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Rod Speed Rod Speed is offline
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Default OT: Latering thinking puzzle "Why do more peoplre die on their bithday than any other day?"



"NY" wrote in message
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"NY" wrote in message
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"NY" wrote in message
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Is there some biological property that makes a person more likely to die
n*365.25 days from their birth, for various integer values of n, than on
any other day?


Or which makes a person more likely to die on a given date because more
people were born on that date.


And extending my earlier analogy, suppose there were 10 births on every
date in January and 1 birth of each other date throughout the year.

If I was born on 1 January, why would I be more likely to die on 1 January
than on any other day in January when there were the same number of
births?

I'm assuming the deaths are independent events - that barring multi-death
disasters, the chance of me dying on a *specific* date (as opposed to
dying at around the same time of year but not necessarily on that precise
date) will not be affected by how many other people happened to be born or
happened to die on the same date - ie that my birth/death doesn't causally
affect anyone else's.

What possibly elementary mistake am I making in my reasoning?


You have missed the crucial point that the only thing that matters is that
birth day not being evenly spread thruout the year is the only thing that
matters.