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THE MATH OF TERRORISM
Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight - Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner that landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas. . .
Over the past decade, according to [, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.
A 2005 report by the Center for Disease Control found the following probabilities:
1 in 126 of heart disease
1 in 169 of cancer
1 in 400 of heart disease
1 in 520 of cancer
1 in 1,245 of murder in DC in early 1990s
1 in 2,900 of an accident
1 in 7,000 of an auto accident
1 in 9,200 of suicide
1 in 12,400 of Alzheimer's
1 in 18,100 of murder
1 in 21,004 of AIDS
1 in 43,000 of a hernia
1 in 88,000 of a terrorist attack
1 in 1,500,00 of a terrorist-caused shopping mall disaster assuming one such incident a week and you shop two hours a week
1 in 55,000,000 in a terrorist-caused plane disaster assuming one such incident a month and you fly once a month
In 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the most dangerous job in America was being a timber cutter. Converting the data, a lumberman has 104 times the likelihood of being killed on a job as you do of being killed in a terrorist attack. A construction worker is 25 times more likely to die on the job than you are of being killed in a terrorist attack.
Over the past decade, according to [, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.
A 2005 report by the Center for Disease Control found the following probabilities:
1 in 126 of heart disease
1 in 169 of cancer
1 in 400 of heart disease
1 in 520 of cancer
1 in 1,245 of murder in DC in early 1990s
1 in 2,900 of an accident
1 in 7,000 of an auto accident
1 in 9,200 of suicide
1 in 12,400 of Alzheimer's
1 in 18,100 of murder
1 in 21,004 of AIDS
1 in 43,000 of a hernia
1 in 88,000 of a terrorist attack
1 in 1,500,00 of a terrorist-caused shopping mall disaster assuming one such incident a week and you shop two hours a week
1 in 55,000,000 in a terrorist-caused plane disaster assuming one such incident a month and you fly once a month
In 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the most dangerous job in America was being a timber cutter. Converting the data, a lumberman has 104 times the likelihood of being killed on a job as you do of being killed in a terrorist attack. A construction worker is 25 times more likely to die on the job than you are of being killed in a terrorist attack.
Labels: CONSTITUTION, TERRORISM
5 Comments:
So, if an airliner blows out of the sky and 270 people have their arms and legs, heads and torsos evaporated by a bomb, we can all rest easy that it's more dangerous to work as a timber cutter. Thanks, I feel so much better Nate.
Well Suzanne, the sensible thing to do would be to demand your gov't. stop bombing wedding parties or destroying whole countries as directed by the corrupt corporate rulers that pay your gov't.'s excesses. Or you could just keep whining.
I just want to be the first person to agree with Anonymous without being anonymous (I hope he or she wasn't Anonymous simply due to living in the US!) Suzanne might try to stop imagining herself as an evaporated victim. Or, alternately, she might try working in a lumber camp for a season.
Just remember folks, they "hate our freedoms." Sit in a comfy chair down in Tampa Florida and remotely direct a drone in Afghanistan to waste a bunch of ragheads. They're probably terrorists. Now that's freedom in action. That's real guts. Of course, don't expect any blowback.
We need to see that war is big business. The threat of an actual terrorist attack is minor, but it is the warlike ways of Amerikan Warlords that threaten us all more than any actual foreign terrorist attack. We got more deadly daily attacks by urban gang warfare inside the United States. Don't buy into the paranoid!
~ http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
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