Remembering all the math I did in high school, I can only say that looking at numbers can be confusing. Or just boring. But sometimes, they can offer you a better understanding of the world than a news show. And in a much more entertaining fashion, too.
In October, Redditor u/alexbbtkd asked other platform users, "What's a crazy statistic?" and has received plenty of answers. We've combed through all of them and picked out the most surprising ones just to broaden your horizons. So put on your smarty pants, get a notebook, and enjoy!
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If you were to compress earth’s existence into a 24 hour day, life would first appear at 4am, plants would first appear at 10pm, dinosaurs from about 11pm-11:40pm, and humans emerge at 11:59pm.
From Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
You are more likely to be bitten by a stranger in New York City than by a shark anywhere else in the nation.
You are more likely to be killed by a vending machine than by a shark.
What we can learn from this is that strange vending machines in NYC should be avoided at all cost
That the Catholic Church hid a (now self) reported 8.4 child rapes per day for over 71 years.
WTF. ONE is bad enough but over 8, and every day. Seriously that is so f****d up. Those poor kids.
That there are A LOT more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people.
I don't doubt that it would be the same in Australia. It's morally criminal that there are people living on the streets when there are so many empty houses. And if a homeless person goes into one of those houses they can be charged with trespassing.
40% of homeless are employed.
The top 10% of drinkers account 60% of all alcohol consumed in the US. And they drink the equivalent of 74 drinks per week.
So the entire alcoholic beverages industry is kept alive by severe alcoholics.
This is so sad. Alcohol is protected by long standing human custom and sometimes religion, and seems to be exempt from the common classification of a 'drug'. In NZ in level 4 covid lockdown (the first one, most extreme lockdown), we couldn't get takeaways etc delivered. Or go get them. We could only order essential items online, and children's winter clothing was added to the list after a while. BUT: alcohol delivery was all the time, even in level 4. To your door, advertised everywhere. More available for delivery than food. More essential than almost every item, even at one point more important and legslly available before being able to buy clothes for your child. This isn't about the lockdown, the point I'm making is that it was, almost unspoken and nationwide, a 'necessity'. Every other drug (street, pharma, tobacco etc) is treated so differently, but they are no different to alcohol. It is such a juxtaposition and it really upsets me sometimes EDIT: I understand that alcohol dependency is serious, and a person can die without alcohol when they are seriously addicted. That was not the point I was trying to make: I meant the free for all that governments and society allows on alcohol, despite it being a drug like any of the ones they ban/regulate/monitor. It's that unfortunate attitude around alcohol that leaves so many people dependent to the point where alcohol was essential during lockdown, despite no acknowledgement of why that needed to be available
There is more actual lemon in Lemon Pledge cleaner than there is in Country Time lemonade
More first responders and survivors have now died due to 9/11 related illnesses than the number lost at Ground Zero on the day of the attack. The number will continue to rise because of the huge amount of health problems caused by the dust and smoke that everyone in the surrounding areas inhaled when/after the towers fell.
Also, the number of fatal traffic accidents in the United States increased after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, for a period of 12 months due to flying avoidance.
The U.S government has 'misplaced' six thermonuclear warheads. They were either lost or stolen in transit and at this juncture, one of the largest nuclear superpowers in the world has no idea where they are.
It is estimated that bears kill over two million salmon a year. Attacks by salmon on bears are much more rare.
It's a fact that there are more airplanes in the ocean than there are submarines in the sky.
The most common cause of death for pregnant women is homicide
I can only find statistics from America on this - anyone have numbers that apply to the rest of us?
In the UK Cardiovascular disease is the leading direct cause of death for pregnant women. However Cancer is the leading non-direct cause of death in pregnant women.
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I don't know the stats but I do know that pregnancy and when trying to leave are the most dangerous times for women in abusive relationships. I worked with these women for 15 years trying to help them understand the psychology of abuse and how to avoid it in future relationships.
Is that this study? - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2760408 - that was looking specifically at non-obstetrics causes of death of pregnant and postpartum women in a single American state based upon 119 deaths? That is an awful sample size that can't be extrapolated across the world (obstetrics caused deaths are well over 90% of maternal death worldwide)
It almost makes sense since pregnant women are almost exclusively young, mostly healthy and are probably more careful than most people. Accidental death becomes more rare, but intentional death doesn't change. Still pretty messed up though.
For the US perhaps, for much of the developing world I believe it’s childbirth.
The study on homocide must exclude pregnancy-related mortality (PRM). For all races in the U.S., the likelihood of dying of pregnancy is higher than the likelihood of dying of homocide while pregnant. The overall PRM rate in the U.S. is 17 per 100,000 live births. It is much worse for women of color due to many factors, including systemic racism in healthcare. For Black women, the PRM rate is 40.8; for Indigenous women it's 29.7. The likelihood of being killed in a homocide while pregnant in the U.S. across races is 1.7 per 100,000 live births. That's definitely bad. But the pregnancy-related mortality rate is worse. And the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women is the worst of all. That's really what we should be focusing on fixing.
Sweden only had one homicide , most maternal deaths (about 6 per year on130.000 deliveries) was heart,HELLP and suicide.
Agree. I thought we're well past that. This fact really surprised me. 😔
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After a robbery/execution of 3 workers at Outback Steakhouse in Texarkana, it is now considered double homicide, in several states) when a pregnant woman is murdered.
