Barking up the wrong tree

What’s more dangerous: a playground jungle gym or your office chair? As it happens, one in every 3,759 fatal accidental falls starts from a piece of playground equipment. You’re 85 times more likely, meanwhile, to fall to your death from a chair. That’s one of the many odd pairings waiting to be discovered in The Book of Odds, an online statistical encyclopedia launching tomorrow.

Some other probabilistic tidbits I found digging through the site:

• The average American is more likely to live without ever visiting a dentist than to live without a TV in her home.
• A married man is about as likely to cheat on his wife as he is to experience a flight delay.
• You’re eight times more likely to have your ashes abandoned at a crematorium than to see a new book on personal finance be published in a given year.

The Book of Odds is a searchable online database of “odds statements,” the probabilities of everyday life. You can search it by keyword or by the odds themselves — for instance, how many things stand a 1 in 142 chance of happening to to you. As a special treat for Freakonomics readers, you can try the beta version of the site by clicking here and entering the username “brownian” and password “motion.”

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