John, I will add you to my "Follow". Because much of my adult life has been spent gathering and analyzing data I am not giving in to my urge to offer lots of comments, but two only: (1) taking the average over large variable populations can be misleading without accounting for the error in the average (aka, the mean). (2) finding the "median" of a population helps dampen the effects of extremes in both ends of the distribution--- median= value at which 50% are above and 50% are below. Thanks for your essay.