As one of the three or four perptually-shorter-than-the-other-kids in my grade schools and middle school, I might have been tempted back then to ask for something like this, but when puberty finally kicked in - a little later than everybody else - things improved greatly. Even though I'm "only" 5'8" (as you are, Clive!), I've got a 50" chest, and broad shoulders, without working out.
I could see how this knowledge - that the more vertically-endowed will make more money over time - could be seen as a test of character for the "short people" out there. Work harder, know that you've earned what you get, not just have it given to you due to a genetic fluke.
And you're right, I think, to put this through the Gattaca-filter. We, as a society, definitely have to think about these things long and hard...

Yep, I hit puberty rather late too. And yeah, I wonder what the cultural effects would be if this sort of information about pay differences becomes better-known. Will there be a sense of "this is what the life of a tall person is like" and "this is what the life of a short person is like"? Of course, "tall" and "short" are perfectly relative terms, so you have to wonder what the effects are in different cultures, or situations where the norm is to be shorter.

'Idiopathic short stature,'huh? Shades of 'micromastia,' a term defined in the 80s by plastic surgeons specializing in breast implants.

And now I know that wearing my high-heeled boots doesn't just make me *feel* powerful... :)

A future where most of the people are post-genetically or hormonally altered and a small (literally) contingent of "punks" who refuse to take the hormones.

Among the megacephalic sapiotropes, the little ur-humans are deft and brutal.

If you'd asked me back in Middleschool what I'd do to be taller I'd have said anything. I was always the shortest kid in my grade and I still am actually...but I'm 5'7 now which is pretty close to the average. While I might wish at times that I had the tall, skinny build that alot of girls seem to be going for at the moment...I'm actually pretty happy with what I've got. I'm taller than my parents which is always good.

This does resonate at a scary pitch with Gattica.

Yeah, I'd probably have taken a pill or a shot to make me taller when I was a kid, too. That's partly what creeps me out about this. One can't eradicate social biases -- which is what this height bias is, if in fact it truly exists. You can sorta go, aaaaaah, whaddya gonna do, and try to ignore it -- which is what most people in bias situations do. But if there's a solution dangled in front of you, anyone who's feeling vulnerable tends to want to jump at it.

And where will it stop? After all, if everyone wants their kids to be the tallest...

I know, it's rather like the problems that Robert Frank, my personal favorite economist, laid out in his book *Luxury Fever*. When the wealthy pay for incremental increases in the quality of their children's lives -- a better house in a neighborhood with better schools, or special training to get into college -- it isn't just a personal choice. It affects the ecology of everyday life. Their high spending drives everyone's spending up. The paradigm would be precisely the same if height-enhancement ever really takes off.

So...one day in the distant future, it's just not acceptable that your kid's "only" 6 feet tall in the fourth grade, and you're worried he won't have the quality of life you'd like to provide...
and parents who refuse to put their kids on the "Miracle Gro" formula leave themselves open to child abuse charges. Lovely!

Sounds like we're headed the reverse direction from the Genesis song "Get 'em out by Friday" (scroll down to the verse that starts: "EXTRACT FROM CONVERSATION OF JOE ORDINARY")
:)

Ahahah! That's an excellent cultural crossreference.

I am a 14 year old teen, and i am only 5'4. Though i have always had broad shoulders and a muscular build ... so i get respect from other bigger kids, but, being shorter hurts my self confidence. All my friends are 2-7 inches taller then myself.. and it literally sucks being the shortest... heh what im getting to is that being short is at times depressing , ecspecially to me a teen. But my parents have to do with it .. since they are short at 5'8 and 5'0. comments and maybe some cheerful things will do. thank you for your time.

Tony

Hey dont worry about it. I was just like you 5'4'' beggining of my high school year and weighed only 100lbs. Now im 6'3'' tall 210lbs, my last growth spurt was at 22 just when i thought i wasnt gonna grow anymore. My dad is 5'8''exactly like you, but my mother is 5'2''. I had it worse than you cause i wasnt muscular as a kid and had extremely narrow shoulders and if that wasnt worse i didnt even have the privelage of being the nerd of my class at least theyre smart. No girls would talk to me let alone touch my awkward looking ass. Dont worry about it just when i thought i had no chances of growing anymore i grew alot. Plus your at the heart of puberty so ull probably grow some more. Dont lift weights in high school thats a mistake im glad i didnt make cause if you injure yourself or if you lift weights youll quicken your growth and youll grow faster but might not reach your full potential height.

Nice site. thx.

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.

But variables get one benefit people do not

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

But variables get one benefit people do not

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.