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It’s been ten years since Oprah officially retired from the highest rated talk show of all time but she remains a force to be reckoned with, landing the most anticipated interview since Monica Lewinski sat down with Barbara Walters. Oprah almost landed that interview too but Lewinski wanted money. Did someone say money? Absolutely not! was Oprah’s attitude.
In a statement released by CBS they said:
Winfrey will speak with Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, in a wide-ranging interview, covering everything from stepping into life as a Royal, marriage, motherhood, philanthropic work to how she is handling life under intense public pressure. Later, the two are joined by Prince Harry as they speak about their move to the United States and their future hopes and dreams for their expanding family
While the couple could have been paid millions of dollars and appeared on any show in the World, they chose to sit down with Oprah for free, and for 90 minutes, with no questions off-limits.
Oprah didn’t pay a penny.
She’s so powerful, she doesn’t have to.
Cunning and smart, Oprah got herself invited to the royal wedding and shrewdly parlayed that into a friendship with the couple and Megan’s mother and from there, they moved close to Oprah in her exclusive Montecito neighborhood, and eventually granted her the interview everyone wanted.
And now the castle is in a frenzy and the British press has gone ballistic, wondering how in the World did this overweight black woman from poverty checkmate them all and end up with more power over Harry and Megan than the Queen herself.
I wonder what people thought back in May 2018 when a mysterious black woman dressed in pink showed up by herself at the Royal wedding, wearing a jumbo-sized custom-made hat to fit her supersized brain.
“Who’s that?” a British kid might have asked.
“That’s Oprah” someone might have answered, “she’s like the Queen, except of America, and by extension, the World”
Her journey of fame and fortune through resilience is pretty inspiring. I can see you use a lot of that to structure your life around PP. Particularly her ability to use chaos to bring order.
Wheres my comments?
I’ve read your post from some time ago about how Oprah may be the biggest headed black and female and both. But I don’t think so, blacks in the US have a roughly similar head circumference to whites, maybe it is because of the low-long skull shape of American blacks. Oprah is at 25.25 inches, which is well above the average, but only by a Z score of ~4.86. I say “only’ because it is a positively skewed metric and the high end values would be more common than in a perfectly normal distribution. For her to have the largest head of any black woman in the US, their total population would have to be no more than a few hundred thousands. The rarity value assuming a perfect normal distribution would be about 1 in a million, but it is positive, so it would be less than that. Maybe one in a few hundred thousand among black American women. She would be rarer in African blacks since they have a higher and shorter skull profile than American blacks.
If you adjust for body size & exclude pathological cases which skew the curve at the extremes, she’s got arguably the biggest black HC or at least did at one point in time (in the 1970s population was smaller & heads were a bit smaller). There are black men with bigger HCs but these men will have more fat-free body mass than she has & most of the sex difference in HC vanishes when you adjust for fat-free body mass (Jensen, 1998).
I am not just talking about men having bigger heads pp. Though the body mass adjustment could be a good case to make. I don’t have a strong argument against it.
As I wrote in 2014:
According to the U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey Database, by Claire C. Gordon (Final Report, October 1996), in 1995, a sample of 3,482 active duty females in the U.S. army had their heads measured. The mean circumference was 546.6 mm and the standard deviation (SD) was 15.1. Assuming this sample is roughly representative of adult female U.S. crania, Oprah’s head perimeter is 6.3 SD above the mean of American women. Assuming a Gaussian distribution, fewer than one in five billion women in America should have cranium that large. There are of course, not five billion women in America or even the world, let alone the developed world where nutrition is optimum for brain growth; thus Oprah has arguably the world’s largest female cranium (excluding female hydrocephalics, where head enlargement reflects cerebrospinal fluid not brain mass, and autistic females, where enlargement reflects a brain that was super-sized in childhood, before shrinking in adolescence).
I downloaded the actual datasets of that survey, as Excel files. The largest head circumferences were 635 (female) and 633 (male), presumably in millimeters. Odd that a female tops the charts here, with a head circumference about equal to mine, depending on which of my several inconsistent measurements I choose to believe. I wish I had access to Army-quality equipment for this.
