December 13, 2002
SHE MOVES IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS:
Friday the 13th bad day for female drivers: study (Ian MacLeod, December 13, 2002, The Ottawa Citizen)Women might want to knock on wood today. A new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry reveals they have a 63-per-cent higher risk of dying in traffic accidents on Friday the 13th compared with other Fridays.For guys, according to the study, it's just another day, with only an additional two-per-cent risk of not making it to midnight.
"Friday the 13th may be a dangerous day for women, largely because of anxiety from superstition," writes the study's author, Dr. Simo NŠyhŠ, of the University of Oulu, Finland.
He theorizes that "women who are susceptible to superstitions obsess that something unfortunate is going to happen, which causes anxiety and the subsequent degradation of mental and motor functioning. Presumably, in women suffering from neurotic and situational fears, awareness of this day could produce driving errors with fatal consequences."
In fact, there is a name for people with an irrational fear of Friday the 13th -- paraskevidekatriaphobia. A milder condition is triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13. People who suffer from both should throw a few grains of salt over their left shoulders today and and crawl back into bed, preferably on the right side.
We are not one damn bit closer to understanding women than we were on the day God pilfered one of Adam's ribs and worked His wonders. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2002 5:56 PM
This is also a perfect example of how statistics can be tortured into meaninglessness. Doing a little math (and taking some population data from the CIA World Factbook) it turns out that, on Friday the Thirteenth, Finnish women have an increased likelihood of dying in a car accident of 6 in 100,000,000. As there are only about 2,500,000 Finnish women, I hope they aren't losing any sleep over this.
Popular health reporting is full of statements like "X increases your chance of dying by 63%." These are used because they sound like a big impact, when what's really going on is that a very, very small chance of something happening has increased by a tiny, tiny amount. Based on this, people run around doing all sorts of bizarre stuff, or simply fail to enjoy themselves as much as they could, thinking that otherwise they're going to fall over dead tomorrow.
David's probably right. However, today my wife backed the car into the side of the garage, doing a number on the passenger side and tearing off the sideview mirror. There might be some validity to this.
Posted by: AWW at December 13, 2002 8:17 PMWell, at my office the network DID go down for an hour...
Posted by: David Ross at December 14, 2002 2:21 AMFunny, at my home the cable internet went out for the whole day.
Posted by: pj at December 14, 2002 2:57 PM