James T. Kirk laughs in the face of your insurance plan

Here's an amusing headline and post, courtesy of The Trek Movie Report.

Hey, I work in marketing, and right off the bat I would have realized that this billboard and "customer care" program concept would instantly amuse and possibly exclude the large segment of the population known as Trekkies (or Trekkers, as some prefer). Hell, even friends of mine who don't know the difference between Klingons and Vulcans are familiar with the term "redshirt."

Which got me thinking. Is the concept of redshirt deaths just a pop culture meme, or was there really something to it? Of course, almost anything you can wonder has probably been analyzed somewhere, and thanks to the usefulness of these here interwebs, we have an answer.

In three years of the Original Trek, 43 redshirts took the big galactic dirt nap. How do I know this? Check this out.

You have got to love it when statistical analysis is used to examine the death rate of red-shirted crewmen on the USS Enterprise. Complete with a fucking Starfleet Powerpoint, for crissakes! Brilliant!

And the conclusion: We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

Of course, let's hope their insurance carrier wasn't (or rather, isn't going to be) "Independent Health."