Asymmetrical Information

Personally, I'd like to know where Mangu-Ward gets her support for the comment that Italians are "a notoriously emotionally unstable people". Gah! How dare she! It makah me wanna set a vadetta agaist her! Oh but she'a beutiful!

Porca miseria! Perche dice quelle favole? Ma dove si prenderno?

Porca miseria! Perche dice quelle favole? Ma dove si prenderno?

in Boston, there were more violent trauma's in the ER when the weather was nice. People would go out, encounter each other, and fight.

In the winters, the ERs were filled with slips on ice etc.

You made me curious so I eyeballed it and the total rates are nowhere near constant across Europe. All the suicide rates are so much higher than murder rates and there's so much variation in suicide rates that the total numbers are all over the place.

In general suicide rates are significantly higher in the north than the south though, but not in Holland. Italy and Portugal do have high murder rates by Western Europe's standards, but so does Finland.

There is a line about a Spanish nobleman saying his confession while on his deathbed.

"I now have no enemies"

"You reconciled with all of them? The Lord will be pleased"

"No, I killed them all"

I've always thought lack of sun tends to coincide with depression and alcoholism, so this perhaps explains the variance in the suicide rates between north and south. As for murder, well, in general the farther south you travel the more poverty you tend to encounter, and poverty tends to be accompanied by violent crime.

I once asked a Danish friend how they're affected by the summers, when it stays light until the middle of the night. She said, "It's wonderful, we spend the whole time drinking!" I then asked her about the winters, when it's dark all the time, and she said, "It's horrible, all we do is spend the time drinking." I was never able to figure out whether or not she was joking.

What jokebook does that come from???

Army probes war contractor fraud. The magic of the marketplace.

My husband and I have long thought there was no coincidence to Seattle's two big beverage exports, coffee and beer. We moved there of a November some years ago, and, with day jobs and all, didn't see our apartment in daylight (on weekdays, and sometimes not on weekends either if we were headed to the mountains) until March or so.

<shudder>

I heard that Seattle has the highest suicide rate in the US and Finland the highest in the world, probably due to seasonal/weather factors.

Seattle's suicides could be due to the grunge rock.

Purple: 1) You're completely off topic.
2) Government contracting is not a free market.

Army probes war contractor fraud. The magic of the marketplace.

Congratulations! You have now lowered yourself to the level of the Fox News spambot. Here are your membership card and secret decoder ring; wear them proudly and spam onward.

According to my history teacher the Febraury Revolution of 1917 happened because it was an unseasonably warm day. People took the weather opportunity to wait in bread lines, and for some unknown reason they started to riot. The army decided to join it, and then one thing led to another....

Of course my history teacher also pointed out that the riot wouldn't have happened in the first place if pre-revolution Russia was a better place to live in.

I always thought that warm weather made people lazy. I think the biggest threat of global warming is that people will become lazy slow the economy. Of course, cold weather stops a lot of work from getting done too.

Getting the wrong amount of exposure to sunlight can cause some people to have their sleep patterns screwed up. Lack of sleep causes some to undergo significant stress. That may be a reason for suicides.

Night shift workers sometimes have a lot of problems with this. There has been some success managing exposure to ultraviolet light with flourescent lamps, which simulate exposure to sunlight.

Had a look at the stats. Both Spain and Greece have low homicide rates.
Italy's and Portugal's are pretty homicidal but not as high as chilly Finland and are positively tame compared to Northern Irelanders. I don't see the temperature link - at least within Europe.

Jane Galt: "This reminds me of a factoid I picked up somewhere. Allegedly, in Europe, the rate of violent death is roughly the same across all countries, but is differentially composed of suicide vs. murder."

I remember reading that factoid in a James Michener novel. Oddly, I remembered the title of the German translation (Die Kinder von Torremolinos), but had to look up the actual title (The Drifters).

I remember P.J. O'Rourke once asked why people in the Soviet Union, where chess is a spectator sport, was so economically backwards, and why people in Cuba, where the weather is always sunny, are so miserable.

I think you all know the answer.

I don't know about killing someone because they sleep with your sister, but law enforcement experts will tell you that warmer climates in the US tend to have higher murder rates because, the more warm weather a given region has, the more people are out and about intermingling and, therefore, the more opportunity for conflict to occur.

I know that I chose Spokane instead of Seattle because of the moonbats-- and my guess would be that's part of the suicide problem.

The moonbats get depressed and kill themselves because they watch the news, etc, and everyone is so against what they are for.
The non-moonbats are surrounded by moonbats, feel the same disjunction, and kill themselves.

It is a well established fact that a lack of sunshine causes an increase in suicides. In areas close to the North Pole with six months of darkness suicides are especially frequent.

