Race Systems

Thomas Denmark has a post about systematizing the races, which got me thinking. I made a comment on his blog about needing to link the two systems of categorization to two different components, either angle vs. distance from center or x-axis vs. y-axis. I also suggested using better than human, worse than human, and nearly human as one of the systems, instead of fey, monstrous, and humanoid, although I suppose you could treat the latter as synonyms for the former. Plus, the six attributes don't really map to races as they are typically played, but if you used physical and mental as two extremes, that might work as the other component.

Here's a slight variant of what I suggested in my comment, though:

This uses distance from the center as better than/nearly/worse than human, but I've broken down physical/tangible and mental/intangible in a slightly different way using two axes: physical vs. mental and active vs. passive.

I think elves, with their heightened awareness, would be passive mental, approaching the super-human center, while mind flayers would be active mental and somewhere in the outer sub-human ring.

Anyone have any ideas about other races?