Jim writes: << Here's another kind of median I could imagine statisticians using: Suppose our data are the numbers 1, 1, and 2. The bar graph is ___ | | | |___ | | | |___|___| 1 2 We could then choose the median to be the value m such that the line x=m bisects the area inside the histogram, which (if I'm not mistaken) is m=1.25.

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I'm proably not understanding the bar graph; it doesn't seem very clear to me even in an equal-width font. But I'd expect the bar graph for data 1, 1, 2 would be a bar of width 1 and height 2 around x = 1, adjacent to a bar of width 1 and height 1 around x = 2. Which would mean that the vertical line bisecting the area would lie at the solution to 2 - 2(1-x) = 2(1-x) + 1, giving x = 3/4. --Dan