howrare.me
Where you land among 8 billion people
Who
Built by Kenneth in Norway. One person, evenings and weekends. No company behind it, no investors, no team.
I am not a statistician. I read the papers, copy the means and standard deviations into the code, and write down where every number came from. When I get something wrong, the fastest way to fix it is to open an issue or email hello@howrare.me.
Why
Population data is sitting in government databases and journal appendices that almost nobody opens. "Mean adult male height in Norway is 180.9 cm" is a fact. "You are taller than 84% of Norwegian men, and the other 16% mostly play basketball" is the same fact, and it is the one people remember.
I wanted a place that does that conversion honestly: the real source, the real year, the actual method, and a plain statement of where the estimate is weak. Nobody is good or bad at their height. It is just a number with a lot of other numbers around it.
How it works
- 1
You give one number
Type it in, or let the browser measure it: a reaction time, a typing run, the highest tone you can hear.
- 2
The site places it on a published distribution
Usually a mean and standard deviation from the source named on the page, assuming a normal curve. Income uses World Bank percentile tables instead, because income is not bell-shaped.
- 3
You get a percentile and the group it refers to
Your country and gender when the dataset has them, the world when it does not. The result is saved in your browser so your card can combine it with the others.
The full method, including where the normal curve is a bad fit and what the browser tests cannot control for, is on the methodology page.
Money
The site is free. It may carry a small ad or an affiliate link, always marked. Share images are free and always will be; the only thing that has ever cost money here is a version of the card without the small watermark.
Privacy, briefly
Your answers are stored in your browser and stay there until you delete them. They are not sent to the server. Share links carry the results inside the URL, so whoever has the link can read them. Analytics is cookieless and aggregate. The details, and a button that deletes everything, are on the privacy page.
Sources
Every module links its own source. The complete list, with the year and what kind of source it is:
NCD Risk Factor Collaboration
Height and BMI by country and sex
UN World Population Prospects
Median age and life expectancy by country
World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform
Global income percentiles (2017 PPP)
US Social Security Administration
Baby names by year, 1880 onwards
CDC National Vital Statistics
Births by month
Veale et al., BJU International
Penis size, clinician-measured, n=15,521
Jurca et al., Footwear Science
Foot length distributions
Sturm & Larsson, Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research
Eye colour frequencies
Papadatou-Pastou et al., Psychological Bulletin
Handedness prevalence, meta-analysis
Human Benchmark
Reaction time, aggregate of site visitors (self-selected)
Dhakal et al., CHI
Typing speed, 168,000 online participants
Brysbaert, Journal of Memory and Language
Silent reading speed, meta-analysis
Sleep Cycle
Sleep duration by country, app users only
Buysse et al., Psychiatry Research
Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index
Our World in Data
CO2 per capita, life expectancy, literacy over time
DataReportal, Digital 2024
Daily screen time by country, survey-based
Survey Center on American Life
Friendship network sizes
World Values Survey, wave 7
Political values by country
FAO Food Balance Sheets
Diet composition by country
US Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances
Savings and retirement wealth
Ethnologue, 27th edition
Native speaker counts by language
Tauroza & Allison, Applied Linguistics
Speaking pace norms
Lutman, British Journal of Audiology
Hearing range by age
Miller, Psychological Review
Digit span, the 7 plus or minus 2 paper
Cooney et al., JAMA Internal Medicine
Resting heart rate norms
Goldberg, Psychological Assessment
Big Five extraversion markers
Dohmen et al., Review of Economic Studies
Risk attitude survey measure
Human Benchmark, aim trainer, number, visual and verbal memory
Score distributions from a self-selected sample of site users
Miller, Psychological Review
The magical number seven, digit span
Standing, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Recognition memory for words and pictures
Luck & Vogel, Nature
Visual working memory capacity of about four items
Fitts, Journal of Experimental Psychology
Speed and accuracy of aimed movement (Fitts's law)
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, 4th ed. (Pearson)
IQ scale, mean 100 and SD 15 by definition