Hung up on a statistical detail
Apr. 30th, 2012 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollEric, the idiot vampire [1] from JF Lewis's 2009 Revamped, explains why he takes the steps he does to limit how often he has to hunt amongst the general population:
"Because of what I am, I murder, on average, roughly one hundred and thirty people a year." He further estimates that in the four decades he has been around, he's killed in excess of ten thousand people.
Note that he is unusual in wanting to mitigate the effect he has on regular humans (and he feels kind of bad that when it comes down to it, he'd rather keep on killing people than end his unlife) and that other vampires, like Eric's daughter Greta, make no such efforts. Off hand, there are at least (Eric, Tabitha, Phillip, Roger, Veruca, Greta, Kyle, Gabriella) eight vampires running around Void City and probably more. Even if they made the same effort Eric does, which they do not, that's over a thousand murders a year, or something like 7% of all the murders committed in the US in a given year. That's more murders than are committed in all Canada in any given year and that's the low estimate.
How many cities in the US can you stick a thousand extra murders a year without it standing out like a big red flag? True, Phillip has a spell up that prevents any of the humans in Void City from seeing the supernatural for what it is but I don't think it hides the fact people are being murdered, judging by what happens after Eric eats a newscaster. Can we work backwards to figure out what the minimum population size of Void City has to be?
(The easy answer is Phillip, no dummy, cast his spell so it conceals Void City's murder problem from the nation as a whole. Some of his comments about the spell are in line with that model)
1: Not his fault; he was embalmed before he rose, but he's still the kind of guy who can go 40 years before discovering a highly significant fact about his own physique, that when he's peeved, he gheaf vagb n ong-jvatrq qrzbavp xvyyvat znpuvar. Nobody mentioned it to him because they figured he knew.
"Because of what I am, I murder, on average, roughly one hundred and thirty people a year." He further estimates that in the four decades he has been around, he's killed in excess of ten thousand people.
Note that he is unusual in wanting to mitigate the effect he has on regular humans (and he feels kind of bad that when it comes down to it, he'd rather keep on killing people than end his unlife) and that other vampires, like Eric's daughter Greta, make no such efforts. Off hand, there are at least (Eric, Tabitha, Phillip, Roger, Veruca, Greta, Kyle, Gabriella) eight vampires running around Void City and probably more. Even if they made the same effort Eric does, which they do not, that's over a thousand murders a year, or something like 7% of all the murders committed in the US in a given year. That's more murders than are committed in all Canada in any given year and that's the low estimate.
How many cities in the US can you stick a thousand extra murders a year without it standing out like a big red flag? True, Phillip has a spell up that prevents any of the humans in Void City from seeing the supernatural for what it is but I don't think it hides the fact people are being murdered, judging by what happens after Eric eats a newscaster. Can we work backwards to figure out what the minimum population size of Void City has to be?
(The easy answer is Phillip, no dummy, cast his spell so it conceals Void City's murder problem from the nation as a whole. Some of his comments about the spell are in line with that model)
1: Not his fault; he was embalmed before he rose, but he's still the kind of guy who can go 40 years before discovering a highly significant fact about his own physique, that when he's peeved, he gheaf vagb n ong-jvatrq qrzbavp xvyyvat znpuvar. Nobody mentioned it to him because they figured he knew.
