Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 February 14

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February 14

Perfect game vs. teen death

I like to cash in your thoughts about which one is more probable: A particular MLB team throwing a perfect game on a particular day or a particular white teenage girl dying in a particular year? PlanetStar 03:42, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm guessing that MLB is Major League Baseball - but who is to say... -- SGBailey (talk · contribs) 23:57, 14 February 2017‎ (UTC)

That would be a given, unless it's Major League Bowling, which is unlikely. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:35, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Nothing "given" about it at all. Wikipedia (even the English Language version) is relevant all over the world. MLB is a USA-centric abbreviation not used in much of the rest of the world. But thanks for confirming my guess. -- SGBailey (talk) 11:08, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

I assume you're badgering the OP about failing to link MLB. If all else fails, you could check MLB (disambiguation) and see if any of the other uses of MLB fit scenarios which have teams and perfect games. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:33, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

30 mlb teams. 11 perfect games in the last 27 years. Let's round that out and say one perfect game every 2.5 years. In one year, the chance of a perfect game is therefore 40%. On a given day, it's 1 in a thousand. (Now, half the days are inaccessible to this distribution since there is no game on that day. So you could also say that half the days have a chance of 1 in 500, and the other half have a chance of 0.) Now, if you stipulate it has to be a particular team, and we pretend that every team is equally likely to score a perfect game, then it's 1 in 30,000 per day.

Ok, how about the girl? For simplicity, let's pretend this is the United States, and all races and genders have equal probabilities of dying on a given day. Then we can take the Social Security Administration's actuarial life table [1] to calculate that the cumulative probability of dying in one's teens is about 0.37%, or a bit over 1 in 300. Now, it has to be on a given day. There are 2556 (give or take a leap day) in ones teen years. So the chance of a particular teenager dying on a particular day is about 1 in 700,000.

So pick a team, pick a teen, pick a day. That day is about 20 times more likely to see the team score a perfect game, than to see that teen die. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:07, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

(The question is asking about "odds of given team throwing perfect game on a given day" vs "odds of given girl dying in a given year". So dividing by 365, the odds of a given teenager dying in a given year is about 1 in 2,000). We can be a bit more specific - although this data is slightly old (1999-2006), it's the best I can find, and gives the mortality rate among (non-Hispanic) white teenage girls as 31 per 100,000 per year, or 1 in 3225. So a random white teenage girl is still substantially more likely to die in a given year than a random team is in a given day. Interestingly, there's very little difference in mortality rate across races for girls (among black girls, it's 34 in 100,000, among Hispanic girls, 27 in 100,000) - the difference is almost entirely due to the extreme divergence in death rates among boys. Smurrayinchester 10:20, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

This question should be on the Maths desk. And it's illustrative of why I always hated probabilities. Two seemingly reasonable approaches, coming up with wildly different answers. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Someguy1221 and I used essentially the same approach, and got quite similar answers - odds of 1 in ~2,000 per year versus 1 in ~3,000 per year (the only difference is that he used data for all teenagers, rather than for white teenage girls). The reason they look very different is that Someguy1221 calculated the odds of a girl dying on a given day, rather than in a given year as the question asked. Smurrayinchester 10:40, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Not reading the question carefully enough is probably one of many reasons why I wasn't that good at maths, lol. Thanks. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:29, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

War

Is it true that "in the recorded history of mankind, there has never been a single day without a war being waged somewhere on earth"? Or is it another baseless assertion of the same sort as "if you go 7 generations back, all people on earth are related"? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:9076:92A3:E19C:2F76 (talk) 06:49, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this is a very popular claim, see here, but I have not been able to find the genesis of this claim. Maybe in the full book, he gives a citation? Of course you know this depends heavily on what you count as a war. Remember, there are no wars going on right now - just police actions and the rounding up of terrorists. As for people being related, see most recent common ancestor. Someguy1221 (talk) 08:30, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

The claim is most likely bogus. Earlier in the history of mankind, for instance in the Stone Age when the global population was relatively small, there should have been at least a day without an armed conflict. Brandmeister^talk 08:50, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

