5 Comments

"Then motor vehicle accidents."

Unlike all the other means of suicide I can think of, motor vehicle accidents have inherent ambiguity. At least some of them are suicides, but ascertaining them is nearly impossible.

If the vehicle had a just one occupant, male, and wasn't belted in, and was traveling at excessive speed, and center aimed a resolutely fixed object, and there were no skid marks ...

Expand full comment

Yes, a lot of MVA deaths are single-vehicle, and only the driver dies... and high speed (and drugs and/or alcohol) is often involved. It's not just a matter of MVAs, but risky behavior in general -- how should one interpret that? Death wish? Deliberate action?

Expand full comment

How's the excel-ification of the CDC 100 year mortality statistics PDF coming along :)

Expand full comment

slooooooowly ;)

(I'm learning Microsoft's new automation tools. I'm hoping to use those for the project)

Seriously, though, I am learning Power Automate, and trying it out on that project first, because I'm hoping to be able to teach my team at the day job how to use it for all sorts of things. If I can extract the table data from the mortality paper for the blog purposes, then boy howdy can we go to town on all sorts of historical info, and we will have some proprietary data. WOO!

Expand full comment

For those who don't realize (and I should be doing a post on jitter charts next -- how to make them and why I like them) -- I use this blog often to test out technical skills I'm developing, and sometimes it fails and sometimes it works, and then I can transfer it to my day job. If it fails, well, I was just trying something out for the blog. ;)

I've got all sorts of ulterior motives all over the place. And you can look over my shoulder while I'm doing it.

Expand full comment