Alaska, Northern Russia, Iceland, the Bsltic states are famous for gloomy people. However, even places as far south as Northern Wisconsin, where sucides normally take place in the Spring,
have this problem. There was a book on this phenomenon published in the 60s titled "Wisconsin Death Trip".

The best way to compensate for the lack of sunshine in Northern climes is indoor tanning. In Alaska many people own their own tanning beds while others wear battery powered florescent lites around their necks with high uva-uvb bulbs.

The most traditional solution is to move South ala the Vikings, the Golden Horde, the Visigoths and most Russians (after all, Sharapova and Viadasove both live in Florida fulltime).

Thanks Nick, it helps when you're a web developer by trade ;)

Actually, the highest suicide rates are in the west, with the highest suicide rates in Nevada. Given the large differentiation in sunshine levels for the western states, and Nevada's dependence on gambling (a fool's trade, more often than not), it's difficult to sunshine (or the lack thereof) as a significant predictor on suicide.

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/34/4/837

"The overall correlation between homicide and suicide rates was weak and statistically insignificant ({rho} = –0.08, P = 0.5178). However, when analysed by geographic region the data revealed two distinct patterns: homicide and suicide rates were positively correlated in European countries ({rho} = 0.89, P

The rest got cut off, it reads: "({rho} = 0.89, P

According to "Regional Variation in Suicide Rates -- United States, 1990-1994" (CDC 1997), highest suicide rates in the US are, in descending order, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kentucky. These figures are adjusted for gender and race variation.

Hmmm... most of these states are pretty sunny, eh? Maybe the sunny/warm correlation isn't all that important after all, though of course I'm just eye-balling these numbers.

I know that the myth that winter holidays are a time of high suicide rates is just that, a myth.

Weather and suicide: the present state of knowledge on the association of meteorological factors with suicidal behaviour -E. A. Deisenhammer

Abstract

Deisenhammer EA. Weather and suicide: the present state of knowledge on the association of meteorological factors with suicidal behaviour.

Acta Psychiatr Scand 2003: 108: 402-409. Blackwell Munksgaard 2003.

Objective: To review the available literature on the association between daily and longer-term weather data and the incidence of attempted and completed suicide.

Method: A computerized search supplemented by a cross-check of the references sections of the thereby identified papers was performed.

Results: A total of 27 studies looking for a relationship between attempted or completed suicide and weather or climate data were found. Most of the papers reported a statistical association of suicidal acts with at least one weather factor. However, the results are not conclusive and in part contradictory.

Conclusion: Possibly due to the high variance in methodological approaches of the studies it is not possible to identify a specific weather condition associated with a generally higher risk for suicide. Weather and seasonal effects may interact with each other. Environmental effects on brain function and weather-related interactions of people may be involved in the occurrence of suicidal behaviour.

According to "Regional Variation in Suicide Rates -- United States, 1990-1994" (CDC 1997), highest suicide rates in the US are, in descending order, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kentucky. These figures are adjusted for gender and race variation.

Hmmm... most of these states are pretty sunny, eh?

Hmmm, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Oregon all have long winters. Colorado and Utah winters are not as long, but they are noticeable. So nearly half aren't all that sunny for a good part of the year.

Maybe the sunny/warm correlation isn't all that important after all, though of course I'm just eye-balling these numbers.

Culture plays a role as well, as the European numbers indicate.

I don't know about southern Nevada, but northern Nevada is friggin' miserable in winter. Cold, windy, sometimes snow, usually just grit and frost.

True, many of those states are cold in winter (is there a correlation between elevation and suidice?)... but most (NOT all) of them are fairly sunny (even in the bitter cold winter).

In any case Chris Janak's comment above seems to support that idea that weather is not clearly associated with suicide rates.

Better to be lucky than good Whit...

Suicide Rates Strongly Correlate with Altitude
David C. Cheng, Therese I. Mendenhall and Barry E. Brenner
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences: Little Rock, AR

ABSTRACT

Background: In 2002 there were 500,000 emergency department (ED) visits for self-inflicted injury and approximately 35,000 deaths. U.S. suicide rates have been increasing particularly in the geriatric population. We previously reported a positive correlation between mean elevation within a U.S. state and suicide rate for all the 50 states, independent of psychiatrist availability, poverty, or isolation. Objective: As intra-state elevations may have a wide variance, we sought to utilize the county which contains the state's capital to re-assess if a positive correlation persisted between suicide and altitude. Methods: This was a retrospective study. Using suicide mortality data assembled by CDC Wonder and limiting data to ICD-9 codes 950–959 (suicide), we collected the crude death rate (deaths/100,000) on the county which contained the state's capital based on the years 1979–1998. To determine elevation for the county containing the state's capital, all weather stations were contacted in the particular county and the mean elevation used, if there was more than one weather station. A Pearson correlation coefficient was determined for the strength of the relationship. Linear regression and curve estimation methods were used as well. p

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