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Eye Injuries As Contagious Plague
The Bastardization Of Mathematics
If you believe the effluent floating around the internet, America is besieged by a new epidemic every morning. Mad Cow Disease in one animal in a small part of one state off to the side of everything threatened every man, woman, child, and lacto-vegetarian in America enough to make front page news. 2003 included such notable outbreaks as SARs, which gave the affected a taste of what asthmatics live with daily, and the flu. It seems that just as the weather shifted towards the onset of winter, a bunch of people started feeling a bit icky. Imagine that.
Iraq 2 was a God-send for people tired of reading about the epidemic of obesity (it must be contagious, it seems to be spread at fast food restaurants like AIDS at a bath house) and horror of anthrax-threats. For a few glorious weeks the front pages showed heroic soldiers not sick with the flu, and anything but morbidly obese. Instead we saw our finest and bravest valiantly performing jobs that some supported, and others attacked. The Iraqi soldiers oscillated between being heroes assaulted by our bullies, to scum eradicated by our heroes, depending on whose version of reality you clicked on. Come what may, and much may in fact came, we were spared from seeing talking heads (and their internet equivalents, typing-hands) from inciting panic to boost web-page clicks. Then it al l went back to hell.
The latest epidemic is perhaps the most interesting to me. It seems that every child, jogger, pedestrian, nephew and grandson is at elevated risk of catching a paintball in the eye. I hear it’s very contagious, and reports of catching paintballs in the eye appear in clusters like suicides in religious death cults. A report authored by Dr. David A. Listman*, from St. Barnabas Hospital in New York, cited that in 1998 hospital emergency rooms in America saw 545 paintball-related eye injuries. If you combine 1999 statistics with 2000 statistics, the number Listman reported was some nebulous figure “over 1,200.” To understand “new math,” we must first apply some of the old math that used to be required learning in our middle schools.
1998 is one year. 1999 and 2000 are, combined, two years. So, we take the 1998 figure of 545 f(x) and multiply it by two, since we’re comparing it to the sum of 1999 and 2000. We get 1,090 cases. That’s 110 casesmore, but we’re dealing with the difference between two groups of two years. To see the one-year-increase between 1998 and, 2000, we take 2000’s presumed half of the 1,200 case figure and get 600. 600 (cases in 2000) minus 545 (cases in 1998) finds an increase of 55 cases between these years. There were an estimated 4.5million paintball players in 1999 and 2000. To find the percentage of increase, we divide the cases (the numerator) by the total players from the population of paintballers (the deonominator, who we assume are all at risk of the same injuries). We get: 0.000012% of an increase. Wow; stop the presses. If I had 0.000012% of a mansion by the sea, I’d have about a speck of sand and a metal shaving from a nail. 0.000012% of Mount Everest is 0.35 feet, or about five inches.
This was data based upon 4.5 million paintball players in 1999 and 2000. I’m writing in 2004, where the most recent estimate of total paintball players in America during 2003 was around 7.2 million. Let’s do a little bit of projecting. 4.5 million to 7.2 million players is an increase of 160%. So, let’s take the eye-injury figure from 1999 and 2000, which is 1,200, and cut it in half so we’re only dealing with one year’s estimated data. That’s 600. Now, to compare apples to apples, we’ll take that number and, since we don’t have eye-injury-data for 2003, “project” what it should be if it increases proportionally to the total number of paintball players. This is an illogical assumption to anyone who knows about paintball’s rules, the industry-within-the-industry wholly dedicated to developing and marketing eye-safety gear, etc. But for the sake of argument, we’ll project an eye-injury figure to compare to the total-player figure. 600 increased by 160% equals 960 “projected eye injuries in 2003.” We’ll set that relative to the 7.2 million paintball players in 2003. Now let’s look at the prevalence of eye injuries among these players. We see that 0.00013% of paintball players likely received eye injuries in 2003. That means that for every 10,000 players, only 1.3 received an eye injury in that entire year. More people choke on ham sandwiches every week than that. Look at traffic reports in major cities: more people die daily in car wrecks.
I will admit a central fallacy to the data above. It’s threefold, actually. First, the data above is based upon reports and data collected via respectable and established means. Any connoisseur of pulp news knows you can’t do a silly thing like research a story any more; there are deadlines to meet, and audiences to sway to buy your doom-predictions and nay-sayings over the others of its ilk. Second, the above relies on showing empirically what goes on behind the numbers of the statistics the news is awash with; and we all know by mass-media’s example that the general citizenry can’t be force fed intellectual material or explanations, for risk of souring their appetite for celebrity gossip and fashion tips.
But third, the above is based upon the idea that only paintball players suffer paintball eye injuries. Listman’s report did not say that the 545, or the “over 1,200” were grouped as being only paintball players. Using the media against itself, there are reports almost weekly of criminals abusing paintball equipment to shoot joggers and motorists. These joggers and motorists, although a possibility, are not paintball players; nor were they participating in a paintball game when they drove to work with the window down one fateful morning... Listman’s data on paintball-related-eye-injuries comes from the entire population of the United States. My figures of 4.5 and 7.2 million were figures of just paintball players; we compared apples to apples, but within a banana cart. So let’s compute just the 2000 statistics again, w ith the total population figures from which these eye-injury-recipients came. I’ll use US Census 2000 data.
In 2000, America had 281,421,906 citizens. There is no way we can count all the foreign tourists, travelers, work-visa-holders, and illegal aliens (who could all presumably have received paintball-related-eye-injuries) in the country at the time. Now, we take 600 and put it over 281,421,906. The drum roll commences as I compute this number in my tortured calculator... 0.00000213%! In 2000, 0.00000213% of the American population received paintball-related eye injuries. Holy horseshit, hide the children!
