[vitus]

I thought this was first attributed to Fred Brooks in the 70s.

> Brooks points out this limited divisibility with another example: while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

[fragmede]

You can't take a random 9 women and have a baby in one month, but that makes me wonder, statistically, how many women from the whole population would you need to get to 1 month? 9 women can't make a baby in one month, but given 9 million women, the chances are, one of them are giving birth right now. if I needed a baby tomorrow, what do the statistics say on how many women it would take to have a baby, tomorrow?

taking the population of the earth and the birth rate and doing some math, you get around to needing 12,000 women of reproductive age for you to have a baby tomorrow.

12,000 is a lot of women! it's well above Dunbar's number. think about that, next time the 9 women one month baby topic comes up.