock)

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