A Time To Be Thankful

I really enjoy this Thanksgiving / Christmas / New Year's time of year, as it provides some time off from work to appreciate some of the smaller stuff and take your bearings.

So, I'd like to take a moment and thank the folks who work diligently, without much credit or fanfare, helping make this thing we call "society" work.

1.  Car safety engineers.  A while ago, I got in a car accident.  This was my car:

This picture was taken from the junkyard, well after the accident.  Multiple airbags deployed, two cars totalled (including mine), a third was seriously dented, and everyone walked away from it.  I think that's pretty amazing, and would like to extend a heartfelt "thank you" to all the engineers out there who carefully consider accident scenarios in the design of their cars.  Wow.

2.  All the folks at Amazon's Fulfillment Centers who dutifully take our orders.

Amazon fulfillment center.  Click for YouTube video of how it all works.

Amazon does crazy, crazy amounts of business: on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Amazon sold more than 158 items per second.  Actually selling that much stuff is one impressive feat; I think an even more impressive feat (logistically) is shipping and tracking all that stuff.  So, my hat is off to the folks who set that up, and my hat is off doubly so for the people who worked hard to fulfill all our orders.  They don't get enough credit.

3.  The software engineers and hardware techs who were able to successfully absorb the impact of 6.8 million devices being activated on Christmas Day.  Happily, I can count myself among those 6.8 million, but you don't survive that kind of hit on your network without a lot of forethought and intelligence.   

About a quarter of a billion apps were downloaded on Christmas, which is twice the normal load in December and three times what was downloaded last year.  So, a profound thank you to the network administrators and people who kept the servers humming, even under a crushing load like that on Christmas.

The list could go on and on: police officers, radio and TV engineers, security guards at important places, mail delivery folks (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, etc.) ... The fact is, there are a tremendous number of unsung heroes who quietly but determinedly go about their business, ensuring that the rest of us can have safe and happy holidays.  Society doesn't just run automatically; it works through the hard work and dedication of millions of folks.

Thanks to all of you for making our society work.  Here's to best wishes for a safe and prosperous 2012.

Is it the end of the world?

The last few weeks have seen some usual events befall the Washington DC area; notably, the earthquake (where in the heck did THAT come from??!?) and Hurricane Irene.

Irene was potentially a biggie, but in terms of damage, it didn't bring nearly the water that Hurricane Isabel did in 2003.  I remember that vividly because I was living on a boat at the time in Southwest DC at the Gangplank Marina.  To this day, I'm still upset that I didn't document that event better -- there's nothing quite as surreal as waking up one morning to see someone riding their dinghy across Hains Point.  It was completely submerged.

But anyways, we've had a rash of seemingly nasty weather come DC's way recently.  Is this a sign of something taking a turn for the worse?  Are we all doomed?

I decided to run some numbers.  Let's take seven natural disasters:

• Earthquake
• Flood
• Hurricane
• Tornado
• Drought
• Snow / Blizzard
• Fire

Of course, some areas are more prone to these than others.  What are the chances that, in some small period of time, you get at least one of these at the hundred-year level?  As in, "Hurricane Isabel was the worst flooding in DC in 100 years."  Or, "the earthquake in August in DC was the worst in 150 years."

For each of these seven events, there is a 0.99 chance that it won't happen this year (for the once-in-a-hundred-years event).  So if you multiply the 0.99 for all seven events, there is a 93% chance that none of them will happen at the 100-year level.  Then, if you hang around DC for ten years, that's

0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93

= 0.495

That means, chances are that if you live in DC (or anywhere, for that matter) for 10 years, there is a better than 50% chance you will experience a once-in-a-hundred-year event of one of those seven catastrophes.

For the statistically minded and rigorous folks out there, I admit this is somewhat contrived.  I arbitrarily picked 7 events.  If you pick 12 events (maybe throw ice storms, hail storms, heat waves, continuous days of rain, and locust swarms in there), you'll get to the 50% level in 6 years.  And since the news media is always looking for the headline, "WORST [SOMETHING] IN 100 YEARS," you could say that they're casting their net pretty wide and looking for anything.  If your event database is 70 items large, you're likely to get a 1-in-100 year event every year.

So, no, I don't think the world is coming to an end.  We're just better at looking for it.