2 out of every 1,000,000 Americans suffered paintball-related eye injuries in 2000. Yes, this threat is posed against every man, woman, child and goldfish from sea to shining sea.
Listman reported that the numbers “remained elevated in 2000.” What could his baseline be, and where is his logic? If he takes a baseline figure of 545 injuries in 1998 and says that an estimated 600 in both 1999 and 2000 is elevated, he is correct. 600 is bigger than 545. If 2001 statistics show that the number is also near 600, well, that’s still bigger than 545. But has he considered that the number of paintball players has virtually doubled, and the number of total citizens (remember, a lot of these injuries come from criminal misuse against joggers and motorists) in the US explodes upwards weekly?
Listman’s figures are downright humorous when taken in light of the somber-warning method he employed to present the facts to the world. What I take special umbrage at is the way the media picked the report up and ran with it, often morphing misleading math into an all-out battle cry.
The phrases “battle game” and “war game” are used often to describe paintball. Such lines are creative, though entirely sensationalistic. Football has long been described as “war without weapons,” but it is only referred to as: football. When hundreds of kids go to the hospital with broken bones, sprained joints, and jammed fingers from football, the doctors and reporters are silent. Football is dangerous; we all know that, and players accept the danger as being as much a part of their game as grass, rain, and cheerleaders. It’s an American institution, a game of our invention and obsession. So is paintball; but it’s newer, and no one outside of paintball players understands it. The Lord used to giveth and taketh away, and that which was not given (such as homosexual tendencies and leprosy) were seen as evil. Now, the media giveth our daily doses of “right thought” and pop-culture, and taketh away the trends and old-news of yesterday. That which was not handed down from the media can rightly expect to be criticized by it; paintball was hatched in the woods by a dozen business men screwing around. None of them were reporters. It predated the internet, but not by enough to become sacred like football or baseball; and the New York Times or Washington Post never ran a headline introducing it. Thus, it was neither giveth, nor introduceth, by the media. They can never be expected to understand it; or, to make millions of readers understand it the way classic reporters from more formal days sought to educate the public on relevant matters.
Letters to editors across the country trickled in from parents, grand and otherwise, who were concerned about this “threat” to their children. Never mind that their children likely weren’t allowed to play paintball anyway. Some called for tighter controls, without volunteering their time or money to impose them. Others called for a ban on the sport, without offering to console the millions of kids who love paintball, or the thousands of professional business men and women whose occupations solely involved it. I liked the grandmother who told me to my face that paintball needs to be banned, and the parents of whomever accidentally shot whomever need to be “locked away for years and fined.” Our police will get right on that; just let them finish booking today’s batch of serial ki llers and child molesters first.
A significant portion of the news we read today has an emotive tone, a violation of just about every entry-level journalism class’s teachings for the last hundred years. Editorials are emotive; letters to the editor are emotive; news reporting presents the facts, and tries to present somewhat of a balance of sides when the topic is, or may be, controversial...but reporting should not be emotive. You interview the mother of a child accidentally run over in a parking lot. But, you also interview the person who did the running over. Now days, articles on such incidents call for tighter automotive regulation, and child-rights-advocates attack the parents for not protecting their kid. Why not ban children who aren’t tall enough to be seen out the back window of a Buick? It fits the logic.
So many concepts that reporters barely understand are brought to light with terms they demonstrably don’t comprehend. Earlier in 2003, there was an “obesity epidemic.” Now, this supposed eye-injury epidemic. When used as a noun, my dictionary lists epidemic as meaning “An outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely.” As an adjective, “Spreading rapidly and extensively by infection and affecting many individuals.” Yes, there’s a note in there that epidemic need not apply only to contagious bacterial disease. Yet, by standard use we say that herpes is an epidemic, AIDS is an epidemic, and all sorts of nasty things you spread from person to person are epidemics. Fatness? Eye injuries? A lot of people are fat, and a couple folks here and there have these eye injuries, but neither are contagious. You can’t get fat by hugging a large person; your eye won’t spontaneously implode if you look at someone who was tragically blinded. Even if we accept that obesity, by virtue of shear numbers, can be considered a full-fledged “epidemic,” we have to realize that some 58 million people are “obese” in the US. If we add the eye injury statistics from 1998 through to the present-day-projections, we still only get a couple thousand. Even a blind man can see this “epidemic,” is not.
What Dr. Listman attempted to accomplish with his study evades me. He prefaced it with an explanation that no such data had theretofore been gathered. So, he gathered it. Kudos. No official record of the ratio of dress socks to white tube socks in my drawer exists. The media would love such a study; it would find that in my sock drawer, I have five pairs of dress socks, eight pairs of tube socks, and one handgun. They could go crazy with the idea that the combination of tube socks and dress socks leads to the presence of firearms; how about “separate but equal” in my clothing drawer, so that removing the tube socks from the dress socks might unravel the equation further and eliminate the existence of a firearm.
I would never submit such a study to MSNBC, Reuters, Knight Ridder, or anyone else. No one would care. Even if they did, the numbers are too small to mean anything (five, eight, and one, respectively). Listman’s numbers were too small to legitimately create the hoopla we drowned in for a few days; they weren’t really significant in a mathematical sense, either. It’s been a while since I computed a two-way ANOVA t-test to look for statistical significance. But, I’m sure that 545 injuries out of hundreds of millions of people, and my sock drawer stats, would be about equally relevant.
*Dr. David A. Listman's report in "Pediatrics," January 5 2004. The remainder of the article is by David Norman, 30MM Jr's best bud.
Hajji, you can run, but why die tired?
_________________
\"Those who hammer their guns into plows
will plow for those who do not.\"
- Thomas Jefferson
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