[PLUG-TALK] For astronomy buffs

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Tue Mar 6 23:33:31 UTC 2018


>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> writes:

Keith> On Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 07:12:27AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
>> A really nice example of an instance where an "outlier" was the whole
>> story scientifically and hiding it with statistical summaries, here
>> an "average" of some sort, lost the science.

Keith> The average person [...] has been dead a long time.

That's an interesting observation.  Probably less long than a person might
imagine, due to population growth.  The graph gets skinny pretty fast as
you move to the left. For example, lets take this graph:

  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Population_curve.svg

Balancing that by eye-ball, I'd guess the center of mass was within a couple/few
hundred years of today.

I think if you did the integration, you might be able to say "P% of every
human that has ever lived is still alive today", with a startling large
value of P.


-- 
Russell Senior
russell at personaltelco.net



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