In general, Americans are bad at math. And scoundrels take advantage of this.
For example, living in a brick home gives you seven extra millirems of annual radiation compared to frame homes. That’s 140 times more radiation than you’d get by living next door to a nuclear power plant. So are brick homes dangerous? Studies say no. Cancer rates are the same for lifetime residents of brick versus wooden houses.
But let’s say you’re in a brick-making trade group that wants to prove that bricks actually protect you from cancer. No problem. You merely go through America’s county-by-county data until you find one where by chance there’s a lower rate in the brick home dwellers. This is called fishing. Then you put out a press release and simply don’t mention that this fact has been fished out of a larger data set that contradicts your premise.
Epidemiologists spot such tricks immediately. But many citizens can’t distinguish between trustworthy and scurrilous statistics. More dishearteningly, epidemiology has failed to answer some of today’s most vexing issues, such as why autism is skyrocketing. According to the CDC’s recent survey of eight-year-olds, the autism spectrum is currently reported in one out of 36 children. But its prevalence varies from one child in 43 in Maryland to one in 22 in California, which doesn’t really make sense. Nor can anyone figure out why in 1970 the rate was just one child in 5,000, an incidence-increase of more than 100-fold in the last 50 years.
Leaving this disturbing topic, surprising stats fill all areas of science and life, even if many have plausible explanations. Perhaps you’ve read that:
• Highway driving is much safer than non-highway motoring despite the faster speed.
• People who fly very frequently, like flight attendants, have a 1% increased cancer risk.
• Taking a daily multivitamin has no benefit in terms of reduced mortality.
• Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from 320 parts per million in 1950 to 420 ppm this year, an enormous increase. But if expressed as a fraction of the air we breathe, it’s less than half of a tenth of one percent, seemingly minuscule.
It’s endless, and rife with pitfalls. So perhaps it’s safer and equally interesting to forego statistics and instead get our math “fix” through solid yet lesser-known realities. On this page they naturally focus on the celestial realm, like the fact that the fastest a celestial object can strike Earth is 37 miles per second — matching the speed of the annual August meteor shower.
Nonetheless, we’ll sneak in mundane elements from time to time. Wouldn’t many who don’t know such things be intrigued that with dice, opposite sides always add up to seven? Or that, on average, falling rain travels at 17 miles an hour?
Yes, let’s do that.
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