How bad is Stormtrooper aim exactly?

A Stormtrooper gun. It’s possible they don’t know what these are for. Photo by Roy Kabanlit.

For some unknown reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about Star Wars recently. Going forward, I’ll assume you’ll be familiar with the events and characters of at least the first six films. If not, what have you been doing? Living in a recent, recent time in a galaxy that’s very close to here? Broadly speaking, this post inevitably contains minor spoilers for Episodes II−VI of the Star Wars films. If you haven’t seen them, inexplicably want to find out about Stormtrooper aim and don’t mind knowing some plot details, then feel free to read on.

There are some characteristics of characters or groups of characters within the Star Wars register that are widely held to be fact. This may be despite them not being explicitly stated within the films. Red lightsabers are for the evil, Jar Jar Binks is rubbish and Stormtroopers have worse aim than a urinating drunk man in a vibrating chair trying to hit a toilet located on The A-Team van.

Can Stormtroopers really be that bad at shooting? There is an assumption that the Empire want effective troops to maintain their evil hold of the galaxy. Surely they get some training in marksmanship rather than signing up, being given armour that doesn’t even protect against Ewoks (weirdly, the autocorrect on my phone turns ‘Ewoks’ to ‘useless’) and told to, “go forth and do bad stuff.” In fact, Obi Wan Kenobi in Episode IV: A New Hope comments, “only Imperial Stormtroopers are this precise” when examining some blast marks on a massive used droid dealership tank. So Stormtroopers have a reputation in the Star Wars galaxy for good aim. There are a number of explanations for this:

• Stormtroopers have good aim compared to everyone else, who is really awful (maybe the Star Wars galaxy is windy, wobbly or makes everyone slightly drunk for reasons)
• Stormtroopers do have rubbish aim, but are good at marketing (history may contain examples where propaganda has been used by states with less than altruistic intentions)
• Stormtroopers do have rubbish aim, but everyone is concerned about their self-esteem and tells them otherwise
• Stormtroopers normally have good aim, but during the events of the Star Wars films develop bad aim; almost as if the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy has informed its troops that they should imagine themselves as antagonists in a series of films that won’t progress very far if the protagonists keep getting shot

Seems about right. Photo by The Conmunity – Pop Culture Geek from Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Why would Stormtroopers’ aim be so bad? Is it their tools? This seems unlikely given that non-Stormtroopers steal Stormtrooper weapons and seem to have no issue with shot accuracy or a gaining a reputation for terrible aim. Perhaps their helmets obscure their vision and make aiming difficult. Possibly, but the Stormtrooper helmet eye holes don’t appear to be any smaller than human spectacles, which can’t be said to obscure vision. Not if they’re doing their job. They are tinted though, which may make aiming difficult when in badly lit conditions and make Stormtroopers look like posers when wearing their helmets indoors.

Perhaps Stormtroopers are just human. In spite of the impression given to us by world events, it is actually quite difficult to get one person to actively shoot to kill another person. During World War I, British Lieutenant George Roupell reported that the only way he could get his soldiers to stop firing above their enemies’ heads was to beat them with his sword while ordering them to aim lower. Later reports of Lieutenant Roupell winning a medal for being a slightly charming human being may have been an exaggeration. Similarly in World War II, US Brigadier and army analyst S.L.A. Marshall reported that during battle, only 15−20% of soldiers would actually fire their weapons. This should perhaps be considered sceptically, as later analysis hints that Marshall may have fabricated at least some of his results. A 1986 study by the British Defense Operational Analysis Establishment’s field studies division found that in over 100 19th- and 20th-century battles, the rate of killing was actually much lower than potentially should have been the case given the weapons involved. Some reports from the Vietnam War state that the average US solder fired approximately 50,000 rounds before they hit their target.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman claims that psychologically this is a result of soldiers choosing to posture (falsely display active combat to attempt to intimidate or deter the enemy) rather than fight, flee or submit to the enemy. In this regard, posturing is chosen as the least costly (psychologically, socially and physically) of the four possible options available to a soldier in combat. In terms of Star Wars, we know that the Empire is not adverse to a bit of posturing with their giant shooty snow dinosaurs, Nazi-chic uniforms and ‘tis no moon space stations. Perhaps the legendary terrible aim of the Stormtroopers is simply due to a human tendency to try and look scary rather than murder another individual. Should they be renamed as ScaryLookingHugtroopers?

