(New posts in the future?  Who knows…)

(Eventually, normal updates will continue. I’m suffering from blog motivation issues at the moment.)

Due to technical problems that still haven’t been sorted out, blog posts have not been able to be made recently.  Hold on.

As everyone may or may not know, the SAT^TM, which apparently doesn’t stand for anything due to a series of controversy, is practically a requirement for anyone who wants to enter college. Not only that, if you want to get in to the college of your choice, you apparently need to score very well (or at least better than everyone else). In order to help us succeed, the same people who made the SAT (an officious not-for-profit organization known as the College Board^TM who themselves are another story completely), have made the Practice SAT^TM, affectionately known as the PSAT^TM. This PSAT is now typically administered to Sophomores and Juniors, and it itself has become a big deal.  As a result, this PSAT now no longer is viewed as a practice test, but rather as a test in itself.  This has made people become worried, and as a result practice PSATs are able to be taken in special booklets during special times.  I would assume these are called PPSATs, but no one can be sure.

However, this is not the end of all this acryonymless chaos.  A few courageous schools — mine included — have stepped to allow students to practice for these “PPSATs” in a series of a few sessions and more booklets.  What do they call these?  PPPSATs?  Clearly, there is something wrong here, and whatever it is, it must be stopped.  And while were on the topic of problems, the College Boards demand for the overuse of trademarks when it comes to their stuff is annoying to.  It won’t be long until they start offering practice booklets for the PPPSAT, and I assume they’re going to want to copyright that too.  How can they copyright a gobblygook of letters, if the letters themselves are currently meaningless.  SAT doesn’t mean anything at all.  It’s just SAT.  This whole concept of acronyms that aren’t acronyms itself is confusing.  But, since I guess we can’t even use acronyms correctly, that’s not a problem either.

Speaking of incorrectly used acronyms, have you ever wondered what all this PIN number and ATM machine stuff is about?  I mean PIN itself stands for “Personal Identification Number”, so what’s with the extra “number”?  Is it supposed to be Personal Identification Number number?  Same with ATM machines, or Automatic Teller Machine machines.  It must be the feeling that the person your talking to may not understand the acronym, and must need additional clarification.  However, if so why not call it PI Numbers and AT Machines?  Until people start doing that, I’m going to keep complaning.  See you Wednesday.
Written September 7, 2007.  Timestamped to appear on September 8.

Note: From now on, I will be limiting myself to more high quality “essays” about various topics. Furthermore, all my posts will be delayed so they only appear on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If these dates don’t work out, they will be changed, but they will only appear once a week. Site News, such as announcing new content, may appear on any day, and will not be counted as an essay. You will also now be able to see the original post date at the bottom of the post.

Most people don’t understand statistics. That’s why people think driving is perfectly safe, and flying in a plane is one of the scariest things that can possibly happen. Many people falsely assume airplanes are dangerous, yet a study of all 583 reported accidents over the past 24 years (about 25 accidents a year), report that almost 96% of all people involved have survived. Compare this with the million car-related accidents that occur annually, which makes up an entire 25% of all deaths around the world. Furthermore, your fears of getting shot down while over N. Korea, or bombed by a terrorist organization while on a plane are neglicable as well. All the incidents of planes getting shot down, bombed, or in anyways destroyed intentionally by a hostile organization or government only make up 5% of all plane crashes.

So, if you consider you are a passenger on one of the 10 million commercial flights that take place around the world annually (still a conservative estimate), and only 25 of these planes are destroyed (crash, blow up etc.) each year, you have a 1/400000 (.0000025%) chance, that if you only take one flight a year, you will crash. Adjusting for the fact that the average American flies on a commercial flight about 10 or so times a year, this chance of crash is adjusted to 1/40000 (.000025%). However, that doesn’t count the chance of you dying, of course. You’re survival chance is still almost 96%. Therefore, your chance of dying in a crash becomes 4%, which adjusts the inital 1/40000 to a one in a million (0.000001%) chance of you dying in an airplane crash in your lifetime. Now, if you want to know the chance of you dying in an airplane crash caused by terrorism, factor in the additional 5% and you get a one in eighty million chance (.000000125%) of dying in the hands of airplane terrorism. By adding in space travel deaths too, the government has deduced an overall 1/5091 (.0002%) chance of dying in areoplane transport throughout your entire lifetime. You have the same chance of dying in an airplane crash as you do dying from accidentally tripping out your second story window. Compare this chance of death with cars, which the government rates as a 1/237 (.004%) chance of death. Dying in a car is almost 20x more likely than dying in an airplane. But are cars 20x more scary than planes? No.

One of the problems with the “car is safer than the airplane” scenario, is that the media hypes all airplane accidents and broadcasts them on a national or international level, whereas car accidents are only reported on the local level, and even then, not nearly all the accidents make television at all. Consider that when watching TV, or fretting about getting in an airplane, or when you go to get in a car. Statistics mean everything, and they are slanted on a daily basis, in our minds and by the media.
References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_safety
• http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

Originally written September 4, 2007. Timestamped for September 5.