Risk and death

Like everyone else, I spent much of Friday (and indeed yesterday) following the events in Japan. I too was shocked and appalled, and frightened, by the force of Nature unleash'd (as the poet said) and the — what to call it? — the futility and uselessness of our technology and science in dealing with it. What exactly should we find awesome about nuclear power or the theory of quantum mechanics if neither can hold back a single wave?

I was also observing myself as I watched the reports, noting my cowering fear of the events and my horror at the rising death toll. I found myself starting to worry about earthquakes, anywhere and everywhere, remembering that there had been one here eight years ago — it was trivially minor, most people slept through it — and feeling exposed to a terrible and immediate risk. I realized as I watched that this was basically the same reaction I'd had to 9/11, and with that came the thought that this risk too was probably vastly overstated.

Let me be clear: the death of a thousand people in an afternoon is a tragedy. I am shocked and appalled, but the thing is this: thinking of their deaths started me thinking about our own. We are alive, and for most of us death is (fortunately) a singular and very rare event. We do not see that there are people dying all around us, all the time.

People die, and they do so in far greater numbers than we know. The mortality rate for Japan in 2010 was estimated at 9.83 per thousand*; given the population of 126.8 million, that means that that 1.24 million people in Japan were statistically expected to die during that year.

That's an amazing figure. I was astonished, I'd have been surprised if it were a tenth that many. But let's go on.

That works out to some 23970 deaths per week, 3424 deaths every single day. A thousand people die in Japan every seven hours, every day of every week of the year.

The earthquake and tsunami were terrible, yes, horrifying and appalling and deeply saddening. They were significant events, but they are not a significant risk. We mourn the victims of the tsunami because of the manner and the brutal suddenness of their deaths; who but their immediate families mourns the many thousands of people who died in hospitals across the world on Friday? Or the vastly greater number who died without benefit of medical care, from hunger and neglect?


* The source is Index Mundi.
You didn't ask, but I'll tell you the comparative figures anyway:
USA: 8.38 per 1000 = 2599476 per year = 1000 deaths every 3.3 hours
Germany: 11 per 1000 = 912230 per year = 1000 deaths every 9.5 hours
Canada: 7.87 per 1000 = 265219 per year = 1000 deaths every 33 hours

London scorecard

Birthday parties attended: 1
Combined age of attendees, in years (estimated): 1118
Average age of attendees, in years (estimated): 46.6
Number of attendees who were the same age as the host/guest of honour: 9
Languages that I heard spoken at the party: 7
Languages that I spoke at the party: 2 (French 70%, English 30%)
Hours away from home: 98
Hours spent in transit: 16
    of which actually in flight: 3.3
Hours in London: 82
Hours spent waiting for taxis, busses and Tube trains: 1.25
Hours spent walking in Richmond Park: 3
Minutes spent attempting to get online via Post Office DSL: 45
Minutes spent online: 0
Indian meals consumed: 3
    of which vegetarian: 1
Italian meals consumed: 1
Greek meals consumed: 1
English breakfasts consumed: 2
Pints of Guinness consumed: 1
Pints of Cobra beer consumed: 2.5
Pints of other beer consumed: 3
Glasses of Jameson's Irish Whisky consumed: 1
Glasses of Remy Martin VSOP consumed: 1
Glasses of Italian red wine consumed: 5
Books carried with me from Germany, to read on the way: 1
Pages of said book that were read on the way: 0
Locally-available books read: 1
Books bought: 10
Music CDs bought: 1
Music CDs "ripped" i.e. stolen: 1
Strangers flirted with in the Tube: 1
Strangers flirted with in bookshops: 1
Art exhibitions viewed: 1
Sightings of St. Paul's Cathedral: 2
Visits to St. Paul's Cathedral: 0
Sightings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 1
Crossings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 0
Blogging buddies met in RL: 1
SecondLife buddies met in RL: 0
Persons I met who had heard of either blogging or SecondLife: 0

Trivia, Saturday edition

I bought a copy of Windows XP Professional today, the first money that Microsoft has ever had directly from me, largely because I was fed up with being unable to ask for assistance and worried about downloading updates for the—what shall we say?—borrowed copy I had been using on my old PC for the last few years.

I'm blogging now on my Mac Mini while installing Windows on that very same computer, to run under Parallels Desktop in parallel (as the name implies) to the Mac OS. I have my doubts whether this will be as fast or as smooth as running Windows in Boot Camp, but not needing to reboot when switching between systems is very appealing. We shall see.

Had a nice day yesterday, went downtown for lunch at a fish restaurant and permitted myself a glass of Blanc des Blancs with it; very pleasant. All manner of bloggable topics ran through my mind as I sat there watching the pedestrians, but none left traces deep enough for me to recover now. I guess I shall have to carry my Moleskine around town to record my thoughts in, as I did in Venice two summers ago. Doing so would be quite appropriate, in a way, because one of my first impressions of Germany (before coming here) was that everyone carried around a little black notebook all the time, to jot down the poetical and philosophical insights that crowded their day (of course). This idea came, as did many of my early ideas about what life was like and how the world worked, from the cinema, in particular from Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Herbert Achtenbusch and Rainer Maria Fassbinder (pretty much in that order). I was quite disappointed when I started visiting Germany, to discover that not one of my friends carried a little black notebook, and that some of them wouldn't know a poetical insight if it bit them in the arse.

