statistics

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent.

In poker, it is well known that playing the odds will net you more wins than losses, but it wont make you a top player. For that, you need an unquantifiable ability to read the other players at the table and decipher their emotional state when they make bets. Just the opposite is proving to be true when it comes to betting on winners in the NCAA tournament. Engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated that statistics accurately inform success in the tournament. Most peoples picks are based largely on emotional inference, they say, which leads to inaccurate choices.

Once upon a time, the only fielding statistic listed on the back of baseball cards was fielding percentage, a simple calculation of the number of assists and putouts a player records divided by total chances.