Link: https://phc.amedd.army.mil/topics/workplacehealth/ergo/Pages/Anthropometric-Database.aspx
actually, this is apparently a different survey done later, just the same name
Okay pp but there is this 2004 anthropological study which had the female average at 55 point something cm, the sd was 1.78 or so and the highest head circumference was about 65 cm. Granted the group must have had overweight members but the sample size was between only 2000 and 3000 people. The highest value shouldn’t be higher than that of an alternative non-overweight sample of 1 million females. So a measurement well above that of oprah’s would fit in a million based on that.
Now why did I do this? Why go from 2000 something to a million while roughly retaining the highest values? Well for one thing I retained the sd and assumed perfect normal distribution in an otherwise positively skewed result so I am being quite generous when I say this.
Okay pp but there is this 2004 anthropological study which had the female average at 55 point something cm, the sd was 1.78 or so and the highest head circumference was about 65 cm.
By 2004 she may have lost her title as World’s biggest brained woman, but she arguably held the title at some point in her life. Also, assuming a bell curve can also overestimate the rarity of extreme values in some cases. This is especially true in multi-modal samples. Also because circumference is proportionate to the cube of volume, any circumference much larger than Oprah’s leads to ludicrously large expected brain volume.
And as an addition:female heads seem to be more well-filled with regards to hc. Given length and width, the ratio between a female hc and an oval perimeter estimation is higher than that of males hc.
A normal distribution seems to generally underestimate rarity at high end values. I base this on the studies where the highest value is slightly more than what you’d expect from a bell curve, especially for females. Though how much of that is an actual skew vs obesity and other factors like hair mass idk. As for HC vs volume, that may result on the skull build, an especially long build without corresponding height and width (especially width) wouldn’t have as much of an extra volume.
Though now that you have brought up volume….in this thread: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/489830-homo-erectus-under-the-stars-that-would-become-orion/
the poster Starman1 lists something around 2700cc as an upper end for human measurement. Although, based on his comment, it may have been measured over several generations so that would be more than in any single generation. What would that person even be like? My guess is a length of 251 mm, width of 197 mm, auricular height of 163 mm or so. It would look big even on Angus MacAskill. I only semi-jokingly refer to that hypothetical guy as an ESPer.
How many X Limbaugh’s influence does peepee think Oprah has? 4-5?
Hard to say because he was extremely influential too when you look at how his success transformed right-wing radio into a huge industry and a potent political force.
”“That’s Oprah” someone might have answered, “she’s like the Queen, except of America, and by extension, the World”
Oh stop it PP. Most in the world dont even know who oprah is.
99% of humans probably didn’t know who any rand was & she was once considered the most influential woman in the world.
Influence != fame
I can’t wait to watch this tonight, Oprah said it’s the best interview she’s ever done.
I’m watching right now.
I almost considered watching in case Oprah dared to ask them something about the Prince Andrew / Epstein island shit, but I’m not risking away valuable minutes of my life for that
Megan just said they were worried her baby would be too dark skinned. WTF?
L
O
L
But really when the entire country (not to mention the rest of the world) is in the state that it’s currently in, and people would rather watch ANOTHER COUNTRY’S FIGUREHEAD ROYAL WIFE get interviewed than focus on substantial news articles, it tells you how democracy got us into this rut to begin with
Unbelievable interview. The British press is circling the globe looking for dirt on them now. The royals were probably worried the press would use the baby against them.
I didn’t know Orpah before reading your blog. And I have just discovered Dolly Parton thx to Oprah interview. Both are so wise women. And such an enjoyable conversation. That’s the beauty of human mind to be able to relate to people that comes from so far away.
The best friend of my girlfriend is from Taiwan. She is named Tatiana because her mother felt in love with Rudolph Noureev and this Chinese lady became fluent in Russian and started imposing Russian in a right wing Chinese household with a general husband. I don’t really like global but I found multi-local and unexpected tastes so exciting.