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Marathons and the increase in mortality

2023-07-12

Just to give you a sense, the mortality rate for something like cardiac arrest or a heart attack goes up by about 15 to 20% on the day of a marathon. Now, most people are not having cardiac arrest or a heart attack, so the aggregate impact on a city might be limited. But I think if I were to talk to people about the Boston Marathon bombings, most people would say that was a horrific event. But more people die because of marathon-associated road closures every year in a given city with a large marathon than died in the Boston Marathon bombings. But the bombings, what they did are so salient to us. Deaths in these other channels, we don’t even think about that.

That is from David Epstein's newsletter Range Widely. The cause is that the closure of roads along the marathon route makes it difficult to get to hospitals quickly.

An idle thought: I wonder if the same holds true for cardiac arrests during rush hour traffic?

Update on Meta(verse)

2023-07-05

Truly incredible statistic from the Nation on Meta's Metaverse, Horizon Worlds:

Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars.

I don't consider this to be a definitive statement on the concept of the metaverse, but wow are those numbers small. Found via The Browser.

Shipping profits during the pandemic

2023-06-29

"In 3 yrs from 2020 to 2022, the shipping industry generated as much profit as in previous six decades combined." Just incredible the way that the pandemic created ripples through different industries.

Robert Oppenheimer learned Dutch in 6 weeks

2023-06-23

The Rest is History is doing Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, this week.

Here's a fact that blew my mind: he learned Dutch in just 6 weeks in order to give a technical lecture at a university in the Netherlands.

This makes me feel way less proud of the three years I've spent getting to A2 in German...