Its not true in every country yet but counterintuitively this is a good thing. For most of humanity's history, childbirth has been a leading cause of death of women. Not just pregnant women, all women. With the spread of modern medicine, those numbers have dropped dramatically. Between 2000 and 2017, we dropped it worldwide by 38%(https://data.unicef.org/topic/maternal-health/maternal-mortality/). The US went from a mortality rate of 607.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1915 to 12.7 in 2007. We can aim to eliminate all maternal deaths but humanity will never stop trying to kill each other.
And they're killed by men... are we going to discuss this at some point, or are we so used to this reality that we are not utterly shocked, appalled and disgusted by it anymore?
I guess what Prestigous Cactus said - young, mostly healthy and well supervised women. Imagine one of them dies of medical issues and two are murdered in 10 years, then you'll immediately have a statistics like that.
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40% of cops are domestic abusers
86% of British people live within 8 miles from where they were born.
There are more combinations in a 52 deck of cards than stars in the known universe.
39% of the world's population is overweight and that number is only getting "bigger"
If you were born in 1923 in the Soviet Union as a male, you would have an 80% chance of dying in world war II.
In the US, you are more likely to be killed by a cow than you are to be killed by a coyote.
Your more likely to be killed by a cow than all the stereotypical deadly Australian creatures put together.
Humans, (Homo sapien sapien), appeared on earth ~200,000 yrs. ago and didn't reach a population of 1 billion until 1804. About one hundred years later, 1920's, there were 2 billion. We now add a billion people to the planet every 12 years.
That you can fit all the planets in our solar system between the Earth and the Moon and still have some room spare.
Mind blown
More energy from the sun hits Earth every hour than the planet uses in a year.
1 in 3 Australians will be diagnosed with a skin cancer by the time they're 70.
Edit. Google search actually says (multiple times) that "at least 2 in 3 will be diagnosed with skin cancer by 70"
F*ck.
Slip, slop, slap, seek and slide is our motto. Also no hat, no play for primary schools.
We are closer in time to the birth of Cleopatra than she was to the construction of the Great Pyramid
I’ve seen this one appear on these lists many times, and I don’t know why it’s so interesting to people. I don’t associate Cleopatra with the pyramids at all except they are both from Egypt. That would be similar to being shocked that we are closer to the birth of Gandhi than he was to the building of Taj Mahal just because they are both from India.
According to the FBI, there are currently more than 25 active serial killers in the US
The United States "land of the free" incarcerates more citizens per capita than any other country: US: 629 inmates per 100,000 citizens
Compared to other countries: Cuba: 510, Brazil: 381, Russia: 326, China: About 250, Mexico: 169, UK: 131, France: 100
Broccoli has more protein per calorie than a steak.
Not quite. 3 ounces of broccoli is 31 calories and 2.5g of protein. 3 ounces of New York strip is 195 calories and 18g protein. I suppose if you're using a much fattier cut of steak maybe. Regardless, you'd need to eat over a pound of broccoli to get the same amount of protein as the 3 oz portion of steak. And the broccoli is an incomplete protein anyway, so there's no real comparison...
1 out of 25 people are sociopaths. No automatic sense of empathy.
Obligatory "Sociopath does not immediately equal violent and/or serial killer" comment
There are approximately 78,000,000,000,000 000,000 atoms in a grain of sand.
Men are about 7 times more as successful at suicide than women.
Human life expectancy has increased more rapidly in the past 50 years than in the past 200,000 years.
According to the bible that's not quite true. Apparently Noah lived to be 950yo, Methuselah was supposedly the oldest living human that died at 969yo. Lol.
20% of produce and fruit in the usa is never sold and is left to rot
Note: this post originally had 54 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
There are more airplanes on the bottom of the ocean than there are submarines in the sky.
These threads are interesting, but I feel I have to check the facts on every post. And it seems lots of readers don't bother to do that. Scary.
Fun website giving perfect examples: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
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Thank you. I really think the US bashing is ridiculous. All countries have their problems and skeletons. It not just a US thing.
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None of these statistics mean anything without a citation saying where the information came from.
If you took all the arteries and veins in one man's body and laid them end to end, that man would die.
Do not believe any statistics you did not fake yourself. I do not have any use for these as none of them provides background or cites the sources.
More proof, if you needed any, that statistics as a subsection of math is stupid, pointless, and as the saying goes "can be used to prove anything".
You can twist statistics to support just about any viewpoint you want.
*Citation needed. My understanding is the correct figure is 100%
Load More Replies... There are more airplanes on the bottom of the ocean than there are submarines in the sky.
These threads are interesting, but I feel I have to check the facts on every post. And it seems lots of readers don't bother to do that. Scary.
Fun website giving perfect examples: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Load More Replies... Thank you. I really think the US bashing is ridiculous. All countries have their problems and skeletons. It not just a US thing.
Load More Replies... None of these statistics mean anything without a citation saying where the information came from.
If you took all the arteries and veins in one man's body and laid them end to end, that man would die.
Do not believe any statistics you did not fake yourself. I do not have any use for these as none of them provides background or cites the sources.
More proof, if you needed any, that statistics as a subsection of math is stupid, pointless, and as the saying goes "can be used to prove anything".
You can twist statistics to support just about any viewpoint you want.
*Citation needed. My understanding is the correct figure is 100%
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