Linden Labs has published the in-world economic and user-base figures for Second Life for 2007 in the official SL Blog, and a fine piece of sleight-of-hand they are too. Start with that first graph, titled "LindeX Volume Millions of USD," noting please the nice straight arrow leading smoothly upwards for eighteen months. Bullshit. It is a lie. Look at the grey bars behind it, the actual monthly figures, and you will see a different story: traded volume peaked in March and has been flat since. Bah. I can understand the impulse to massage information, but why would anyone be so blatant about it; how could anyone intelligent enough to make this graph be so stupid as to think that we would believe it? It's a mystery.

The Economic statistics page also makes interesting reading (this may be members-only, I can't tell because I get logged in automatically (it's a Mac, it Just Works)). I draw your attention to the second table, un-informatively titled "Linden Dollars." This does in fact show who earns how much in Second Life, and the executive summary is that 472 people earned US$ 2,000 or more in December '07. There are already more than 470 people active in Second Life who could close down their First Life businesses and still earn an adequate to very good living. I find this fascinating and very encouraging. But read on:

What I find greatly discouraging is the statistics on sign-ups and returning users posted on Dwell on it, the blog of a SL avatar who is keenly interested in such things (scroll down and look in the green column at the right). They tell a depressing story: the rate of new sign-ups is slowing and the number of residents who actually visit SL is declining. Attendance (let's call it that) dropped by 20 percent between July 07 and January 08. If I were one of the 472 lucky high-earners, and had actually taken the step of closing my First Life business, I would be getting worried.

To end with a laugh file this under "E-Mails that I didn't finish reading."

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated John Tavener: The Veil of the Temple [Hybrid SACD] have also purchased Greatest Hits by Spice Girls...

Ermmm, no, I'm fairly sure that they did not. You must be confusing two quite separate groups of people. But thanks for trying.

On statistics

If you have ever glanced down at the bottom of the left-hand column (don't bother) you will have seen a pair of icons from Statcounter.com and Sitemeter.com, which provide (overlapping but different) information about visitors to my blog. I resisted putting the counters for several months after I started blogging, feeling that knowing how many people were reading might influence my writing, but that hasn't happened so far. Perhaps that might be different if I had 12 thousand page views per month (as Mindy recently noted), but I would hope not.

I look at these three times a week or so (because the free version of Statcounter only stores the most recent 100 page-loads), to see who's been here recently. The stats are pretty abstract, they tell me (among other things) the browser you use, your operating system version, the city where your ISP resides and the IP address you are currently using. Statcounter goes one further and also tells me how many times you have viewed the blog. (The current record-holder is my sister, in both first (home) and third (office) places.)

Nonetheless, this abstract information is often enough to identify regular visitors (I can guess which Opera user in College Station TX reads my blog, and who is reading from Lisbon Lisboa); and if you leave a comment, then I can cross-link the time of your visit with the time that you posted. Gotcha.

And you thought the Internet was anonymous?

My sister needs to keep on her toes, though, because there is a new contender: catching up fast at 200 page-loads is a reader in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan whom I have not yet identified. At first I thought that I knew who it was, but then I noticed that the visitor always uses a Windows XP machine. Puzzling: the person I thought of has a brand-new Mac.

Another puzzler is the reader in Anchorage, Alaska, who has been here 19 times but as far as I can tell has not yet left a comment.

Please say "hello" next time, you two: I like to know who's reading. (If you don't wish to comment publicly, then use the mail address at the top left.)

In other news, it's Springsteen day here in Udgeland. It doesn't happen often, but when the bug bites there is no denying it. I was lustily singing along, but this stanza caught in my throat:

Girl you're looking at two big spenders
Why the world don't know what me and Wayne might do
Our pa's each own one of the World Trade Centers
For a kiss and a smile I'll give mine all to you.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In other other news, I have finally discovered Who I Really Am.



Neo, the "One". Neo is the computer hacker-turned-Messiah of the Matrix. He leads a small group of human rebels against the technology that controls them. Neo doubts his ability to lead but doesn't want to disappoint his friends. His goal is for a world where all men know the Truth and are free from the bonds of the Matrix.

Neo: 63%
James Bond, Agent 007: 58% (I hope they mean Sean Connery!)
Indiana Jones: 58%
Maximus: 54%
The Amazing Spider-Man: 54%
William Wallace: 50%
Lara Croft: 50%
The Terminator: 42%
Batman, the Dark Knight: 42%
El Zorro: 38%
Captain Jack Sparrow: 29%

I had to look up Maximus, William Wallace (mea culpa) and Capt. Sparrow.

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com