(no subject)

a while ago yoon ha lee wrote,

...I still think it would be awesome to team-teach a math/history bloc, but I suspect this would be best accomplished with a statistics class on the math side...

(comment, nov 1, 2007)

i also think this is a neat idea. like, you could do life expectancy, about which statistical data have been collected (at least in england) since like the sixteenth century. not only is this a lot of data to make plots and things of (and extrapolate), but the process of determining life expectancy is interesting too.

in principle, one could have a really long study and follow a bunch of people around for a century or more in order to determine the age at which they die, and then one would have the life expectancy 100 years ago, which is not about to make any headlines.

instead one has, for every age, the rate of death at that age. this is

then one puts together the life expectancy from that. ( cola, explain in great detail using tables )