Hi Rick,
Seems like there's an assumption that a different distribution
of "first license" dates would imply something about
growth or death of contesting. Actually a flat distribution
could be a bad thing. That could be more correlated to the
death of a sport? who knows.
On the other hand, a bell curve (poisson distribution) might
be the sign of a healthy sport, or more typical of sports in general.
For instance: if you did a similar study of drag racing drivers,
and their "first licensed" date, there might be a similar
peak for some age group.
This might reflect the "peakiness" of interest for that sport in a
person's lifetime.
All sports might have age peaks, rather than a flat distribution.
I wonder what the age distribution is for runners in marathons.
For contesting, if you had similar log data from 1977, you might
still find a peakiness in "first license" years (it might be a different
group of years though, probably?)
Seems like that as long as contesting is interesting, it will happen.
If it becomes not interesting, it should die. Why do something
not interesting?
I think the more interesting questions for any sport, is "how does change
happen, and how does that change keep things interesting".
But sometimes things remain interesting with no change, and
the long history is enough to keep it interesting.
Maybe as long as the # of posts to cq-contest increases every year,
there are no worries!
-kevin
ke6rad
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