{"id":183438,"date":"2013-03-01T23:24:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T04:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/01\/another-cherished-myth-shattered\/"},"modified":"2013-03-01T23:24:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T04:24:00","slug":"another-cherished-myth-shattered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/01\/another-cherished-myth-shattered\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Cherished Myth Shattered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.significancemagazine.org\/details\/webexclusive\/4381371\/Keep-your-redshirt-on-a-bayesian-exploration-of-character-deaths-in-Star-Trek.html\">gold shirt crew were statistically more likely to die that red shirts<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/R25oCCe.jpg\" \/><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yep, I know, you are wondering how it is safer to be a red shirt than a gold shirt.<\/p>\n<p>The pretty picture seems to indicate otherwise, until you realize how many of the crew were red shirts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A pie chart was created using Minitab to graphically view the data. It is obvious from the pie chart in Figure 1 that redshirts suffer most of the casualties. However, raw casualty figures are not very informative without knowing how many people were in each uniform. According to the Joseph\u2019s Star Trek Blueprints, the only set of Enterprise blueprints endorsed by Paramount Pictures, the Enterprise\u2019s 430 crew members consisted of 55 command and helm personnel, 136 science and medical personnel and 239 engineering, operations and security personnel. This means 16.4% of casualties were in command and helm, 5.4% were in science and medical and 10.0% were in operations, engineering and security. Of the remaining 27.3% of casualties, 12 were killed by contact with the galactic barrier or Rigelian fever, which could have affected personnel regardless of duty assignments.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It should be noted that the relative safety of red shirts varies with tasking though:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Based on an analysis of casualties that considers the overall total number of personnel in each color of uniform, wearing a redshirt may not be the automatic death sentence that it is popularly considered to be. On the other hand, 18 of the redshirt casualties were security personnel out of a total population of 90; 20% of the security department were casualties. Although wearing a redshirt may not of itself be particularly hazardous, personnel in a redshirt who are members of the security department should expect to pay a high premium on their life insurance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, engineering\/operations, pretty safe.&nbsp; Security, not so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that gold shirt crew were statistically more likely to die that red shirts: Yep, I know, you are wondering how it is safer to be a red shirt than a gold shirt. The pretty picture seems to indicate otherwise, until you realize how many of the crew were red shirts: A pie &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1069,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}