Everything dies.

January 16, 2009 8:00 AM

I've been doggedly procrastinating on my actual tasks this morning. A big part of that procrastination has involved counting the obit filters on the blue for the past year.

I share them now as a statistical curiousity -- my axes are quite sharp and in no need of grinding at the moment. Seriously. I don't think somebody dying makes a great post, it's just a genesis -- what you do with the post makes it a great post. And we have had many, many great posts.

DISCLAIMER: I only counted posts that were built around a death that month, or a recent death, "has died" "has passed" etcetera. Posts that involved people dying as a detail or subtext were excluded.

And yes, I thought of this last month when I could have sworn the grim reaper was doing a combo. And it seems he was.

8 - January
20 - December
10 - November
8 - October
9 - September
14 - August
9 - July
2 - June
9 - May
7 - April
12 - March
7 - February
8 - January

posted by cavalier to MetaFilter-related at 8:00 AM (28 comments total)

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posted by Pollomacho at 8:04 AM on January 16 [3 favorites]

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posted by flatluigi at 8:07 AM on January 16 [13 favorites]

.-. .. .--.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:13 AM on January 16

I would have thought it would have been more. Some pretty obscure people get posted to the blue (sometimes it's the first time I've heard about them). Seems like there should be at least one person of note a day. Especially since somedays we get like 3.

Just surprising to me is all.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:15 AM on January 16

Everything dies.

Except my kitten. She's never going to die. YOU HEAR THAT GOD? NOT THIS ONE!
posted by piratebowling at 8:18 AM on January 16 [18 favorites]

As a non-statistician, I can definitively say that fewer people worthy of Metafilter posts die in the late spring and early summer months. Just look at that graph.
posted by jefeweiss at 8:25 AM on January 16

huh. turns out December is the cruelest month. Color me surprised.
posted by shmegegge at 8:28 AM on January 16

Aee you counting obits that had duplicates? 193 people submitted Ricardo Montalban obit threads, while a half billion people submitted threads when James Brown died.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:30 AM on January 16

Except my kitten. She's never going to die. YOU HEAR THAT GOD? NOT THIS ONE!

I take it you've stopped masturbating, then?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:43 AM on January 16 [4 favorites]

I'm surprised at the low overall numbers too. I think it's easy to notice a couple in near sequence and then generalize that out (c-c-c-confirmation b-bias, Scoob!) into this sense that there's just piles of the things sometimes.
posted by cortex at 8:49 AM on January 16

Does your count include two more today?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:51 AM on January 16

Crap doodle. It does, Pickle, but apparently I was over zealous and counted 8 instead of 7. Now that my faith is shaken in my numbers, I'll have to recount all of them.

UNLESS ONE OF YOU... DIES..... MUAHAHAHAHAHAH *cough*
posted by cavalier at 9:00 AM on January 16

And to be clear, I'm just looking at posts that remained live (...), not deleted attempts.
posted by cavalier at 9:01 AM on January 16

Do you have any idea how many birth notices were last year, cavalier ?
posted by gman at 9:27 AM on January 16

toss a 'there' in between 'notices' and 'were'. OR get on the 3 minute edit feature please.
posted by gman at 9:28 AM on January 16

O_o

The chart. It is shaped eerily like the chart of cooter counter resets, Apr-Nov.

w. t. f.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:36 AM on January 16

Some pretty obscure people get posted to the blue (sometimes it's the first time I've heard about them).

I remember some obit thread in which someone said, "Hey MeFites! Start posting about stuff you like. Don't wait until someone dies." I've worked out a number of FPPs in my mind that are just general things about interesting people, but I'll probably never get around to posting all of them. When someone you like dies, you remember that they've never come up in MetaFilter.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:36 AM on January 16

Last minute Christmas shopping, lines at the mall, traffic...urk
posted by buzzman at 9:42 AM on January 16

Looks like I'm gonna have to do some more killin' come June.
posted by Dr. Wu at 9:43 AM on January 16

According to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the death rate per 1,000 total population on a monthly basis in 1996 was as follows:

* January 9.8
* February 9.2
* March 9.2
* April 8.8
* May 8.8
* June 8.2
* July 8.3
* August 7.8
* September 8.3
* October 8.3
* November 8.8
* December 8.9

For the year 1996 as a whole, the death rate was 8.7

Remember the recent thread about norovirus? Winter kills.
posted by orthogonality at 10:46 AM on January 16

I was very, very wrong. What I said about the shapes of obits vs resets was due to a screwup - using the Excel "Stacked Line" chart really mangles stuff, as it charts sums.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:22 AM on January 16

Yeah, obitfilter is kinda depressing. It's like saying, "Hey, here's this awesome person you've never heard of, and they've done all kinds of cool stuff! But guess what? They're totally dead now!!!"
posted by Afroblanco at 11:32 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Hey, here's this awesome person you've never heard of, and they've done all kinds of cool stuff! But guess what? They're totally dead now!!!

That's how I'd like to be remembered. I'm trying to limit the number of people who realize how awesome I am to, like, one or two. So when I die, they can be all like, "Ha ha! This guy was totally awesome, and you all missed it! suckOrZ!!!"
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:55 AM on January 16

Should have been 15 in August.
posted by cashman at 12:06 PM on January 16

Interesting. I was getting all annoyed that the front page was being taken up with obit-filter, and clearly it isn't at all.
posted by CunningLinguist at 1:10 PM on January 16

Well, with 115, that means we have 1 every 3 days on average. And since the front page seems to have 2 dates of posts or so, you'd have probably less than a 50% shot in picking an average day that there wasn't an obit post on the front page.
posted by garlic at 2:03 PM on January 16

Well, fine. I'm not posting any obit threads when one of YOU dies.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:08 AM on January 18

Afroblanco writes "It's like saying, 'Hey, here's this awesome person you've never heard of, and they've done all kinds of cool stuff! But guess what? They're totally dead now!!!'"

Luckily we have the internet now which tends to keep their achievements around even after they die. At least I've never come across a page dedicated to anyone even remotely famous who took down their content just because the creator died.
posted by Mitheral at 5:32 PM on January 18