no. 9: panic! at the ED.

it's snowing again. and it's new years's eve. this means snowblowers and alcohol. this means more amputated fingers. also, i recently read that new year's is the most deadly day of the year for pedestrians--about 500 people will be struck and killed within this 24 hour period. this may not seem like a lot (it's not really, considering that about 250,000 people die each day), but this rate is nearly 10 times greater than other days. yikes.

speaking of unlikely ways to meet one's end...i conversed with a man last night who had a trip planned to isreal in a week. he confessed that with the current clash in gaza, he was worried about the threat of a terrorist attack on his plane. he asked me if i worried about such things and i responded in the negative. he asked why this was the case and i answered that the probability was so low as to be something that i could accept. how low? i did some loose estimating: how many people travel by air in a given year? i went with an easy to work with figure of 30 million, thought i suspect the true number to be much greater. how many people die from terrorist-related activities on aeroplanes each year? not very many. even in 2001, a far deadlier-than-average year, maybe 300 people? i'm not counting those on the ground, since my friend was worried about air disasters. 300 out of 30 million is 1 in 100,000. in a "regular year" how many die? 10? 20? 30? even 30 per year would be a 1 in 1 million chance of dying. since that is far more representative a number, i took that as the chance of this chap being the victim of air terror.

1 in a million is a pretty slim chance, i told him. he still seemed worried. to try to assuage his fears i quoted some other numbers that i had in my head, as i just read some year-end EM-related data, from which the opening stat was gleaned. chance of drowing: 1 in 20k. shark attack: 1 in 6 million. bike accident: 1 in 70k. choking: 1 in 80k. car accident: 1 in 5k! i told him he was actually safer once he got to the airport, onto the plane, than in the car en route (even worse if he was eating and driving!). he still wasn't convinced.

i thought for a while and come up with the following solution to reduce his probability of death: if the chances of there being a bomb-toting terrorist on his plane were 1 in 1,000,000, the chances of there being two shoe bombs would be obscenely small (using the multiplication principle of probability, the chances of 2 independent events occurring is the product of their individual probabilities: (1/1,000,000 x 1/1,000,000); that is a tiny number.).so all he had to do was hatch a plan to bring down his plane--say, putting some TNT inside his prosthetic leg (did i mention he had one? well, he did)--and put it into action. once he did that, the probability of their being 2 bombs on his plane would be 1x10^-12. as in, 0.00000000001 percent chance, or 1 in 10 billion! as long as he didn't detonate his leg-bomb, his trip would proceed death-free.

yeah, that's right, i told a one legged man to put a bomb in his prosthetic. i have to go now, homeland security is at my door.