To even start to get an answer to this we need to at least get some idea of the accuracy of Stormtrooper aim. Luckily, counting exists and can be used get numbers for percentage purposes. In order to calculate the Stormtrooper hit rate, the number of shots fired by Stormtroopers in Star Wars Episodes II-VI (the ones with Stormtroopers and that aren’t currently in cinemas) was counted. The number of times that the Stormtroopers hit what they were aiming at was also counted.

Let the Wookie in. Photo by William Tung from USA (SWCA – A Stormtrooper and Chewie) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Stormtroopers were identified as such by their armour. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were not counted as Stormtroopers when they were wearing said armour as a disguise. The Stormtroopers wearing the special armour in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (the ones dress as Arctic pepper pots) and in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (the ones with helmets like sad bulldogs) were counted as Stormtroopers. A hit was counted as such when a Stormtrooper launched or fired a projectile that hit what the Stormtrooper was judged to be aiming at. A miss was defined as when that stuff happened but the projectile didn’t hit the target. When the final resting place of a projectile was not seen on screen, it was presumed to be a miss, unless there was some kind of sound effect that hinted otherwise (like a character saying, “Ouch, this laser wound is relatively painful”). Only shots fired from hand weapons were counted. Shots fired from vehicles were not counted as some sort of computer-aided guidance may have been used. We know they have that and that’s it’s not as good as trusting your feelings when you’re a bit forcey.

It should be noted that the resulting Stormtrooper accuracy ratings will be rough estimates only. It’s quite difficult to count shots fired in the reasonably frenetic action scenes of these films and it is likely that the number of shots fired here is an underestimate. Also it’s not real and this may be a waste of time.

Table 1 illustrates the accuracy of Stormtrooper aim for each of the films and the overall Stormtrooper shot accuracy rate across all of the films. Stormtrooper aim appears to be most accurate (37.4%) in Episode III and least accurate in Episode IV. Otherwise Stormtrooper accuracy is reasonably consistent at around 7% across the other episodes with an overall accuracy of 9.8% calculated across all of the films. Of note is that Episode III is the only film where Stormtroopers can feasibly be argued to be on the side of good. It would seem that it’s being evil that’s bad for your shooting accuracy.

Table 1: Stormtrooper shot accuracy in the Star Wars films.

However, many have noted that during the events on the Death Star in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the plan was to let Princess Leia and company escape so that the Empire could locate the Rebels’ headquarters and blow it up along with the planet they were on. The Empire is apparently not that concerned about conservation. Or about killing lots of people. As such, it is likely that the Stormtroopers firing on the protagonists had been ordered not to kill their escaping prisoners. This may change the accuracy rate for this film as we suddenly have to count every miss in these sequences as a hit. So the space abacus (calculator) was broken out again and the Stormtrooper shot accuracy rate for Episode IV and the overall Stormtrooper shot accuracy was recalculated. Table 2 shows these new figures.

Table 2: Stormtrooper shot accuracy in the Star Wars films (assuming they were aiming to miss during those bits on the Death Star in Episode IV).

Suddenly, the accuracy of Stormtroopers doesn’t look so bad. In order to determine if this is the case, it is necessary to compare these rates with others. Ideally, this would be with other accuracy rates from the Star Wars films (probably not Greedo’s) in order to remove any confounding windy, wobbly drunken influences that the Star Wars galaxy might have. I didn’t do this for reasons of time, illness, difficulty and laziness. However, we do have some shot accuracy rates from our galaxy. These are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Comparison of Stormtrooper shot accuracy with real-world examples.

We can see here that Stormtroopers don’t fair too terribly, with greater shot accuracy than archerfish and the average US soldier (aiming at a human-sized target) at 300 metres, but lower shot accuracy than a US sniper at 600 metres. So Stormtrooper aim suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. In terms of accuracy. Their aim is obviously “bad”. They tried to shoot Chewbacca!

If we discount the US sniper (unfair to compare to a trained specialist with more time and calibrated equipment) and the archerfish (a fish which spits water at land-insects in order to eat them and which is rarely found in conditions of modern warfare) the Stormtrooper is four-times more accurate than our only remaining comparator, the average US soldier aiming at a human-sized target from 300 metres. If we accept that reduced soldier accuracy is due to posturing in favour of other combat choices, it suddenly seems that Stormtroopers are choosing to fight rather than flee, posture or submit. This makes Stormtroopers seem less human and more terrifying. Fitting soldiers for the Dark Side indeed and certainly not deserving of their reputation for inaccuracy! Unless they didn’t read the Death Star memo. Then, they’re just average.

