How small is 123/15 million?

February 7, 2008 8:12 PM

If you wanted to analogize 123 reports of death out of a population of 15,375,000 to some other statistic, what statistic would you use?

The point is to make the amount of defects seem small. Something like, more drivers die in a hour on US roads than 123/15 million.

posted by lockestockbarrel to law & government (9 comments total)

If you accept an average life expectancy of 80 years (and people are distrubited evenly across all different ages), on average your 15 million person population wil see 526 people dying of old age every day.
posted by aubilenon at 8:20 PM on February 7, 2008

There are 31,556,926 seconds in a (non-leap) year, so you could use that and say that it is the equivalent of about 4 minutes over the course of an entire year.
posted by i love cheese at 8:57 PM on February 7, 2008

That comes to 1 in 125000, exactly. So what are you trying to pull?

Google wasn't really very helpful:

So WDFM grew from an audience of 1 to over 125000.

The scale of the Bidwell Bar Quadrangle 30-minute. 1897 reprinted 1944, 1:125000.

It is said that 125000 recitations of a mantra will bring mantra siddhi, the realization of a notable level of benefit from the mantra

125000 secular Turks protest over Islamic head scarf

Walt Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger on Tuesday said the company sold 125000 movie downloads
posted by hexatron at 9:04 PM on February 7, 2008

The probability of getting a straight flush on the initial deal in draw poker is only one in about 72,000.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:15 PM on February 7, 2008

What about the rate of people getting struck by lightening in the USA in a year?

According to some data (link below), the rate of getting struck by lightening in the USA each year is 1 person out of every 280,000. (link)

Your defects happen in 1 out of every 125,000 widgets/events/people. So about twice as often. If you want to assume that lightening won't strike the same person twice (heh), then the rate of defect is less than the rate of people getting struck by lightening in 3 years. Ok, so that's not so snappy, but it kind of works. There are probably other lightening striking stats that would work a bit better...

I hope you don't own a child-seat company or something :)
posted by sentient at 9:18 PM on February 7, 2008

41 on the roster out of 5.1 million... if X affected all of metro Atlanta, it would kill the Braves and give Bobby Cox a head cold.
posted by ormondsacker at 9:34 PM on February 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

The actual number is pet deaths per population of pets (resulting from a product liability thing), so I'm looking in areas of pets or products liability. It's a purely academic exercise, so you can help me find a statistic AND sleep at night. Thanks!
posted by lockestockbarrel at 10:02 PM on February 7, 2008

Conveniently enough, the odds are identical to those of winning $1,000,000 in many US state lotteries (i.e. about 1 in 125,000).
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 3:56 AM on February 8, 2008

I find it highly unlikely that the odds of winning a million dollars on a one-dollar lottery ticket would be 1:125,000.

That's an 8:1 average rate of return on investment, which would make state lotteries better investments than any hedge fund.

Which, um, they're not.
posted by dersins at 8:30 AM on February 8, 2008