End of every recent year they've died in threes. This year:

[CousinIT]

Desmond Tutu
E.O. Wilson
Harry Reid

...

[demtenjeep]

1. John madden

Sad

[Retrograde]

2. Sondheim, Wayne Thiebaud, John Madden

actually, people die in the hundreds of thousands at this time of year - and at every other time. We tend to notice the famous ones and forget the vast masses

[Klaralven]

7. The death rate is about 7.6 / 1000 population annually.

Unfortunately, the birth rate is 18 / 1000 annually.

So for 7900 million, that is 60 million deaths or about 165 thousand per day.

Net population gain is 82 million annually or about 225 thousand per day. That's about one new USA every 4 years.

https://knoema.com/atlas/World/Death-rate

[RockRaven]

3. and John Madden, and my neighbor who died on Christmas morning (though not a celebrity)

[PTWB]

4. People see patterns even when there are none.

Our brains are fascinating.

[Disaffected]

5. This people dying in threes is an old superstition.

What typically happens is that they start counting and when three is reached, for some reason they start over or stop counting. The same thing would exist for two or three or four etc. but three was chosen for some reason, likely related to some other superstition.

[Karma13612]

10. Human nature is drawn

To three’s.

I get what you mean about the ‘three in a row deaths’.

But when you look at the other uses of three:
Three strikes and you’re out.
Three tries on a password, then you’re locked out.
Lots of entities are 3-letter acronyms.

These aren’t actually superstitions, just subconscious man made patterns that have been adopted and stood the test of time.

[Disaffected]

12. Yes, there is that aspect of it.

Perhaps there is something intrinsic in threes. For instance:

https://www.bookofthrees.com/the-rule-of-three-in-mathematics/

Another thing that occurs to me is that three is commonly the highest number that most can grasp instantly as a single entity i.e without thinking of it as a combination of smaller values.

Perhaps superstitions such as three in a row deaths have an origin rooted in those more basic concepts(??). Interesting topic....

[Karma13612]

18. Indeed! Eom

[Raine]

16. "Three on a match"

unlucky to light 3 smokes on the same match, goes back to WWII.

[Karma13612]

19. There ya go!! Eom

[ProfessorGAC]

20. I Believe It Goes Back Further

I've definitely heard it as it relates to trench warfare in WW1.
I've heard it may have gone back as far as the Crimean War.
It was based on the anecdotal evidence that lighting three cigarettes off the same match gave a sniper time to see & key in on that location.
In fact, in WW1, even if lighting 2, the protocol was light the 2 cigarettes and move a couple feet away. The sniper shooting where the flame used to be was shooting at nothing.
I don't know that there was specific data to suggest a true risk increase on that third cigarette, but it generally makes sense.

[Raine]

27. Thanks for the added info, very interesting! 👍🙂 nt

[Disaffected]

23. One, possibly apocryphal explanation , is that

the lighting of three smokes took about the time required for a sniper to take aim and fire. It was therefore the third (unlucky) guy who got the shot....

Or maybe the guy holding the match got his fingers burned.

[Poiuyt]

14. People with dyslexia can often make connections that others miss.

Talk about fascinating brains.

[NQCowboy68]

6. Dole, Reid, McCo?????

[GoCubsGo]

8. Also Thomas Lovejoy, another big champion of conservation and biological diversity.

He died on Christmas Day, just a couple of days before Edward O. Wilson.

[edhopper]

9. Superstition bullshit

Last edited Wed Dec 29, 2021, 11:56 AM - Edit history (1)

People die, we mourn them.
Don't make more of it.

[former9thward]

11. What makes it a Christian superstition?

[Disaffected]

13. Yes, I don't think it is confined to Christianity (or any other particular religion).

https://www.bookofthrees.com/the-symbolism-and-spiritual-significance-of-the-number-three/

[edhopper]

21. Thanks

I was under the impression (wrongly it seems) that it was linked to the trinity. I'll amend.

[Disaffected]

22. Glad to help.

[CousinIT]

15. Not religious. Just making a casual observation.

No attempt to be accurate, 'Christian', scientific or anything else.

Exccuuuuuuse ME!

[edhopper]

26. Fixed

[Raine]

17. It's not a Christian superstition

it's just a superstition.

[edhopper]

25. I corrected that

[LetMyPeopleVote]

24. The reassurance of their light

We lost three great leaders

Link to tweet

The past few weeks have been filled with the deaths of acclaimed scientists, political veterans and cultural giants. They are men and women of advanced age who have succumbed to a variety of chronic ailments or simply to the passing of time. They enjoyed long lives and accomplished a great many things; theirs were not lives cut short, but rather ones that followed a gloriously long trajectory.

And yet their deaths seem especially sad, not because their lives were of any greater inherent value than a Jane Doe who might have died anonymously or a singular relative in a quiet corner of a small town who left this earth surrounded by friends and family, but because their particular prominence was a bright reminder of something that seems endangered or wholly missing in these times. They were warming lights in the midst of darkness.

They were complicated just as everyone is, but their deaths are a reminder that the culture has little ability to stomach nuance and complexity, shades of gray and the middle ground. The details of their lives fill books, perhaps they have even pontificated in their own memoirs. But the heartfelt sorrow over their deaths is more often sparked by a minute detail in the grand sweep of their story, an intimate moment amid all of the public accolades, a disappointment faced with aplomb.....

As we mourn the dead, we make peace with their flaws and appreciate their talents. We reminisce about their sense of humor, their kindness and their generosity. The statesman Robert J. Dole, 98, is memorialized in the same pages as the fashion editor Grace Mirabella, 92, and the children’s book author Beverly Cleary, 104. All of them shaped the culture, and their deaths leave us longing for something that they represented. Dole was the military veteran with political ambition whose death reminded Washington that it wasn’t always so inhospitable to compromise and civility, let alone facts. Mirabella, a former editor in chief of Vogue who rebounded from being fired to launch an admired glossy that bore her name, believed style was a conversation starter but should not be the entirety of its content. And Cleary saw childhood in all of its scary, joyful, boring reality.

They were reminders of what it means to be flexible in a world that has gone rigid. They recognized that the very things that complicate life can also power us through it. We are not one thing or the other. We are a host of messy bits and pieces. And we mourn them because they made being fully human both an admirable and daunting accomplishment.

[CousinIT]

28. Betty White. I stand corrected. And I HATE it. n/t