Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Caped crusaders

I was adding it up the other day, and if I'd given my life over to being ready to explode in crusading violence every time the occasion arose I would have got into fights twice, some forty-five years ago. Unless I actually went around starting fights myself, which is hardly the done thing.
Riffing off that, Batman can apparently run into thugs mugging someone in an alleyway about what? Once, twice a week? I mean, he's looking for them, but even so, if a mugging takes (let's be generous) ten minutes, and if it takes him ten minutes to cover a single (multi-alley) block...
Let's say he's patrolling after dark five nights a week...say 50 hours, or 300 ten-minute periods... and has two hits. One in 150.
Let's say that Gotham City has 500 downtown blocks (he doesn't seem to do the suburbs much - nowhere to swing from). That means that in any given ten night minutes there are three and a bit muggings, or a total of a thousand muggings (or break-ins, bank robberies, or gang hits, or arson cases) a week.
That seems about right; if Batman's strike rate was much more than 2 in a thousand it might reduce crime below the level where there's enough of it to keep him busy . An ecological balance.
Though... a thousand crimes, given recidivism, probably implies between three hundred and five hundred actual criminals. And he takes out two a week - that's a hundred a year. Or a one chance in five of going down. You'd think that odds like that would have to reduce the attractions of crime.
Except that, to be fair, a number of Batvillains aren't homo economicus; in the latest movie the Joker, for example, makes rather a point of it.
The same, of course, applies to Spiderman, though his spider-sense may mean he has a wider search area at any given moment. On the other hand, he doesn't have a car, so it probably evens out.

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