It brings a lark to your hand

Taken on the walk home a couple of weeks ago:

I wasn’t able to find a way to view the spoiler as anything but functionally backwards.

I found out today that yet another of my close friends has an October birthday. Apparently this was the last straw – I finally hunted down a little data on the distribution of human birthdays. These folks have a minor treasure trove of fun data to play with.

The only data I could find quickly are ostensibly from the United States in 1978. The red are the daily data, the blue are weekly averages. The minima are, indeed, weekends. I found a suggestion that perhaps this is due to ceasarean-sections and induced births taking place primarily on weekdays. This is consistent with the apparent dip for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Kinda neat. I think there might be some edge effects at the beginning and end of the year, but given that the year is important to humans, some of them may be real.

You are, however, probably already subtracting nine months from the plot (or trying not to), trying to figure out the adults were up to…

Here you go…

Blue is again the weekly average. A gestation period of 38 weeks (266 days) was assumed. If you want to figure out precisely what your parents were up to, I’ll let you do the subtraction yourself (I’ve got too much work to do to add it to the upper axis). The standard deviation of births around the due date is 12.8 days, so there’s really no sense in looking at finer scales. The wraparound point of the mod occurs in early April, naturally.

Stayed home and worked on histograms for part of the day in order to sign for a package…

In my experience with people of the same vintage, it was a very good year.

Try as he may, Nathan Drake won’t find the real treasures until he can get outside the box.