ABSTRACT
A little-known fact about the subject of statistics is that it has mostly to do with probability, or chances. The accident statistics just quoted are not useful because they don't tell us anything about our chances. People have more accidents at home than anywhere else because home is where many of them are. More car accidents occur within x miles of home because most of the driving occurs there. If you really care about your chances of having an accident within x miles of home, you have to find statistics that tak~mto account the amount of time spent or the number of miles driv~nwithin x miles of home. Such refinements may be very hard to obtain, but don't give anyone part credit for quoting useless, unrefined statistics just because meaningful statistics are hard to obtain. If a space program fails to put a man on the moon, we give no part credit for putting him up into a tree.
