Showing 1 - 10 of 23 posts found matching keyword: statistics
Friday 24 January 2025




Today, while casually discussing bulls with my father (as one does), I mentioned that ten times more people in the United States die every year from cattle than from shark attacks. My father asked where I got my data, and when I told him it came from the CDC, he told me the CDC lies about its death numbers and should never be trusted.
I immediately assumed he was talking about COVID, which is a topic he likes to downplay, so I tried to be diplomatic and agreed that the pandemic was chaotic and the CDC was an imperfect organization hindered by politics and could only report what it was told by states like New York and Florida, which were both sued for intentionally misleading the public about COVID cases. I also agreed that the CDC even admitted that their numbers were sometimes flawed (sometimes by man, many thousands) and had to revise their numbers over time based on updated data and data collection methodology. I concluded that the CDC's numbers were probably now as close as we were going to get to accurate numbers and could still be useful.
And he said, "Of course they're correct now. Two people resigned over it."
Whether he was implying that those two noble souls refused to participate in the CDC's malicious miscounting or were taking responsibility for it, I cannot say. Whatever the case, if he was now agreeing that the current data set was useful and could be used for rough analysis why did he say it could never be trusted in the first place?
By this time I had already had enough of his bullshit, and I just couldn't take any more. So I stormed out. Was my response rational? No, definitely not. But it's the best I can do some days.
For the record, if you can believe anything these days, the CDC counted specifically 22 cases where people were killed by cattle in each year between 2003-2008 (in just four states!). Meanwhile, the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) indicates that sharks kill fewer than 10 people globally annually, and only about 1 per year in the US. So I was wrong, you're statistically about twenty times more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark.
Some days I just can't be right about anything.
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Saturday 28 December 2024




1) The average NFL team goes 3-and-out on about 20% of their drives. (Even the best offenses still go 3-and-out about 10% of their attempts.)
2) The chance of recovering an onside kick in the NFL these days is under 8%.
Therefore, there isn't any reason to ever onside kick unless the time remaining in the game is something less than two minutes.
[My actual formula is that the onside threshold should be 39s x (3 - timeouts remaining). But that's a little nerdy.]
The point here being that there is less and less reason to attempt an onside kick, which I think is a shame. If there's no real chance for a team down 9 or more points to score, recover the ball, and score again inside of the final two minutes of a football game (barring an unlikely fumble or head coach looking for a reason to get fired), that disincentivizes the audience to continue watching.
Let's get this fixed, NFL. If injuries on kickoffs are such a problem, let's just get rid of them altogether. Teams could either surrender the ball to the opposing team at the 25 or attempt the equivalent of a 4th and 20 from their own 25 to retain possession. (NFL teams make plays of 20+ yards about, you guessed it, 8% of the time.)
I assure you that solution isn't any stupider than modern overtime rules.
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Saturday 24 February 2024




I read in the local newspaper that my county currently averages 1 suicide every 14 days. That's on pace for 26 a year. If that seems high, it's because it is.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Americans kill themselves nationally at a rate of about 14 per 100,000, which implies that Coweta County, Georgia, population 155,000, should expect something near 22 suicides per year. For Coweta, that figure is an aspirational number.
What's so bad about living in Coweta? I can only guess.
Of course, thanks in part to our poor healthcare system and our easy access to guns, Georgians kill themselves more often than average Americans. (That's just the price you pay for freedom!) By Georgia standards, Coweta should see 24 suicides per year. So maybe our higher rate is our friendly way of helping prop up those counties that aren't pulling their weight.
Back when I was in a Coweta County high school, the statewide suicide rate was only 13 per 100k (national average 12/100k), yet I knew several people whose parents had killed themselves, and I knew students who attempted it. If people are finding things more bleak and hopeless now than they were then... as a community, maybe as a whole society, we just must be doing something wrong.
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| Leave a Comment | Tags: coweta dear diary death georgia news statisticsSunday 4 June 2023




In the middle of the afternoon, I had to stop my car in the road to let two deer cross in a md dash for the woods. They had been frightened by a car coming the other way. As I watched them run for cover, it occurred to me that they were probably right to be frightened, as humans are their primary predator.
There are estimated to be 30 million deer in the United States, and roughly 5 million of them are killed each year by humans. By comparison, there are 340 million humans in the United States, and roughly 120 of them are killed each year by deer. Those numbers certainly work out in our favor.
On the other hand, consider that nearly 75,000 humans are killed each year by a human (including suicides). We also happen to be our own primary predator.
You're 625 times more likely to be killed by a human than a deer. Oh, my.
Maybe running for the woods isn't such a terrible idea.
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Monday 2 January 2023




Reading a bunch of critic's best-movies-of-2022 lists made me curious, so I went back and counted. I watched 16 movies released in 2022 in 2022.
Six were documentary/biopics. Four were mysteries. Three were cartoon/superheroes. One was Downton Abbey. And these two were on most of the aforementioned "best" lists:
153/2162. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Friend Ken was a big fan of this nearly indescribable sci-fi action film, and he has been encouraging me to see it since it was still in limited release. The last movie Ken promoted this much was Into the Spider-Verse, and I'm happy to report that both lived up to Ken's hype. This is bonkers in all the right ways. I'm sure it's destined to become a beloved cult film in the Buckaroo Bonsai tradition.
157/2166. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
After a great deal of thought, I think I've decided this might be my favorite film released in 2022 that I watched in 2022. Re-teaming the actors and writer/director of the fantastic In Bruges in a character piece, it's much, much smaller in scope than Everything Everywhere but every bit as enthralling in its own much, much more focused way. (I cannot believe that the Colin Farrell in this and the Colin Farrell in The Batman [or Miami Vice or Daredevil] are the same actor. Give this man all the Oscars!)
More of both of these sorts of films in 2023, please!
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Saturday 12 March 2022




