Think of someone right when they die
October 3rd, 2008
I guess my recent experience of my dad passing away’s started a little obsession with death, and mixed with my rampant skepticism of the more woo-woo beliefs people have, I want to quote this little probability calculation from Brian Dunning’s Here Be Dragons:
- There are 105,120 5-minute intervals in a year
- If you only know 10 people (family, friends, celebs, etc) who die each year…
- And you only think of each of them once a year
- There’s a 1:10,512 chance you’ll think about one during the 5-minute interval in which they die.
- But since there’s about 300,000,000 people living in the USA right now,
- That each year about 28,539 Americans think about someone during the 5-minute interval in which the person they’re thinking about dies.
Not so spooky anymore, is it?