This is where I have to admit to all of my ETS friends that I'm a statistician by profession. Given that, I tend to look at most of these kinds of studies with some level of doubt, and I ALWAYS wonder about the objectives/incentives of those who are doing the studies.

One thing to keep in mind is that this map is simply showing fives levels of mortality. From a county perspective, someone has to be on the high side and somebody has to be on the low side. Does that really mean anything? I haven't a clue.

The data were from a 34 year period. Would the results be the same for the previous 34 year period (not that the data are likely available)? Or from the next 34 year period? If they split the data into three 10 year chunks, would each of the time periods have the same result?

I think I'd be very interested in knowing the range of the mortality rates - from lowest to highest. If its not that wide a range, then this is all of little real significance - just random differences.

If they'd have measured some characteristic that had absolutely no impact from geographic location - maybe something like telephone defect rates - the map could very well have looked just like the one shown. Does it mean anything?? Not really.

In the end I suspect that the numbers of people who die from reasons other than "forces of nature" are so much higher that we're talking about buckets in an ocean here.

Ken

Ken

Kind of on topic, does anyone have a working link to one of those maps where you put in a zip code or other location and the yield of a nuke and then it displays the blast area and likely fallout area?

Try this one:
Nuking Google Maps

-Blast

It doesn't look like it makes much sense to me.

"People living in the South along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts have a higher likelihood of dying from a natural hazard compared to residents of the Great Lakes area and urbanized Northeast."

But the map doesn't really show that, does it?

It appears to me that many of the larger red areas are popular travel destinations: Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe to Yosemite, Glen Canyon to Canyonlands to Arches/Moab, Aspen CO ski areas, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Adirondacks, Pine Ridge NE, Black Hills/Badlands of SD, Columbia River Gorge (WA/OR), etc.

So you get people with little wilderness experience or preparation who flock to these popular, scenic areas, and they get lost and die of hypothermia and hypothermia (even if they fell and broke their leg, they probaby died from one or the other).

And they say they were killed by Nature. Huh-uh.

Someone probably got paid a lot of money to sift through causes of death, and came up with this.

Pfffffttt!

Sue

You got it,

It's a Bill Engvall "Here's your sign" map as far as I'm concerned.

I wonder, could they really map out "death by stupid" like this? Where do you suppose all the red would be then?