Walt Duncan has been an out-of-touch orthodontist since Zits debuted in 1997. At the time, "Walter" had fallen to 273rd in popularity among U.S. baby boy names, according to the Social Security Administration. So, yeah, "old guy" names.
The peak for "Walter" in the United States was 1914, when it cracked the top ten for the only time in the 20th century. (Per ssa.gov: "In that year, the number of births is 8962, which represents 1.312 percent of total male births in 1914.") Perhaps not coincidentally, the most famous Walter in newspaper comics is Walt Wallet of Gasoline Alley, who debuted in 1918.
The lowest point for "Walter" babies was 393rd (0.035%) in 2008, but has rebounded since. I would presume that's the influence of Breaking Bad's Walter White, who debuted that year, but the name "Louis" has followed a very similar trend, also peaking in 1914 (at 20th, 0.8%) before dead-cat bouncing in 2009 (0.042%). Is there a mid-aughts Louis I've forgotten about?
For the record, there were 2,358 "Walter"s born in 1975, representing 0.145% of all children that year, ranking 112th overall. On a personal note, there were 39,588 "James," or 2.439%, 4th overall. "James" has never fallen out of the top 20 since the SSA started keeping records. If there was a Venn diagram of such things, "James Walter" would represent the popular kid being forced to hang out with a four-eyed comic book nerd.
I would definitely read a comic strip about that.
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Wednesday 28 July 2021




Autocorrect continues to plague me.
After Simone Biles withdrew from Olympic competition citing mental issues, I tried to Google the definition of "gymnastics twisties."
My autocorrect changed it to "gymnastics titties."
I'm sure they're nice, but that's not what I'm interested in (right now).
If it's true that the average man thinks about sex once every 7 seconds and that computers process information 10 million times faster than humans, how often does my computer think about sex?
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Saturday 5 June 2021




That PSA was published in 1949, when the USA had a population around 150 million and 25 million registered cars. For comparison, today there are about 350 million Americans (+133%) with 287 million registered vehicles (+1048%) resulting in over 42,000 traffic fatalities (+30%). Obviously, roads have gotten a lot safer in the past 3/4 century, and I think we all know why.
Thank you, Superman!
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Thursday 12 November 2020




The Georgia Secretary of State has decided that the "risk limiting audit" of the state's 2020 general election for President of the United States will include every single vote cast and be recounted by human hand. If memory serves, the current Secretary of State's election slogan was "Bring Backus the Abacus." (Which, to be fair, was more progressive than his predecessor, whose platform was "You Voted For Who I Say You Vote For.")
According to the SoS's website, 4,991,854 Georgians voted in the election. If one person were to count one ballot per second continuously, it would take that person 58 days. Of course, he'd be dead then, so he might not want to do that.
If ten people were working together, they could complete the task in a week. A hundred could get it done in one intense work day (with overtime). Too bad they can't put 1,000 people in a room with all 5 million votes. Done in under 2 hours!
Each county has to count its own ballots. If Coweta County is lucky enough to get 6 salaried employees together (in state-mandated teams of two) to recount their 76,799 ballots, they'll need 2 full work days (with no water breaks). Coweta is the 17th largest county in the state, so expect several counties to take longer. Lucky tiny Taliaferro (159th of 159 in population) should be able to count to 928 within an hour.
All this number crunching just to validate that maybe we will, finally, definitively know by next Friday where Georgians collectively stand on the question of which old white guy they want in the federal executive mansion. Personally, I'll take the one who can count.
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Monday 4 May 2020




As I type this, the United States has 1.188 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 68,276 deaths. More Americans have already died in the past 2 months from COVID-19 than died in the entire Vietnam War. And it's not over yet. By the time you read this, those numbers will be worse.
A quick computation of those figures reveals a current mortality rate of nearly 6%. If you've been paying attention (what else have you got to do?), you may remember that back at the beginning of March, the World Health Organization was estimating a 3.4% mortality rate — an estimate our wise president chose to call "a false number" in a live television interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. He objected to the WHO number not because it was too low, but because it was much, much to high. "I would say the number is way under one percent," said the president.
(Footnote for future historians: That comment was made on March 4. A month later, April 14, Trump withdrew funding to the WHO claiming that they failed to report the true danger of the virus back in January. Quote: "The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain that and share information in a timely and transparent fashion." By that logic, I guess we should stop funding the current American president, too.)
Testing continues to be a problem, so we can't really be sure that the 1,188,122 number I referenced above is the true extent of the contamination. If we assume that the actual mortality rate is closer to 3.4% previously observed in other countries, it would mean that over 2 million Americans currently have or have had the disease. That's over a million hidden, untreated, pandemic-spreading cases. Sure seems like someone should be thinking twice about opening those shopping malls, Governor Kemp.
Also unreported in all those grim details is another victim of COVID-19. Specifically, I'm talking about my flattop.
I haven't seen a barber in over a decade, but in an act of solidarity with coronavirus-positive Tom Hanks (and maybe a little laziness), I decided to go ahead and trim my hair down to the scalp. Does it make me look more bald or less?
These days, the fact that I'm alive and well enough to worry about such things feels like an accomplishment.
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