Taking Count

Last time I heard, 2,752 people died in the 9-11 attacks (not including the 10 hijackers). According to Fixiraq.com, 3,592 US citizens have died in Iraq. I'm a mathematician so you'd have to tie my arms to keep me from crunching these numbers... That means that the losses in Iraq are now 130% of the number of people lost in 9-11. At globalsecurity.org you can get stats on the number of soldiers lost on a monthly basis. They made a graph of the data from May 2003 to February of this year and so I made a few amateur lines of best fit which gave me at least three reasonable equations, one of which was C = 1.74M + 38, where C is the number of casualties that month and M is the number of months since May 2003. That gives an estimate of 121.52 casualties in May and 123.26 in June. The true numbers? In May, 121 US deaths were reported in Iraq. In June 98 died. That suggests that, unfortunately, there does seem to be a positive correlation between our two variables...that is, the number of soldiers killed every month generally increases with time. However, this is only an estimate and, fortunately, in many months fewer soldiers died than the equation would lead us to believe. Little solace for the loved ones of those that did. Hmmm...Now, I wonder who is tracking the number of Iraqi civilian deaths?