Bit More Slime

With plenty of real problems from terrorist threat to ongoing war to economic collapse, the media this week has been hyping a satellite falling in the most dire terms. The tumbling missile was reported to weigh as much as a school bus and said to stand a one in thirty-two hundred chance of "hitting you". This threat was described as greater than being struck by lightning, which was described as one in one hundred thousand, or winning the Powerball lottery, which was said to be around one in a few billion. After trying to find a neighbor with a bomb shelter from the old fear of Soviet nuclear fallout era after all the media exaggeration, I was greatly relieved this morning when ABC let the cat out of the bag that the odds were actually one in twenty-one trillion of pieces of the falling spacecraft actually hitting any particular individual. That is a bit different than the hyped number of one in thirty-two hundred that the media had repeated over and over- is it not?