[daanvd]

From an article on The Atlantic website [1] concerning the origin of the goal of 10,000 steps per day:

> Based on conversations she’s had with Japanese researchers, [professor of epidemiology I-Min] Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. [2]

If the character for 5,000 or 50,000 happened to have looked like a walking person, we might have had that number of steps as our daily or weekly goal. It's remarkable that the actual optimum of steps for health benefits is that close to a heuristic from the 1960s.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/10000-ste...

[2] http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji/85-10000-%E4%B8%87