May 8, 2014
Briefly
- David Winter’s comparison of polls to actual votes at the last election
- Pie chart of causes of death in Game of Thrones. It’s a pie chart, but more importantly, there should be a lot more deaths from infectious disease given the setting. And also from drowning — it’s not clear whether the unreasonable effectiveness of CPR is supposed to be divine intervention or just the typical fictional license
- Tim Harford on health care and health care costs
- A reminder from Texas of where we were heading before the Psychoactive Substances Act
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
While the infectious disease death rate is low, that could be argued to be due to the short duration of the books so far. In England, as an example, the cause of death in a three year window that included Towton would be really non-representative. It was remarkable just how many people died of violence in that single battle (28,000 according to Wikipedia).
I would suspect the same about the civil war, although there we do have information on ID deaths (and they went up along with the violent ones).
The series also focus on senior folks, you seem to be less susceptible than foot soldiers.
Or we could accept this as a limitation to the author’s understanding of the causes of mortality in a pre-industrial urbanized society
10 years ago
Or lack of audience acceptance for lots of death that doesn’t advance the plot. There’s a nice discusssion of historicity in the two Borgias TV series
10 years ago