facebook and statistics

If you're my friend on Facebook, you know that I've been running an app that updates my status daily with the number of dead and wounded in Gaza.

I do realize Facebook politics has its limits. But after some consideration, I decided I liked the idea of everyone I know on Facebook being reminded of what's going on in Gaza whether they wanted to be or not. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was pretty great. The Palestinians can't ignore it, so why should you be able to, former-coworker or friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend?

There are two thing this little app calls to attention. First, a third of the dead in Gaza are children. Why is that? Well, primarily it is because Israel is targeting civilians, or at least not bothering to avoid hitting them. Second, it is because, like all parts of the world with low life expectancy, children make up a disproportionate percentage of the population in Gaza. In fact, half the population is under 16. Families have an average of five children, because they know it's likely that not all of them will survive to adulthood.

The second thing came to my attention today, when I noticed that the number of dead had jumped by nearly 100 while the number of wounded was unchanged. Why would that be? The most logical answer seemed to be that fighting had ceased enough for families to return to their houses and begin digging the bodies of their dead relatives out of the rubble. I updated my status, rather casually, to say something of the sort.

No sooner had I done that than I looked on the New York Times website and found this. I immediately regretted the correctness of my guess. Even by Gaza standards, this article is so heaped with one horror after another it almost becomes comic, in a black, Catch-22 kind of way. I actually laughed at one point, when the paper quoted one resident as saying, "Even our dead have no land," because it's true, and horrible, and he was saying it because he had to dig up the grave of a relative buried years before to put a fresh body on top, because there wasn't enough room in the cemetery for all the dead, including 28 members of the Samouni family.

I wanted to put all this in my Facebook status, but it wouldn't fit.