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Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and now John McCarthy - maybe some truth that deaths always come in 3's. Quite unnerving. We should propose National Computing Mont
by unexpected 15y ago
Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and now John McCarthy - maybe some truth that deaths always come in 3's. Quite unnerving.
We should propose National Computing Month or something for October.
- huherto 15y agoPoisson distribution? I wish I knew more probability and statistics to understand why this happens.
- pjscott 15y agoThe explanation could be simpler than that: you just don't notice when notable deaths don't clump together.
- scott_s 15y agoYou can take any arbitrary, long running sequence and partition it into threes. Also: selection bias.
- gwern 15y agoTo quote the wise _Principia Discordia_: > "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."
- blahedo 15y agoI confess that when the news about Dennis Ritchie was posted, I immediately flashed to the thought, "who's number three?" Thing is, so did a lot of other people, and tagging John McCarthy's WP page in this way would be just the sort of prank/hoax that would inspire. So the "deaths come in threes" aphorism makes me more suspicious of this, not less.