(Untitled)

[breibrei]

Okay, maybe someone can explain this, because it's confusing the hell out of me.

Ceiric and I were discussing the birthday paradox and the reasons why it feels intuitively wrong. This resulted in me pulling together a graph of birthday distributions in excel for the year 1978 in the US from this listNow if you look at that graph you should immediately

Comments

[illessa]

Note that there are still plenty of births happening on Sundays, I imagine the difference is due to induced births and caesarians, which (excluding emergencies cases, obviously) will be scheduled for set dates, and are thus less likely to occur on Sundays/holidays due to fewer available staff

[breibrei]

That seems like a surprisingly high percentage. I always assumed induced births and caesarians accounted for like <1%

[illessa]

I have no idea of the actual numbers, but given I know several people who have had induced births and C-sections, the percentage must be higher than that.
Hell, pre-eclampsia alone (the most common life threatening complication) occurs in 6% of pregnancies and the only known cure is to deliver the baby early. Add on to that any other life threatening conditions (of the child or the mother), excessive distress of the fetus or mother, physiological problems that prevent the mother giving birth normally, babies that are too large, very late, or significantly abnormally positioned, multiple births, mothers that have had C-sections before (until relatively recently standard medical practice was to always do a C-section after the first time a woman had one), and elective C-sections for various reasons (admittedly probably less prevalant in 1978, but still), and you've got... well, quite a lot of births basically.

[illessa]

Oh plus bear in mind (although it's a little cynical), that there's always the temptation to do these procedure's when they're not 100% necessary, since they're faster and make scheduling easier, especially when you consider that natural births, for some strange reason, are more likely to occur in the early hours of the morning than any other time.

[infinidimincorp]

Damn, Claire got there first. Gotta be induced births.