h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The original "majority" was meant as: The actual day with the highest percentage of births from the total amount, which is not > 50%, as someone would have noticed this much earlier on. Gift shop owners could take very long holidays indeed, if that were the case.

Fact: there was a day in 2018 that saw more births than any other day.

Fact: there was a day in 2017 that saw more births than any other day.

Speculation: they were not the same date.

Further speculation: they were in the same month, and that month was September.

Even further speculation: the stats will be significantly different based on latitude. The more northerly the latitude, the greater the cluster in September, the more southerly, the greater the cluster in March.

Query: how could one confirm or refute this? Is the data available online anywhere?

I agree that cultural and geographical deviations can make a lot of difference.

In my case, the data source (and scope) is Netherlands based.
See https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/achtergrond/2019/39/hoera-iedereen-jarig
Just hope you understand Dutch.

If not: The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistical analysis (CBS) counted the amount of people having their birthdays on every day of the year based on the entire (Dutch) population. Over time, new births and deaths will cause the results to move.
The days nine months after Christmas score high. Six days at the end of September score in the top 10.

Before going into any further statistical discussions, I wish everyone a happy and enjoyable birthday whenever and wherever that may be.

Thanks for your posts. I really did try to get to the bottom of what statistical majorities are, just in case there was something I wasn't getting. I still kept coming up with what I came up with in my last post.

If there's still something I'm not getting, please let me know.

I'd be interested to see the data from, say, Dunedin NZ or perhaps more interestingly Ushuaia.

There are two drivers here - cultural and geographic. I can see why births would cluster nine months after a major religious festival. I could also see births clustering nine months after a winter solstice.

It's a coincidence that those two things more or less coincide in the Western world.

If Christianity had never happened, it's likely we'd all still be bringing trees and mistletoe and holly into the house and feasting around that time - after all, all those things are unconnected with any imported Middle Eastern death cults, they're very much our pagan heritage and make sense from a practical point of view. It's understandable to have a celebration when the nights stop getting longer.

What intrigues me is how strong the effect of the two things are. Is there a culture in the northern hemisphere sufficiently detached from Christianity to not have it as a confounding factor, so that you could see the effect of just the December solstice?

And is there such a culture in the southern hemisphere, so you can detach the effect of the solstice from the Christmas?

Apart from the solstice, we have the Carnaval (Feasting before Fasting) which tends to cause extra alcohol induced births, but it is not on a fixed date, so the effect is somewhat muddled. It can be pretty cold around then, which in itself can be a strong drive to procreate...

I can't find the documentation for this, but long ago I read that societies in the Andes used to bring green plants inside during the Winter Solstice. This would have been about 10,000 years ago.

Evergreen boughs, holly, etc., were brought into Roman villas before Christ was born.

""[In] India...in celebration of the new solar year, or the birth of the pastoral god Krishna...it is customary, towards the end of December, to give cows to the Brahmans, exchange presents..."
http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/krishna-december-25th.html

Japan has winter solstice celebrations.
http://www.justonecookbook.com/japanese-winter-solstice-traditions-toji/

I'd like to mention that the Winter Solstice comes in December in the Northern Hemisphere, and in June in the Southern Hemisphere. Christmas, however, is always december 25, making it either a Winter Solstice or a Summer event in temperate areas, and a tropical event in the tropics.

peace.

So where is everyone? We seem to have wandered off again..Spending my time trying to avoid showers and wondering what has happened to Autumn..

Fled to Hooverville to where the heat is.

Autumn colours are lovely round here.

If you want to avoid showers, don't hang around with brides and babies.

I'm not American so a rain shower is just a rain shower to me..

I've noticed that baby showers are creeping to the UK too...
A new take on raining cats & dogs?

Bridle showers re a good opportunity for mares to horse around.(I didn't realize that baby showers weren't common outside the U.S.

There's a whole bunch of stuff that seppos don't seem to realise aren't common outside the US.

- Black Friday (until about five years ago )
- making a big deal about trick-or-treating (until about ten years ago)
- school shootings
- toilet doors that don't fit in the gap and thus allow anyone outside to just look in and see you taking a shit
- being able to be fired from your job at the drop of a hat for no reason
- automatic gearboxes on cars (in 25 years' driving I think I've spent single-digit hours at the wheel of an auto car, whereas "driving stick" seems an exotic skill to Yanks)
- Jews (half the Jews in all the world live in Israel. Most of the rest live in just two cities - NYC and LA.)
- medical bills that can bankrupt you

"Driving stick" is about exotic as the ability to do arithmetic in your head, write with a pen, spell without an auto spell-check. Most of us Canadians over the age of 35 can still do most of these without the advances of devices and machines.

Not that it means anything at all, but are there no Jewish people in the glorious UK, or across Europe?

While I was quite aware of how US-centric Black Friday, trick-or-treating, definitely school shootings, "right to work" conditions, and our outrageously expensive healthcare system, I too am quite surprised that there aren't any (or even many) Jews in Europe. I mean I can easily understand why they may not feel overly welcome in some parts of Europe after some significant events in the 20th century, I had no idea their exodus was so complete.






(I recently did learn that those restroom stall door gaps are considered a "feature, not a flaw" by the designers, I suppose to eliminate the need for those awkward knocks and responses.)

Yes, there are Jewish people in Europe - but the numbers are small compared with Israel & USA. I guess there is a fine distinction between Jewish purely by religion & Jewish as being from Israel?

Gaps in rest room doors sounds horrific! Although a gap at the bottom of the door does allow a peek for feet.

As for automatic gear box, I've been driving that for over 20 years,& my Dad had one some 40 years ago. But they're not the norm, usually have to be ordered in eg for a test drive.

Buzzfeed had an "article", sorry, list of tweets and memes, about the stall gap issue we have in North America.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/i-can-see-you

Slate actually tried to answer the question.

http://slate.com/technology/2019/01/toilet-stall-gaps-bad-design.html

"Yes, there are Jewish people in Europe - but the numbers are small compared with Israel & USA" [Teasswill]

I just looked at a pie chart of the world's jewish population. 51% of the Jews live in the U.S. A bit more than 30% live in Israel. France comes in third with a much smaller number.

I guess people don't go into rest rooms for rest.

I have relatives who swear by manual transmissions. If you regularly take long trips, you'd be spending a lot of extra money on gas if you drove with an automatic transmission.

But what's this with self-driving cars? Can computers drive stick shifts? Think about this.