Last December I took E. Tufte's Presenting data and information class. One of the pictures he shown reminded me a very Tuftesque diagram I found via J. Kottke's blog. It's a map of the Golden Gate bridge which shows all the light poles on the bridge and the number of suicides committed near each pole. It's an illustration for SF Chronicle's article Lethal Beauty.

From the article we can learn that the average number of suicides committed on the Bridge is 19 per year. 50 more wannabe dead are persuaded not to.

Every year, about 50 people are persuaded not to jump off the bridge. There is no suicide barrier on the bridge, so the task of saving lives goes to the CHP and Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District patrol officers. Sometimes even ironworkers or bridge employees who are working on the span get involved.

But if a death aspirant still decided to jump, the Bridge is very effective, if this word is appropriate here, 98% of jumps are fatal. Compare to other popular suicide tools -- poison: 15% effective; drug overdose: 12%; wrist cutting: 5%.

The total number of suicides stopped being reported when it approached 1000.

If you look at the diagram, two things are easy to spot. The first: most of jumps are made from the middle, right between the two towers. This isn't much surprising. More interesting is the fact that most jumpers prefer to fly facing the lovely San Francisco sight, rather than the gloomy emptiness of the Pacific ocean. You would think what difference does it make, if somebody decided to die? Yet it does, apparently.

Even when the cooling fog blunts the view, the vast majority of jumpers take their last step facing east instead of west toward the Pacific.

For those who select it for suicide, says Jamison, there's an attraction in "seeing for the last time something that is truly beautiful. Perhaps doing it in a very beautiful, spectacular, dramatic way adds meaning to something that otherwise doesn't have as much meaning as one would like."