When A Leaf Turns

Update: I decided to put a link to the graphic instead in the name of fairness (it’s not cool for me to post the image in full). You can find it here: The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart – Odds of Airborne Attacks – Gizmodo.

In the meantime, some numbers to wet your appetite:

• Analyzing data from Oct 1999 to Sep 2009
• Over 99 Million Flights, traveling over 69 Billion miles.
• That’s one attack per 11.5 Billion miles
• or one attack per 3,105 years of air time

I’m not sure that this is related the way that I think it might be, but the latest Radio Lab Podcast had a segment on the fact that very young children think of numbers logarithmically. Perhaps our difficulties with scale and magnitude are a reflection of this natural understanding of numbers (rather than our “unnatural” understanding of numbers as serial).