Awesome. But forgive me not reading the answers. I want this to remain puzzle for me. I don't want to learn the answer. I want to invent it some day. Same way I feel about Rubik's cube.
I still have fond memories about finding out precise recursive equation, implementing it in LOGO for Atari and waiting minutes to find out the answer to how many times you have to try to burn all matches in a box by picking them from the box one by one at random, lighting them and putting them back in the box before picking next one.
I found that model somewhat overkill. I would have cut some corners there: assume that the oldest person alive is 110 or older (reasonable, given a world population in the billions and the data we have) and compute his (more likely her) hazard rate from the curve you fitted.
For hazard rates at old age, taking life expectancy equal to 0.5/hazard rate isn't an extremely bad approximation (I have no education in actuarial science and gave that little thought; corrections welcome), so one gets:
Reminds me of the guy who answered some question about Python how to put two strings together, and then 3 years later commented 'Oh look here I am asking the same question I answered' lol
What i find interesting there is that multiple approaches seemed to arrive at about the same result, 2/3 of a year between deaths. That makes me think it's highly probable that it's the right answer for the current time period at least.
Note that one of the answers there is based on the GRG data used in OP. Different graph but same conclusion - average tenure has dropped, Calment was a monster.
I can't stand this parenthetical. it's not strange at all!
(Strangely, the 20th century is considered to have started Jan. 1, 1901, so there are a handful of other, verified women still alive who were also born in the 19th century.)
Yes it is. You're confusing what's right with what seems intuitively wrong to people. It's strange because it's inconsistent with most systems which group numbers by significant digits. For example, a person who is 30 years old has entered their 30's.
For someone who is clearly perturbed that most people don't know this archaic and inconsistent rule, I'm surprised you're perturbed by a writer who is helping your cause by including a parenthetical. I suspect the writer selected the word "Strangely" to prompt the reader to pay special attention to the rule, because what he's about to say is going to violate many people's intuition and assumptions.
If you can't stand that people are unfamiliar with this rule, then this writer should be on your Christmas list.
One of my favorite things about HN is when people take the time to be extremely clear about something that's almost obvious. Always gives me a chuckle.
This relates to the argument about whether array indexes should start at one or zero. The standard argument for one-indexing is that it is what people do. But do they really do that?
The first century is 1 to 100. The second century is 101 to 200. and so on. After a while things get a bit blurry. Eventually the 21st century is 2000 to 2099, as proven by humans holding their big parties on Jan 1st 2000 instead of Jan 1st 2001.
Humans start at one, but weary of the strict logic of it. Without acknowledging it and without agreeing which century, humans sneak in a 99 year century so that centuries work as if zero-indexed; 0-99, 100-199,...,1900-1999, 2000-2099.
What then of the argument "Array indexes should start at 1 because that is what humans do."? It fails two ways. First, that is not in fact what humans do, (and the parenthetical strangely is evidence of that.) Second, humans weary of strict logic. Having the computer do what humans do is a bad idea.
Maybe the big parties were not so much to celebrate the arrival of the 21st century, but the arrival of the magical year 2000 with its flying cars and stuff.
sorted table by "Default base index" and at first picked FORTRAN, considered COBOL and Smalltalk for a while then saw Lua and thought that should resonate with people. My personal experience with 1 based indexing is from Matlab and Pascal (though you can base your indexes on whatever value you want there).
Natural counting isn't 1-indexed. You usually count things after you tally them, not before. (You don't start counting beans by saying "one bean" and then waiting for that bean to arrive.)
Besides, it is not all that clear if someone just says "Jan 1 marks year one" whether it marks the end of the first year or the beginning. With dates, it usually marks the beginning. That's why it is 1-indexed. We hardly count anything else that way, so why would you assume it is 'natural counting'?
Yes it's wrong. According to that page and the one on the 21st century, the year 2000 didn't belong to any century. Oddly, the wrong statement is listed as having two citations.
>It's sad that 538 has turned into a pop-stats site that runs on volume and snappy headlines.
It's our fault, they're catering to our demands. You can't run a media company any other way. No one wants to read read (although I'd bet on average everyone spends far more time reading). So you get wham-bam, buzzfeed-esque content. Even on HN, long form articles will inevitably be met in the comment section with a "tl;dr?".
There's nothing wrong with asking for a tl;dr when you're trying to find out if the long form is worth your time. (Most are not.) In academics, the tl;dr is called the abstract, and it would be silly to think that they should be eliminated because people ought to just read everything.
The real problem seems to be that Nate Silver's (and 538's) brand value exceeded the available payment from NYTimes. So he did the rational thing and tried to capture it in the open market.
But Nate's a stats guy, not a marketer. Brand dilution is a thing. I don't begrudge him for selling out. I just wish my domain-based trust filter hadn't been broken in the process.
I sure hope they put together some solid election coverage.
Monetarily, perhaps -- which if true makes the subsequent devaluing all the more disappointing.
But content quality was higher (and volume lower) at NYT than post. I've been a reader since well before the NYT imprint, and I don't think the quality went down significantly at NYT.
There have been "modern" human beings (homo sapiens sapiens) for at least several tens of thousands of years. Even accounting for the fact that human population today is much bigger than it's historical median level, you would expect that if 94% death rate was anywhere near accurate (and assuming a power law distribution of age), you would have no trouble to find a few people that are 200-300 years old. I don't feel the need to calculate the actual numbers, but I suspect that it would be plausible to believe there was at least one "millenial" (someone older than 1,000 years) alive today.
Instead, what embryology tells us is that the power of life and the power of death are not opposite to each other, but deeply entangled. Your body is what it is in equal parts by the fact that many of your cells reproduced themselves and specialized, but many more committed suicide so that the whole organ could live and thrive. And if you stop cellular death, you don't get immortality, you get cancer.
Calculate how often on average oldest person in the world dies.
Assume whatever is necessary to give the answer. For example that population pyramid is constant over time and known.