Why are so many asylum seekers born on 1 January?

It is a question we have never had to ask ourselves, and we still don't have to, strictly speaking.

But we want to.

If you had access to information about the date of birth of a thousands of asylum seekers from third world countries, you might notice a statistical anomaly in the distribution of birthdays through the year.

You then go and adjust for seasons, remember, they are totally the wrong way around in the southern hemisphere. I mean, what was God thinking, when he came up with that system.

Anyway, you do all the smoothing, cleaning, making gaussing distributions, un-gaussing (de-gaussing is different althogether), yet you still end up with too many people born on 1 January.

Jesus, what is going on? Okay, it is unfair to ask a one week only baby, but you were a boy genius, so help us out, will ya.

Do folks in the third, ahm, developing world do sex differently from first worlders? Are we on the path for an IgNobel prize here?

We so miss the K-Landnews Random Research (RR) team, they would have googled it minutes ago. We eventually resorted to querying this most common and most fallible of resources, a human expert.

The expert smiled and said: There are a lot of places where birth certificates do not exist or are a ball park document. The number of people who know their exact date of birth is smaller than you think, not to speak of the hour or minute of the event. I happen to know that  your birth certificate says you were born at 4:20 AM, but why would anybody need to know the exact time? We actually get quite a lot of people who where never told their day or month of birth, only the year. If someone arrives here without papers from a bombed out country, we assign 1 January as their birthday. 

Others, he continued, arrive with two birthdays. Their real one and the day they were registered at some god-forsaken, or muhamed-abandoned, or buddha-forgotten place. Villagers will gather the names of babies born within a certain period of time and then one of them goes to the nearest administrative outpost and registers all of them at once.

Happy Birthday to  all 1 January babies!