 

 

Shocking evidence of stereotyping in Mr Men and Little Miss

I have very occasionally been asked the question, “Why are all Mr Men good and all Little Miss bad?” I’m sure this was meant to be rhetorical, with the underlying assumption that all Mr Men are good and all Little Miss are bad, but my admittedly limited recall was not in agreement with this statement. I was sure Little Miss Sunshine existed for start and unless exposure to her was the cause of skin disease, I didn’t remember her being bad as such. I also remembered Mr Uppity, a wealthy character who was rude to everyone and could potentially run for parliament as a member of the Conservative party. I don’t think he could be considered good per se.

For those who are unaware, the Mr Men and Little Miss are a series of semi-popular children books, originally written by Roger Hargreaves, which took shapes, gave them faces and one bit of a personality and asked us to enjoy ourselves by judging their actions. Luckily, their popularity meant other people had heard of these Euclidian protagonists. When I asked others about the Mr Men/Little Miss morality divide, the general response was not that Mr Men were good and Little Miss were bad, but that the characters as a group were sexist. It was generally felt that the characters conformed to harmful gender stereotypes. This is certainly understandable. For a start they all live in Misterland. The place they live in is actually named just after the males of the population. It’s like if the countries were called Manada, Mance or Oman. Which is obviously ridiculous. Secondly, the female characters’, the Little Miss’, creation began in 1981, much later than the Mr Men, whose creation began in 1971. I don’t know the actual reasoning behind this, but it does somewhat make the Little Miss seem like an afterthought. Finally (for this list, by no means for all reasons why Mr Men/Little Miss might be sexist) why don’t the Little Miss follow the same naming convention as the Mr Men? Why aren’t they the Ms Women? Or something better? “Little Miss” seems a little demeaning, like describing something that’s demeaning as “a little demeaning.”

They’re jeans! They’re all essentially the same. Just like people. Depth!   “Clothing Rack of Jeans” by Peter Griffin – Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

There is very little reason to even divide the characters based on binary gender. If they were real people, we could say that they each identify with a gender or different aspects of genders i.e. they all have different traits as people, and that would be fine. Except that these are characters which have been assigned a traditional gender and a specific characteristic. We don’t know how this decision is made other than the gendered title is not based on primary or secondary sexual characteristics. There’s nothing specific about the characters that even make them stereotypically male or female other than their names. They’re all just shapes with personalities. Technically I suppose this is true for most people.

So far these are all opinions based on perceptions. Perceptions, psychologically speaking, are prone to an enormous amount of bias. For example, Distinction Bias, where there is a tendency when considering two things to see them as more dissimilar when evaluating them at the same time than when evaluating them separately. Like when comparing different pairs of jeans in a shop and tiny differences are magnified, but really they’re all incredibly similar because they’re just blue trousers for crying out loud! Or potentially when comparing Mr Men and Little Miss. Or there’s Trait Ascription Bias; where individuals consider themselves to be variable in terms of behaviour and mood, while considering others to be much more consistent and predictable. To be fair, this may be understandable when it comes to the Mr Men and Little Miss. Our judgement on the relative goodness of Mr Men and Little Miss may therefore be influenced by such bias. Can the morality of these shapely (literally) populations be objectively examined?

Each book in the original Mr. Men and Little Miss series introduced a different title character with a single dominant personality to convey a moral lesson. The dominant personality trait was also their name. Luckily this is not how humans or Piers Morgan are named. To examine whether the Mr Men and Little Miss are separated by some sort of weird moral judgement, it should therefore be relatively easy to use their names to observe if there are any trends.

The populations of Mr Men (n=50) and Little Miss (n=37) were examined. Based on their names alone, each character was assigned a moral weighting of good, bad or neutral. For example, Little Miss Brainy was considered good, Mr Greedy was considered bad and Mr Bounce was considered neutral. These decisions were just made by me, which will almost certainly introduce a source of bias towards my own values, determined by upbringing, culture, socialisation and so on, regarding what’s good, bad and neutral. I could have attempted to correct this by hiring a suitably varied team of Hargreaves-trained research assistants and averaging their judgements, but I haven’t the money, time, inclination or money.

The proportion of the total population for each moral assignation was then calculated. No further statistical tests were performed to compare the two populations, as the numbers involved weren’t large enough to make these comparisons meaningful. Any differences observed can therefore be considered trends or as a real statistician might technically call them, “nonsense.”

