This may cause some offense

I read a cyanide and happiness cartoon: http://www.explosm.net/comics/2921/

It plays on the idea that the september 11 attacks in nyc are THE defining event of that day...

That got me thinking. The average death rate for the world is ~8 (this number came from a yahoo answers so is probably amero-centric, i believe (http://www.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob370/students/class06/global/analysis.html) implies ~22, but this is not explicit so i use 8) per 1000 people per year... thats ~150k people per day... Ok. So a report I read for america had the death rate at ~890 per 100k per year and a standard deviation of ~80 per 100k per year (www.who.int/bulletin/archives/80(1)9.pdf)...

We can all see where i am (most distastfully) going to take this... and if you are going to be hugely offended, please dont read on.

300m americans: ends up with a mean plus minus two standard deviations averaged per day at that yearly rate of a death rate of about 6800-8200 ppl per day. Therefore from an USA-centric pov, 3000 dead would potentially, depending on the number of dead from other events of the day, be a significant deviation, but also might have been within standard expectation for the day.

But take the fact that america has a much lower death rate than alot of other countries (http://www.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob370/students/class06/global/analysis.html), using these figures in a global context is extremely conservative estimate, however:

for 6.9b people, the american death rate applied to this population becomes in the order: 140k-196k people per day in the whole world is considered the normal(conservative) death rate.

This makes the 3k figure almost insigificant for the purposes of calculating death rate. I am not trying to say that any death is insignificant, only that the figure as a stand alone indication of the significance is flawed, from a purely (simplistic) statistical analysis of death rates, it wasnt...

I think my last paragraph was too flippant, and not respectful enough. But I already said not to read it if you get offended. (Also as i am not american, nor had any relatives/aquiantences in the towers, I was not emotionally affected by 911, people who had personal investment in the tragidy would obviously have more emotive stances on the event).