We were celebrating our monthly birthday party in my new startup company. By the way, for those of you who dont know already, I have quit Juniper Networks and I have joined this startup called "Nuova Systems". Now, you can see why I dont write a lot of blogs anymore..;)... Anyway, back to birthday party. There were only 2 people out of a company of 50 people whose birthday was in April. It kept me thinking.
I was trying to find out if there is a distribution in human birthdays. I partially believe in zodiac signs and their generalisations on characters of people born in different months. So, I was wondering, if people's birthdays fall in certain months more than others, it might affect the opinions based on generalisations. Fundamentally, based on the number of days in a month, the probability is different for each month. For example, february will have the least probability. Also, there must be some climatic influence and in India, the "good" months identified for marriage and all of that must certainly influence the birthday of a given person. Isnt it? There is this famous birthday problem that most of you must have heard about. If you have a group of people more than 23, there will be atleast 2 people who will have the same birthday with a probability greater than 50%. But, my feeling is that it may not be true if the distribution is not uniform.
Anyway, I tried to search in web to find out if I can get any pointers to it but in vain. In one of the sites, the distribution was kind of normal. But, the sample size was less and hence I wasnt very convinced. It would be interesting to analyse it and see how it impacts society and its culture. Well, the fundamental premise lies in the belief that we agree on zodiac signs, which is probably a subjective thing. Was wondering what you folks think.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Theory of Human Distribution
Posted by Suresh Sankaralingam at 7:55 PM
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3 comments:
I am also a partial believer of Zodiac signs.
Just for argument sake,
It could be that zodiac signs are formed because of the imbalance or improper distribution you mentioned.
i.e. People born in the crowded birth month have to compete and becomes more competitive and people born in relatively easy month become artists or something.
If that this is true, zodiac signs is effect and may not be the cause.
My 2 cents!
Thats an interesting thought..You might be right in saying that zodiac sign is an effect rather than the cause...
But, I dont understand why people born in a crowded month have to be competitive...I think competitiveness should be proportional to the resource available divided by the total population of a given age-group...
interesing problem...infact if u were to look at it from a large scale perspective (any sample size over 30) then we can apply the central limit theorem and hence use a normal distribution to arrive at solutions..the larger the sample the merrier the results...dunno if anybody has worked with it...but i think the challenging fact would be how to do it in small samples right???
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