Loose Marble

Boon Cartoon, boondawgoggle. Doodles. Spy, happy face,  naked legs, gun, thug, jail, girl things and hearts. The odds?  We hear this term tossed about regarding casino's and the the odds are in their favor.  Sports games will  have odds of one team winning.  It also applies to endeavors of life and just about any activity or event where the outcome could be more than one result.  There are no odds that 2 plus 2 is 5.  Just never going to happen.  But the odds of a random coin flip landing on heads is 50%. Now most people don't understand or at least they are not comfortable with statistics, which is the basis for odds.  What I've witnessed is people generally dramatically skew the odds or interpret them to favor their preferred outcome by employing emotion and desire. What has me thinking about this?  Well for one I saw a news story this morning.  Now I've seen a lot of news stories that employ this tactic of big numbers standing alone.  This particular story focused on

LARGE NUMBERS INCITE FEAR AND DRAMA Let me add to that, Large numbers incite fear and drama for the ignorant.  Surely it can only be the dumb masses that don't see through the use of big numbers or don't question the relative importance. super hero, dad, witch, idiot drooling, boon, cartoons, cartoonist  for hire, one guy drawing, doodles, boondawgoggle Jeff Rosen from NBC was on the Today Show with this new big number, 4700.  Supposedly this is the number of teens that die each year from drinking alcohol.  When  I first heard this I immediately had to ask; "Is that a lot or little?"  Well as it turns out it is 1 tenth of 1 percent or .00011905 of the teens in the United States.  So I concluded it is a little. This number is so small it doesn't even worry me  and shouldn't worry you.  What worries me is  this has to be a blatant lie with other motivations.  Let's break this down.  According to the CDC just over 16,000 teens die per year and 48% of these de