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Comment by ashleyw | Hacker News Reader

There's a 1 in 365 chance the first time-travelers, aliens or some other cool event will happen on April 1st, so it's your loss if you miss it! :P

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That's assuming an even distribution of such events. I'd like to suggest they are much more seasonal.

Now I want to write a program to compute the monthly variance of historical events. I wonder how you'd build a list of historical events... Maybe it's a job for Wolfram Alpha.

Historical events being events that people thought significant enough to write down?

Because I'd posit that the vast majority of the human world we experience today was shaped by chance events that nobody noticed.

Well, it would be better to be able to brag that you determined, mathematically, that disasters are most likely to occur in February, rather than being able to say "I determined that most events that people may or may not notice occur in August!"

this would simply lead to me having plausible reasons not to leave the house everyday....except on the day with the greatest proportion of in home deaths.

You could look where Ray Kurzweil gets some of his data points for "The Singularity is Near". If you serious you could check around for a similar academically compiled list of "significant" historical events. (I think Ray mentioned doing something just like this...)

Further more, I'll mention there is some crazy Russian who thinks our modern calendars (Gregorian) are an elaborate hoax. But, as I understand it, he had someway of applying algorithms to historically "significant" data points. (If you're actually interested, reply and I try and find his name again.)

...FWIW

Agreed. Just because time (arguably) falls evenly between the 365 days of the year, that only suggests a weakly even distribution. See [1].

I also think it's rather unlikely that true time-travelers would use April 1st, unless they were trying to be funny. And if I discovered cold fusion and it was April 1st, I'd take an extra day to iron the bugs out :-P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalisation

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