This graph featured alongside  an  article on the economics of suicide on another site and it shows the pattern of suicidal leaps from the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco with the reference points being the nearest ballustrade lamps to where people were reported to have leapt from, the points that are numbered.

Number crunchers have a field day with datasets of this sort - Freakonomics is up there with Soduko  nowadays  - and they did with this tragically beautiful pattern of despair putting forward theories why more people jumped on the San Francisco than Marin County side and strongly disagreeing  with each other over why so many people jumped centre span and towards the city of San Francisco rather than away from it out into the pacific .

The graph is a mine of information for the statistically curious but  its just a very sad potrait    of human frailty for the rest of us who simply grasp the emotional significance of the  little black square markers and wonder how each of the human beings they represent arrived at the Golden Gate Bridge and what drove them to leap off it to their deaths.

To me it would be interesting to see the personal details and real world social graphs of all these people around the time they took their own lives; how many friends they had, whether they were capable of maintaining relationships at all, whether they had jobs, partners and children, whether they had a history of mental health problems and/or were simply struggling to make ends meet but not managing to.  Let me rephrase that, I'd just like to see how connected or not to the culture all these guys were.

It's revealing to jot down how many people we are connected to and can rely on.

My offline social graph looks nothing like this diagram. My brain isnt really wired for social multi-tasking. 

I have a feeling that the people with the least social contacts never made it to the centre of the bridge or the popular places to jump from. I have a feeling that this graph reveals varying intensity of human isolation even amongst suicides in emotional 3D..  

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