Well, the two week Science Festival started here on Monday and tonight was one of the big talks. The first year I went, it was a really interesting psychology one called Quirkology (to get an idea, go see The Amazing Color Changing Card Trick as this is by the same guy. It's really worth it!).

This year, it was about statistics, but done in a really cool way.

See, there's this unit, called a micromort, which is equivalent to a 1 in 1,000,000th chance of dying. So to say something has a 1 micromort risk rate is to say that one in a million people who do it will die from it.

During the talk, the professor gave a few interesting figures. For different types of transportation, you'd need to do the following number of miles to incur a 1 micromort of danger:
Car - 200 miles
Bike - 20 miles
Walking - 16 miles
Motorcycle - 6 miles
It is ten times safer to go by car than it is to go by bike! The motorcycle figure didn't surprise me, but the middle two definitely did.

Also, a daily dose of heroine has the equivalent micromorts as a UK soldier in Afghanistan.
Ouch! When you start putting things like that, it's really something else.


Oh, FYI: In the UK, in 2008, 96 people died falling out of bed.