As Figure 1 illustrates, contrary to what was originally proposed, there were fewer good (18 vs. 24%) and more bad (48% vs. 38%) Mr Men compared with Little Miss. So it would seem that generally Mr Men are (a bit) morally worse than Little Miss.

Figure 1. Moral Proportions of the Populations of Mr Men and Little Miss.

However, we know that what is considered morally good or bad changes over time. For example, it was formerly considered a moral failing to be left handed. This attitude is now agreed to be a bit sinister.  Previously there was a lot of public judgement as to the type of clothing women should wear. Nowadays, this is also done on social media. There may be one or two other examples in history. Perhaps the moral association of the Mr Men and Little Miss has also changed with time. To examine this, the populations of Mr Men and Little Miss were divided into new and old characters based on whether the book featuring them was published before or after 1990. This year was selected as a fairly natural cut-off as in 1988, Roger Hargreaves unfortunately died and his son, Adam, began writing and illustrating new stories and characters.

Figure 2. Moral Proportions of the Populations of Old and New Mr Men and Little Miss.

 

Figure 2 illustrates that there are fewer good (10% vs. 24%) and more bad (56% vs. 48%) old Mr Men compared with old Little Miss. It can also be seen that there were fewer good (18% vs. 25%) and more bad (25% vs. 18%) new Mr Men compared with new Little Miss.

From a slightly different perspective we can also see from these data that (numerically at least) there are more good and fewer bad new Mr Men than old Mr Men and approximately the same number of good, but fewer bad new Little Miss than old Little Miss. So it would seem:

• Mr Men have been historically morally worse than Little Miss and continue to be so into the present day

• New Mr Men are morally better than old Mr Men

• New Little Miss are more morally neutral than old Little Miss

Because we’re humans with prejudices and bias, it is easy to interpret these trends in a number of ways. For example, it may be argued that it displays the prejudice of the the Mr Men and Little Miss book series, with the Mr Men being allowed more complex characters and the Little Miss, where they have moral character at all, being relegated to the old “good, sweet and innocent” stereotype. Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little female polygons are made of. Without looking in greater detail at the actual traits assigned, it is difficult if not impossible to say what this may reveal; if there is any stereotyping present or if these trends are simply random.

It could be argued that rather than morals changing over time, these data show the change in morals between Roger and Adam Hargreaves. I don’t know either of them, so can’t really say anything in that regard, but I do know that books are rarely just produced by one person on their own and the differences will at least reflect the views of two teams.

Judgement across gender stereotyping is obviously more complicated than a seemingly simple good versus bad dichotomy. The idea of gender as a binary concept is laden with all sorts of complex and subtle stereotypes and comparisons. It may be possible to broadly determine if there are any obvious stereotypical comparisons by matching the names within the Mr. Men and Little Miss populations to see if they conform to any traditional gender roles.

To examine the roles of the Mr Men and Little Miss, the populations were examined to see if their names could be paired with a counterpart with the same meaning e.g. Mr. Birthday and Little Miss Birthday, with a counterpart with the opposite meaning e.g. Mr Messy and Little Miss Tidy, or if there was no counterpart e.g. Mr. Moustache. Where pairs were available, the moral weighting (good or bad) and the meaning of the names themselves were compared. Again, it was just me that was checking, so interpretation is potentially based on any prejudice I may have lurking within my poor tired brain.

Table 1. Matched and Opposing Mr Men and Little Miss Characters

From Table 1 we can see that is was relatively more common for Mr Men to be matched with Little Miss than for them to be opposing. We should perhaps be pleased about this meagre hint of equality, although it is perhaps notable that the majority of the matching pairs may be considered bad characteristics.

Where the Mr Men and Little Miss are compared in terms of their opposite character, they seem to be reasonably balanced in terms of which group is good or bad. However, when we look at the actual words associated with the Little Miss (tidy, neat, helpful, scary) and Mr Men (messy, brave, mean) it begins to sound too much like the parents in a sitcom for us to be comfortable about the lack of gender stereotyping. The sitcom where the husband is the silly, humorous idiot and the wife is an attractive, home-based nag. I’m sure you know the one. However, these characters represent only 13% of the total pooled population. This is perhaps too small a proportion with which to judge all of the 2D people.

