Wednesday, October 28, 2009

I love buses

I am reading a chapter on anxiety, and came across some interesting things that I thought I'd share.

The probability to:

- be killed on your next bus ride is 1 in 500 million
- die as a result of a collision between an asteroid and the earth is 1 in 500 000 (this made me think whether that's actually true, and I came across this page, which makes this seem true indeed)
- die in a tsunami is 1 in 500 000
- drown in a bathtub is 1 in 685 000

So - it is more probable to die from a tsunami, than drown in your own bathtub. And buses are super safe - unless an asteroid falls on top.

Also some more interesting forms of phobias, that I have not yet mentioned on this blog:
  • Gamophobia - fear of marriage
  • Phobophobia - fear of being afraid
  • Hedonophobia - fear of pleasure

2 comments:

  1. LOL - fear of being afraid. That must be a tough fear to have.

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  2. Ha! Except with the "bus" statistic, it's on the "next bus ride" not over a lifetime like what the others seem to be.

    Over the course of a lifetime, let's say a daily ride to work and back, roughly 400 rides per year, 40 years of this, all of a sudden it's more like 1 in 31,250 over a lifetime. A well founded fear it seems!

    As for the meteorite one, if it was true, would that mean that on average, of our current 6 billion peron world population, that 12,000 have or will in fact die of meteorite related incidents? That seems a bit suspect to me. Can't be right.

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