Every day I look at the day’s Wikipedia entries. And I especially focus on what famous people had a birthday today.<\/p>\n
For the longest time I really had no idea why I was doing this. Occasionally I would find out about some fascinating person I had not known about, but I knew that wasn’t really the reason.<\/p>\n
Today I finally figured it out. When you go through the birthdays of famous people, you see a recurring pattern.<\/p>\n
At first, they are all dead people. Then you get to a transition period where some of them are dead and others are still alive. At last you get to the recent birthdays, where pretty much everyone is still alive.<\/p>\n
I think I’ve been looking for someone — anyone — who managed to escape. Has there been even one person who didn’t inevitably leave this earth after living here for some number of decades?<\/p>\n
So far I haven’t found anyone. Alas, sooner or later they all end up dying.<\/p>\n
But I’m not giving up hope yet. Tomorrow there will be a new Wikipedia entry, and a chance to find out that at least somebody is beating the odds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every day I look at the day’s Wikipedia entries. And I especially focus on what famous people had a birthday today. For the longest time I really had no idea why I was doing this. Occasionally I would find out about some fascinating person I had not known about, but I knew that wasn’t really … Continue reading “Beating the odds”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28533"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28534,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28533\/revisions\/28534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}