Monday, July 4, 2022

Memories of July 4th past

ASM826 posted about a July 4th from living memory.  But there are other things about July 4th that make you think that Divine Providence  did, as Otto von Bismark remarked, look out for the United States of America.

Lots of people know that fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Independence Hall, both John Adams (President #2) and Thomas Jefferson (President #3) passed on to that Undiscovered Country from whose borne no traveler returns.  But they weren't the last.  five years later, James Monroe (President #5) joined them.

With 45 Presidents (not counting the current pResident of the office), you would expect 0.12 Presidents to have dies on any given day of the year.  But today, there are 3 - that's 25 times the number you would expect.  I don't know what the standard deviation is here, but this has to be ten or twenty sigma from what you would expect.  Yes, I'm a nerd here, but those of you who Get This will feel the hair on the back of your neck go up.

Divine Providence is not done with this Republic.

1 comment:

ASM826 said...

If you remove the living Presidents from the list, there's only 40 possible candidates for passing on the 4th of July. I didn't find anything about all three of them, but here's a link about the math involved on the odds that Adams and Jefferson died on the same day.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinknudson/2016/07/04/two-founding-fathers-died-on-july-4-1826-what-are-the-odds/?sh=430a2c9e11d8