5 ms·
So, just how often do high-profile people die in close proximity to their expected presentations of controversial information?
by yock 13y ago
So, just how often do high-profile people die in close proximity to their expected presentations of controversial information?
- notimetorelax 13y agoI'd think that for such a high profile person no matter when he dies there will be something that he was going to present.
- ZoF 13y agoI wouldn't really say that at all. His largest presentation was at Black Hat and he hasn't done anything nearly as publicized since. The pacemaker presentation would have been his first presentation of note in quite a while. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here, I'm just not saying there's necessarily not one.
- blantonl 13y agoTom Clancy's Threat Vector comes to mind....
- IanCal 13y agoIt doesn't strike me as that unlikely (oh god I can't believe I'm going to actually work this out...) Going on 1990 data [0] US white male, age 30: 1.77 / 1000 per year So in any two week gap, we're looking at about a 7 x 10^-5 chance of dying. Lets call this variable x. There are about 35 speakers at blackhat, so the chance that at least one of them dies within the two weeks before the conference is 1 - ((1 - x)^35), in english 1 - (chance nobody dies). This works out at ~0.25% or odds of about 1 in 400. That's for one year. For five years, four conferences per year it goes up to about 5%. So it's not that unlikely. It's not likely to the point where we expect it to happen regularly, thankfully, but it's not in the conspiracy range. Please don't mistake what I'm writing here as saying it's not shocking or terrible. It's a great loss. I'd just like to provide a counter to the conspiracy side using actual figures and numbers so that the news of him dying isn't taken over. [0] http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/Life.html http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/Life.html