"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Because you havent grasped that its an entirely statistical quirk.

and I don't see how the chance of Person A dying on any day is affected
in any way by how many other people happened to have been born on that
day (in one year or another).

It isnt, its entirely a statistical quirk.

Hmm. So for statistical reasons which don't have a cause (so I'm wasting my
time looking for one!), that fact that more people are born on one day of
the year than another means the each person is more likely to die on the
anniversary of when they were born than on any other date of the year? That
seems counter-intuitive because it is implying that the probability of any
one person dying on a given date (eg that person's birthdate) is dependent
on the number of (presumably independent *) events of other people having
been being born on that same date (though in a variety of different years).

Certainly not a conclusion I could ever have reached no matter how long I
thought about it, but if you say so, I'll have to accept (but not believe)
it ;-)

I think the main problem is that the effect is based entirely on the length
of our calendar before dates start to repeat in new year. If the universe
had been different and the earth had taken (for example) 400 days to go
round the sun (so our dates repeated every 400 rather than 365 days), then
there would still be a greater chance of someone dying 400 days (rather than
365 days) from their birth date. It seems to ascribe some significance to
one day (which relates to the periodicity of the calendar) that makes it
different from all others in the year.


(*) Maybe that's the problem: maybe they are *not* independent because the
distribution of births is based on climatic and social factors.