The claim was specifically about recorded history. If you take that to start say, 5000 years ago, when the world population was estimated to be around four million humans, maybe there's never been a day without some kind of conflict? Of course, again, definitions. Is a long simmering feud a conflict? Someguy1221 (talk) 08:53, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Actually, the rounding up of terrorists in itself counts as a war (it's even called the War on Terrorism) -- but yes, I have trouble believing that there was always a war somewhere even in fairly peaceful periods like that between 1923 and 1935. As for the definition of war, it's any conflict in which both sides are armed and which involves the regular armed forces (including reserve forces such as the National Guard) of one or more nation. 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:9076:92A3:E19C:2F76 (talk) 10:54, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Wars between 1923-1935 (just running these off from memory, I may miss some): Gran Chaco War (Bolivia/Paraguay), The Chinese Civil War (Nationalist forces vs. Communist forces), the Nicaraguan civil war, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, etc. --Jayron32 11:54, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

That list is useful but leaves us short of wars 1923 to 1926. I expect there was something somewhere though. Itsmejudith (talk) 12:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

How about the Rif War? --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:13, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Also see the various conflicts of the Chinese Warlord era. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 17:23, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Timeline of wars gives a large number of candidates - but uses varying definitions of "war". Rmhermen (talk) 15:33, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

If we take the IP's definition at face value, then considering there were many early insurgencies against European colonial governments at the time with some of the insurgents being armed and the armed forced of the colonial governments sometimes being used I'm sure there would be plenty of examples, e.g. I expect this applies to Communist Party of Indonesia#1926 revolt. Of course these get into complications like how you define the days of the war as that may or may not cover some time period not covered by the Nicaraguan civil war. The Irish Civil War also covers part of 1923. Nil Einne (talk) 06:08, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

It seems highly likely that there would have been a large enough cascade of errors through sheer incompetence to result in one full day without an actual war being waged during the period of recorded history (total peace not being very exciting to "record"). Debouch (talk) 14:47, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

By the way, all people on earth are related, whether you go back seven generations or none. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:50, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

When it comes to the recorded history, it would be safe to say the statement is unprovable and may remain so in the long run. The absence of evidence on war in a particular period neither proves, nor negates the existence of a global peace. But my gut tells that in early recorded history there could have been such a possibility. Brandmeister^talk 15:45, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

While there was probably never a time when no-one was at war (even in ancient times, world population was around 300 million, and only a few thousand of those would have to be fighting to break the peace), there have been various periods of regional peace - most notably, perhaps, the Pax Romana in Roman Europe and Pax Sinica in Han China, which occurred at roughly the same time in the 1st and 2nd centuries. Smurrayinchester 16:42, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

2601's definition of war as "conflict in which both sides are armed and which involves the regular armed forces (including reserve forces such as the National Guard) of one or more nation" makes the statement likely, since there was arguably a time within the last 5000 years when (depending on definitions) there were no "nations" on Earth, and it's even more arguable that there was a time in that period when there were no "regular armed forces". CodeTalker (talk) 21:07, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Conversely, it would also (as written) include any time that the army or militia was called out to deal with riots or raiders. I'm sure this all probably sounds needlessly pedantic to the question asker, but it is a problem that "war", "army", "nation", and "state" are all terms that have varied in meaning for time to time, to the extent that its probably impossible to find a definition of "war" that includes everything everyone agrees is a war and nothing that anybody thinks isn't a war. Iapetus (talk) 12:19, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

1923: The Irish Civil War ended, on May 24. The Russian Civil War ends on June 16. In China, the Warlord Era is reckoned as 1916-28.DOR (HK) (talk) 15:29, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Does frozen conflict count as war? 209.149.113.5 (talk) 16:48, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

No it doesn't -- if they're not fighting, then it's not a war. 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:F88D:DE34:7772:8E5B (talk) 12:32, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

There was a claim made in 1988 that "since the Second World War the globe has only been without a war for a few days, to wit, for 26 days in September 1945" (see LAW AND STATE: A BIANNUAL COLLECTION OF RECENT GERMAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO THESE FIELDS (p. 32), but this is debunked here, since the Indonesian National Revolution was in progress then. Alansplodge (talk) 09:08, 16 February 2017 (UTC)