April 12, 2017
Interview with Amram Shapiro, co-author of the book The Book Of Odds
Mike Carruthers:
What are the odds? Odds are fascinating for instance 1 out of 2 people are afraid of snakes.
Amram Shapiro:
But the real risk of in the United States that somebody will die of a venomous snake, a lizard bite are 1 in 37.4 million.
Amram Shapiro, co-author of the book The Book Of Odds, says you occasionally hear about people being struck by lightning.
But you know the odds of being struck by lightning are really 1 in a million or a little bit more than that. And actually your odds of surviving a lightning strike are 1 in 1.1 or 90% and those are the same odds as the household has a bible, that a person is right-handed.
It may surprise you to discover what kind of things bring people to the emergency room.
You would expect that it would always be a car accident or something; of course that’s #1. But 1 in 167 thousand go to an ER involving an accident involving duct tape. That’s about the same as the accidents for leaf blowers. I don’t even know how you hurt yourself with duct tape but you can.
Ever since the movie Jaws people have been increasingly fearful of shark attacks.
The odds somebody will die from a shark attack in a year are 1 in 250 million. I mean if you look at things that have killed people and do regularly… escalators kill 2 people a year. Escalators kill more people than sharks.