In summary, we have managed to get a few bits of information by looking at the total population of Mr Men and Little Miss. We know that the population of Mr Men contains more bad characters than the population of Little Miss and this is also the case historically. Pretty much just like with humans. We also know that stereotyping is likely present in this population, but we can’t say more without cooperation between more people. Pretty much just like with humans. Finally, we know that gender and how it can be used to stereotype is a complex issue (even the word gender means different things to different individuals) and that there is a lot of thought needed to advance many issues in this field. Pretty much just like with shapes with personalities.

 

Why Pudsey Bear is awful: An annually pointless grudge.

A bear that isn’t Pudsey. I wasn’t sure on the copyright and didn’t want to give him another reason to come after me.

Every year in connection with Children in Need I tell the story of why I don’t like Pudsey Bear. I’m told by my friends (who despite what I’m told by others, do exist) that it wouldn’t be a real Children in Need without this story. They’re humouring me of course, but humouring me is 92% of the work of being my friend, so that’s fine.  I apologise if you started reading this thinking it was a complex critique of the inadequate wealth redistribution of Children in Need or a political discourse on how if society were better we wouldn’t even require Children in Need.  I don’t know if the former is true and while the latter certainly is, there are people far better qualified than I am to discuss it. I’m afraid my story is a short, bitter, pointless grudge against a monocular bear associated with a worthy cause. If you like, at the end, you can tut and say “One night isn’t Children in Need, children are always in need.” Yes.

Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

As a much younger man, a child even, I was ill and had been to the see a doctor. I can’t remember what the illness was. I imagine it was probably just a virus that had gone on a bit too long or possibly the ongoing inflammation of my pedantry gland.  Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the pedantry gland doesn’t exist. After leaving the clinic, in fact just outside the clinic, I did a manly collapse (fainted). On my trajectory towards the ground, I decided that my head should take a slight detour towards the wall. I broke my glasses. Like most people who wear them, (*narrows eyes at hipsters*) I need my glasses for seeing. As a result, this was almost literally adding insult to injury. Actually, I guess it was just adding inconvenience to injury. As I lay there, bewildered and pathetic, head hurting, glasses broken, I notice a blurry figure approach out of the blurry distance into the slightly less blurry foreground. It was Children in Need at the time and this figure was Pudsey Bear! He was obviously out collecting money for Children in Need. That being the thing that he’s in to. Who better than the mascot of Children In Need to help a child in need outside a healthcare professional’s building? Pudsey stepped over me and carried on walking.

I’m not a fan of Pudsey Bear.

“Perhaps Pudsey didn’t see you, his vision can’t be that good.”

“Why did he step over me and carry on down the street instead of tripping over me and carrying on towards the pavement?”

I’m not a fan of Pudsey Bear.

Another acceptable bear.

It is known from studies into altruism, that the decision to stop and help someone is influenced by a number of factors. If people feel they are short of time, see someone is bleeding, think there are lots of people around so one of them will help (diffusion of responsibility) or simply don’t identify with the person who needs assistance, then they are much less likely to engage in altruistic behaviour (the bystander effect).

Perhaps Pudsey was late for an important bear appointment, was put off when he saw I was losing haemoglobin, thought one of the other people would help me and noticed I wasn’t a bear like him, so didn’t help. Perhaps Pudsey’s just awful.

I’m not a fan of Pudsey Bear.

I am a fan of Children in Need. They do good work that shouldn’t be necessary. So please give generously. Because Pudsey won’t.

Or there are lots of good charities, so you can pick one. You might as well, otherwise reading this stupid story about my ridiculous grudge against a visually-impaired ursine has been a complete waste of time.

Mathmaries

What If Disney Princesses Were Placed Into Vaguely Relevant Graphs?

Does Sean Bean Always Die at the End?

The Alpha Sean Bean, shown here to be still alive.
“Sean Bean TIFF 2015” by NASA/Bill Ingalls. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

There’s a quote from a character in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and J.R.R. Tolkein’s character from some book or other, that has been doing the rounds as an internet meme for quite some time: “War makes corpses of us all.”  Of course you all know it, it’s ridiculously famous, after all, one does not simply forget a Faramir quote. Much better than Boromir. In Sean Bean’s case however, the quote might as well be “appearing in a role in television or film makes a corpse of me, Sean Bean.” Sean Bean is well known for dying in films. So much so, that there exists a campaign specifically against the further onscreen killing of Sean Bean. At least, I think it still exists. It might have died.

