\nAnd the second part of the deal is that there aren’t that many
\npeople trying. Even if you assume that for every one attempt that makes the
\nnews, there are ten attempts kept secret, which is a wildly unlikely ratio in
\na world where everyone’s carrying six cameras and wants to be on teevee?
\nThat’s still less that 50 attempts on tens of thousands of flights over nearly
\na decade. There simply aren’t that many people trying to blow up planes.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
His argument is perfectly good. He’s right that the new airport security
\nmeasures are aimed at making you think<\/em> that they’re doing more to
\nprotect you than they used to, rather than actually doing<\/em> more. But
\nten of thousands<\/em> of flights over the last decade? Ummm…. No.<\/p>\n Tens of thousands seems<\/em> like a lot. But it’s so far off
\nthat it’s laughable. It’s off by more than 4 orders of magnitude<\/em>. It’s
\nsmaller than the square root<\/em> of the actual number of flights.<\/p>\n Let’s take one busy airport: Newark Airport in NJ. Newark is in full operation
\nfor about 14 hours per day. Based on my time watching planes take off and
\nland there, I’d guess that they average at least one takeoff every three
\nminutes. But let’s guess that I’m wrong, and double the time between
\ntakeoffs, assuming one every 6 minutes. That’s 10 flights per hour,
\nwhich adds up to about 140 flights per day. That’s definitely way<\/em>
\nto small – but it adds up to well over 50,000 flights per day. <\/p>\n And that estimate turns out to be rank garbage. Looking up official
\ninformation, there were over 225,000 takeoffs at Newark in 2007 – which is a
\nsignificant reduction<\/em> over previous years. So even biasing towards
\nthe low side, Newark airport alone had well over 2 million<\/em> flights
\ntake off in the last decade.<\/p>\n According to the FAA, there were about 37,000 commercial flights per day
\nin 2008 – for a total of over 13 million<\/em> commercial flights per year.
\nAnd that’s a dramatic decrease<\/em> compared to a few years earlier, before
\nhigh fuel prices drove many airlines out of business, and forced others to reduce
\ntheir schedules.<\/p>\n All of us who live in metropolitan areas see ton of airplanes taking off and
\nlanding every day. But we’ve got absolutely no intuitive understanding of just
\nwhat that actually means. I constantly rant about how piss-poor we are at
\nunderstanding scale, but I was seriously surprised by the number of flights per day
\naround NYC. Once we get beyond numbers that we can easily count to, our
\nintuitions about numbers are just a total disaster. We just don’t really
\nunderstand scale; we don’t understand how big numbers add up.<\/p>\n
And on the topic of airport security: put the numbers into context, and you’ll realize
\nthat all of the panic over terrorism on airplanes is really amazingly overblown. The chances of being hurt by someone who got past airport security, even without things
\nlike the full-body scanners being deployed after this latest panic, are smaller than dying
\nin your dentist’s office from an anaesthesia error. And how often does anyone worry about that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As you’ve surely heard by now, on christmas day, some idiot attempted to blow up an airplane by stuffing his underwear full of explosives and then lighting his crotch on fire. There’s been a ton of coverage of this – most of which takes the form of people running around wetting their pants in terror. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-probability","category-big-numbers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-dv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}