Fun statistical fact: Cows are about 300 times more likely to kill you than coyotes.
Minor sidenote to statistical fact: If it was common for people to keep several hundred coyotes on their property and routinely chase them into a corral and handle them, this statistic would be different.
this is a great summary of ‘conditional probability’, a statistical property many people grapple with
…I feel like this post just made me realize that both coconut trees and vending machines, items often quoted in wacky death statistics, are both things that people shake vigorously often.
Ten or fifteen years back there was an ad campaign against smoking
in which people (in staged scenes) jumped out of windows, walked around in the
woods during hunting season disguised as deer, etc., saying “this looks like a
stupid thing to do right? Well, statistically more people die from smoking than
in falls/hunting accidents,” and it annoyed me because if my first response was
“but individual outcomes aren’t *caused* by statistical averages,” then
that was probably going to be the reaction of smokers/potential smokers as
well.
Mooncustafer 