Basically it is a fairly common assumption that if Sean Bean is in something, he will most likely not make it to the end. However, everyone knows what happens when you assume; you make a prick of yourself. Is it actually true that Sean Bean always dies? In psychology, confirmation bias describes the tendency for people to better recall information that confirms their existing beliefs than information that would refute them. The frequency illusion is where something (it can be an event or just an object) which has recently been brought to a person’s attention suddenly seems to occur or appear with greater frequency than it did before it had been noticed. This is also known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon and once you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. So it is possible that the appearance of Sean Bean’s repeated celluloid mortality is a function of some common cognitive biases rather than him actually ending more times than a Sunday furniture sale. The following information that was collected to test this may contain spoilers for Sean Bean projects. Unless you believe the appearance of Sean Bean in a cast list is in itself a spoiler.

Using some sort of internet search engine (if you want to find a similar one, you can look it up on Google) all of Sean Bean’s roles in film and television were listed to create a population of Sean Beans. From here forward, the collective noun for Sean Beans used will be “population” rather than the perhaps more common “can” or “cemetery.” Sean Bean’s roles in theatre or performing voiceover in video games were not included due to a combination of being too difficult to include, laziness and the words “Sean Bean” starting to lose all meaning. The actual actor Sean Bean (the Alpha Sean) was also included, as while technically it is an ongoing role, we do know with reasonable certainly that Sean Bean will die at the end of it. The Alpha Sean was not included in any cause of death calculations in case I end up as a suspect in a future murder investigation. Jupiter Ascending was not included for obvious reasons.

The number of times Sean Bean was dead at the end of a film/TV show and the number of times Sean Bean was alive at the end of a film/TV show were counted and used to calculate the incidence of death for the total population of Sean Beans. The incidence rate is the number of new cases of a disorder or death within a population over a specified period of time. This is commonly express in terms of per 100,000 persons per year. In terms of deaths, this in some ways can be seen as equivalent to the Mortality Rate. Some basic demographics, causes of deaths and intentionality of deaths were also calculated.

The demographics for the population of Sean Beans are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Sean Bean Demographics

Characteristic	Sean Bean Numbers
N	75
Mean (SD) age, years	6,0810,851.05 (523,114,369.60)
Species, n (%)
Actor	1 (1.33)
Human	71 (94.67)
Lion	1 (1.33)
Portrait	1 (1.33)
God	1 (1.33)
Survival
Alive, n (%)	45 (60.00)
Dead, n (%)	30 (40.00)

The incidence of Sean Bean deaths across the total existence so far of Sean Beans (6000 BCE to 2072) is 4.85 per 100,000 person per year. The causes of Sean Bean death and intentionality of Sean Bean death are shown in figures 1 and 2, respectively. The most common cause of death was being shot by a gun. The best cause of death was fall from cliff due to a herd of cows. Most Sean Bean deaths were intentional (as a result of homicide) compared with accidental and orcicide.

Figure 1. Cause of Sean Bean death.

Figure 2. Intentionality of Sean Bean death.

The aim of all this Beanian death numbering was to determine if there was any truth to the common belief that Sean Bean always dies at the end. Examination of a fairly complete population of Sean Beans shows that this is not the case, with 60% of Sean Beans managing to survive the time it takes for many film and TV directors to tell a story. If you are a Sean Bean though, it seems you are most likely to die by being shot by a human. There may be some money to be made in a line of Sean Bean-specific bullet-proof vests.

So why is the belief that Sean Bean always shuffles off the mortal coil at the end so common? The application of confirmation bias to this has already been discussed, but for that particular bias to take effect, there must be an existing belief to confirm. The earliest manifestation of Sean Bean’s tendency for premature televisual corpse shenanigans that I could be found was approximately around his fourth appearance. However, at a preliminary glance, Sean Beans don’t seem to kick the bucket particularly often early on in the ascendance of Sean Beans to make any reputational impact.

If we divide the appearance of Sean Beans into tertiles (an ordered distribution divided into three parts, each containing a third of the population, not an aquatic reptile with a shell) and look at the proportion of deaths as time progresses, we get something that looks like figure 3.

Figure 3. Proportion of Sean Bean deaths by Sean Bean time tertile.

We can see that if 3 is the most recent tertile and 1 is the furthest in the past, then the Sean Bean death rate appears to be greatest in the middle of the population’s progression through time. In psychology, the serial position effect describes the tendency for people to recall items earlier (the primacy effect) and later (the recency effect) in a list the best, with items in the middle being recalled the least. This would not explain the Sean Bean always dies reputation, as in such a model we would expect more deaths in the first and last tertile. Besides, one explanation for the serial position effect is that earlier items are stored more effectively in long term memory than the other items, while more recent items are still present in working memory and are thus easily available for recall. This would only apply to these data if people experienced Sean Bean necrosis as a list in front of them, which most people (besides me) don’t. Even if the data matched a serial positioning explanation, it would be a stretch (i.e. wrong) to use it to explain the Sean Bean deceased at the finale reputation phenomenon.

