It 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 / 100

It 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