At last a twisted genius has applied some higher math skillz to the age-old question of just how deadly is the red Starfleet uniform?

Answer: pretty damn deadly.

Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53%
14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt)
Probability of a red-shirt “incident” when Kirk has a “conquest” = 12%

Which leads to some truly fascinating conclusions:

As the data shows, Captain Kirk “making contact” with alien women has an impact on the crew’s survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.

Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

I particularly love the Powerpoint presentation. Surely, surely, those wizened old Admirals would enjoy the slides as well, for getting in those needed snoozes. Yes, the whole intricate and elegant article on the morbid red shirt is really a stalking horse, to distract you from the fact that, like it or not, you’re reading a comparative analysis of bar graphs vs Powerpoint vs pie charts. It’s as if the anonymous Fellini of the flipchart from Ross Perot‘s campaign finally busted a nerdish nut and this is the offspring.

May he live long and, yes, prosper.

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