Rise of the Nicole Kidmen would be a good episode of Doctor Who.

Characters don’t become instantly well known in popular culture. It takes time for a reputation to build and saturate society. In this respect, perhaps we can consider the middle tertile to be more akin to the starting point for a reputation i.e. Sean Beans will be more well known, with more opinions being formed about them. The Sean Bean death rate here is 52%, meaning that during this period Sean Beans were slightly more likely than not to die at the end. This may be enough to start the rumour of Sean Beans’ non-existence by the credits and establish a source for confirmation bias.

Characters don’t exist in isolation. They usually exist in a complex ecosystem of other populations. The Sean Bean population exists alongside the population of Bruce Willises (Willi?) and the population of Nicole Kidmans (Kidmen?) among others. Important data to consider would therefore be how often Sean Beans die in comparison to other populations. If the comparative death rate of Sean Beans is noticeably higher than that of other comparable populations, then this may explain the Sean Bean clog-popping conundrum. Future “research” should focus on this (I can’t be bothered right now).

It was suggested to me by KTBUG (kgwright73) that the popularity of the mode of presentation of Sean Bean would have an impact on the perception of his tendency for pushing up the daisies. It seems feasible Sean Beans die in more popular things and live in less popular things then the public perception would be that of a gentleman prone to leaving his life behind. To this end (where available) I took an average of lifetime box office takings for films where Sean Bean died and films where Sean Bean lived (figure 4).

Figure 4. Average lifetime box office takings by Sean Bean survival.

Figure 4 shows that films where Sean Bean shook hands with the Grim Reaper on average took more at the box office than films where Sean Bean continued respiring. If we use this as a crude measure of popularity (and it is very crude, subject to bias from missing TV shows and films where I simply couldn’t get the info) and impact on cultural awareness, then films where Sean Bean becomes an ex Sean Bean seem to have made a larger cultural impact. This could certainly be at least one source of the idea that Sean Bean always dies.

Please note, I am in no way suggesting that Sean Bean dying in it makes a film popular. As the old saying goes, “Sean Bean’s death correlation, does not prove film popularity causation.” You all know it.

In conclusion it would seem that Sean Bean’s reputation for always dying at the end is somewhat over exaggerated, with a death rate of approximately 40%. Sean Beans are most likely to die from being shot intentionally by a human or from being in the middle of their career trajectory. The Sean Bean Ex-Parrot Meme may be best explained by a high death rate at a time when Sean Beans were likely to be reaching their maximum prevalence in the public eye and by films which feature a Sean Bean death having made a larger cultural impact than films that feature a living Sean Bean at the end. These perceptions feed into confirmation bias. And then Sean Bean died.

Am I Busy? – The hot beverage science

The Hokey Cokey IS what it’s all about!

This could be the Hokey Cokey. It isn’t.

I got given a card for my birthday. I got more than one, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was bragging about knowing people other than my parents. The card was from my parents. Instead of the more traditional “Happy Birthday” or “Good work on not being dead for a year” or “Mild congratulations on another successful solar orbit” the card posed the question; what if the Hokey Cokey really is what it’s all about?  An amusing enough joke, but what if it is? A song would never make a claim without being possibly researched. After all, The Weeknd wouldn’t claim that “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you” without solid proof that his partner was a dentist or someone trained in delivering botox, and Ed Sheeran will almost certainly stop loving you the moment you pass the age of 70 years. However, I sadly don’t have access to any data from the undoubtedly well-funded laboratories of Clinton Cards. Today, so will have to do my own research. So let’s take our brains, go in out, in out and shake it all about in an entirely non-erotic sense and answer the deeply philosophical question; is the Hokey Cokey really what it’s all about?

The Hokey Cokey as it is known in the United Kingdom or Hokey Pokey in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand is a participation dance with a distinctive accompanying tune and lyric structure. In the United Kingdom the song is currently un-copyrighted due to its age. In the United States, Sony/ATV Music Publishing controls 100% of the publishing rights to the “Hokey Pokey.” From this point forward I will refer to the song as the Hokey Cokey rather than have to send money towards Sony, even if the road to its head office is almost entirely paved with good intentions.

