There are a lot of us about. Billions in fact. And what with the world opening up to journalists looking for tales of weirdness and cruelty and a healthy appetite for the same on the web, there appear to be more and more of us each day.Take China. The opening up of the Red Giant has, yes, provided a bigger market for our widgets but, more importantly, it has fed the world with another tranche of human misery of which we were previously ignorant.
Children walled up in basements, enough bizarre deformities to keep Channel 5 in business for years, more routes off this mortal coil than you could shake a lethal pointy stick at. Doesn't mean each one is not a tragedy.
It just means we get a disproportionate sense of the universe and its workings.
I was informing a lady about statistical irrelevancies over the weekend. Her toddler son had dropped his bouncy pumpkin nose and it had careered, like in some public safety information film, towards the traffic. He, oblivious, gave chase.
I had responded with a yell, a right foot to halt the pumpkin, a left arm to arrest the boy.
The mother was shaken. As reassurance I told her that, in 2011, 33 children were killed on the roads out of an under-16 population of 11million.
The chances that her son would have been among their number were so many zeros right of the decimal point, her fluster was entirely unnecessary.
She was so grateful for my statistical reassurance she stopped hitting me almost immediately.
