Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix
McAfee Secure sites help keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams
Chris Higgins
Trek Analysis: The Red-Shirt Phenomenon
by Chris Higgins - August 6, 2007 - 9:56 AM

Trek - Red ShirtHere’s one for the old-school Star Trek fans. Matt Bailey of SiteLogic has posted data and an in-depth analysis of red-shirt deaths on the original series. Bailey comes from a web analytics background — a domain concerned with measuring web traffic and analyzing data to recognize and exploit trends. By applying these techniques to the Trek data, Bailey uncovers some surprising trends in the data. Here are some samples from the article:

Data Segmentation:

However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

  • Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
  • Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
  • Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
  • Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

Q: What causes a red-shirted crewman to die?

  • On-board incident – 42.5%
  • Beaming down to the planet – 57.5%

Besides not beaming down, another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and “makes contact” the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks’ 24 “relationships” there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.

Read the full article for more, including advanced analysis showing the complex relationship between Kirk’s conquests and red-shirt death. See also: Wikipedia on red-shirts.

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Comments (11)

  1. My brother and I would would place bets on which nameless Trek character was being sent to his doom… the loser changed the cat box.

    posted by natlynn on 8-6-2007 at 10:15 am

  2. Funny, and we always thought that Kirk’s alien ‘dalliances’ were self-indulgent wastes of time…but he was really saving lives.

    Make love, not war. You go Kirk!

    posted by leigh on 8-6-2007 at 12:20 pm

  3. So what color was Guy Fleegman wearing? (from Galaxy Quest)

    posted by n2y2 on 8-6-2007 at 1:38 pm

  4. I believe Fleegman’s costume was sort of a blue/gray combo, but he was clearly intended to be a red-shirt in the larger sense. (They gave the nice red outfit to Sigourney Weaver….)

    posted by Higgins on 8-6-2007 at 1:48 pm

  5. Interesting. However, in the cited article there was a chart segmenting the crew as follows:
    Engineering -yellow
    Sciences – blue
    Security – red

    However, the segmentation based on shirt color is actually as follows:
    Engineering/Security – RED
    Sciences – Blue
    Command – Yellow

    This cast a shadow over the entire analysis, IMHO.

    posted by reversengineer on 8-6-2007 at 9:03 pm

  6. God, that graph is repulsive! It’s actually difficult to *look at*, let alone read.

    posted by Age on 8-7-2007 at 2:12 am

  7. I loved the ep of South Park where the little boy in the red shirt tried to go for help and instantly died. Nice h’omage

    posted by Tim on 8-7-2007 at 4:02 pm

  8. The first crewman to die the dreaded red shirt death was played by Michael Zaslow. He was the first person to have Deforest Kelly stand over him and say “He’s dead Jim.” Zaslow was probably best known as a bad guy on the soap opera “Guiding Light.”

    Michael Zaslow
    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0953651

    posted by Trivial Tdave on 8-8-2007 at 4:08 am

  9. Trivia:
    The first actor to don the dreaded red shirt of death was Michael Zaslow. He was the first person to have Deforest Kelly stand over him and say, “He’s dead Jim.” He had originally auditioned to play “Mr. Spock.” Zaslow was probably best known as a bad guy on the soap opera “Guiding Light.”

    Michael Zaslow http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0953651

    posted by Tdave on 8-8-2007 at 4:21 am

  10. Look this analysis is severely flawed. He doesn’t look at the population of red, yellow and blue shirts. Without looking at the overall population of each group, looking at the number of deaths is meaningless. Sure Reds die more, but maybe there’s just MORE reds to begin with.

    Did i miss this on that link or is it really not there? Cause to me this makes the whole study bunk.

    posted by Head on 8-9-2007 at 12:03 pm

  11. Ok nevermind! :) He just didn’t list the N for all the shirts. He did list the percents. I wasn’t paying attention and thought that the % had to do with percent of all deaths, not the percent of red shirts dying.

    posted by Head on 8-9-2007 at 12:05 pm

Comment

commenting policy