The origins of the Hokey Cokey are not clear.  According to some (Wikipedia), in 1940, during the Blitz in London, a Canadian officer suggested to Al Tabor, a British bandleader of the time, that he write a party song with actions similar to “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.” I’m sure you all know the song and actions to Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree so I won’t bore you by going through it now.  The inspiration for the song’s title that resulted, “The Hokey Pokey”, came from an ice cream vendor whom Tabor had heard as a boy, calling out, “Hokey pokey penny a lump. Have a lick make you jump.” Presumably he has received therapy for this trauma and the ice cream vendor promptly jailed. Al Tabor then changed the name to “The Hokey Cokey” as he thought it would sound better. Some scholars (and one can only imagine the academic rigour it must require to be a scholar of the Hokey Cokey) attributed the origin to the Scottish song “Hinkum-Booby“, which had similar lyrics. I would humbly suggest that it’s a good job. If I were to observe someone shouting, oh the hinkum booby, I should assume that they had acquired a horrible disease of the mammary.

The Hokey Cokey and accompanying dance peaked in popularity as a music hall song and novelty dance in the mid-1940s in Britain and Ireland, as presumably had a sense of boredom. The instruction set and lyrics are as follows: the right leg has been used as an example body part, but in the actual song, the body parts used vary as the song and the desperation of the participants progresses.

Charles Dance like nobody is watching. Love like you’ve never been John Hurt. It’s a saying, who says it isn’t?!

You put your [right leg] in,
your [right leg] out:
in, out, in, out,
you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around.
That’s what it’s all about!

It is the final lyric that I want to concentrate on. That’s what this is all about. To claim that it holds the key to the meaning behind everything in the universe is quite a bold claim for a 1940s novelty song. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not the case. Has the answer to this vital underlying question of everything been lying under our noses like some sort of filtrum all this time? Is “what it’s all about” to be revealed by the lyrics or the movement of the Hokey Cokey, or an elaborate combination of the two.

In order to do the Hokey Cokey, participants join their hands at the fingertips to make a chevron and proceed to rock the chevron from side-to-side. After that, the participants separately, but in time with the others, turn around (usually clockwise when viewed from above, but this direction does not appear to be compulsory).  When combined with the previous instructions to move various boy parts in and out repetitively the meaning of the song becomes apparent.

The Hokey Cokey is drawing our attention to the importance of the wave function.  A wave function is a probability amplitude in quantum mechanics describing the quantum state of a particle and how it behaves. Typically, its values are complex numbers and, for a single particle, it represents a function of space and time. Everybody’s favourite continuum.  The laws of quantum mechanics, in particular the Schrödinger equation, describe how the wave function evolves over time and predicts the future state of dynamic systems. The wave function behaves qualitatively like other waves, like water waves or waves on a string, because essentially the Schrödinger equation is mathematically a type of wave equation. This explains the name “wave function”, and gives rise to wave–particle duality (elementary particles can have the properties of particles and waves).  This is easily seen in the Hokey Cokey. The sinusoidal movement of body parts with a circle in unison with others definitely represents an example of a wave function and perhaps even quantum entanglement. The hands joined in a chevron rocking from side-to-side can be said to be a visual representation of the wave function. The following turning around in a circle is the dance representation of a particle, highlighting wave-particle duality.

Psi. This is presumably the symbol for psychology because it’s the noise psychologists make when “experts” are invited on TV to discuss social phenomenon.

The most common symbols for a wave function are a lower-case or capital psi.  This is also the symbol used to represent psychology. In fact some physicists such as John Wheeler and Edwin Jaynes regarded the wave function as representing information in the mind of the observer, and therefore a measure of our knowledge of reality. Duuuuude!

Ultimately then, the Hokey Cokey can be viewed as a dance form of the wave function, quantum entanglement, wave particle duality, human psychology and our knowledge of reality. It may be fair to say then that the Hokey Cokey is indeed what it’s all about. The chorus confirms this with an exuberant celebration of the Hokey Cokey’s vital place in the universe and the joy and awe human’s should feel in their understanding of this.

Whoa, hokey cokey cokey
Whoa, hokey cokey cokey
Whoa, hokey cokey cokey,
Knees bent arms stretch,
Rah rah rah!

Does your pub have a beer garden?

An important decision making tool for pubs.

New Horizon’s Pluto flyby gets some unexpected results