The Norm Chronicles Read Free Page B

forgot the contraception the time they went camping but said ‘What the hell’ anyway – which really should have made the whole saga about a zillion to one against.
    But then, when you think about it, everyone is improbable, everyone’s story’s a fluke. There are so many reasons why any one of us might not have happened. At least, every particular someone is improbable. There’ll be people for sure, but why you?
    As it was, by going back to say sorry, he was out when his flat caught fire and filled with suffocating fumes.
    So as she lay screaming for an epidural and swearing that he was going to pay for this with his ass, was going to sleep with the fishes in fact, he was wondering about the baby’s future, the strange course of luck and bad luck, the risks and coincidences of life, wondering how much in the riot of fates was calculable. What are the chances?
    And at the very moment the baby was born, far away a spectacular fireball lit up the pre-dawn sky, a radiant explosion caused by the atmospheric entry of a small near-Earth asteroid just a few metres in diameter but weighing 80 tonnes and firing icily through 12 km of space per second, such that it shattered with the force of a thousand tonnes of dynamite and the brightness of a full moon into small meteorite fragments across the Nubian desert below. 1 The asteroid was namedAlmahata Sitta. The baby was precisely 3,400 grams. * They named him … Norm.
    CAN NUMBERS HELP the infant Norm duck the slings and arrows of life? In The Norm Chronicles we will guide him with the best that we can find. We will also make them as clear as possible.
    The last point – clarity – is a big one. There are lies and damned lies in risk statistics, for sure, but there’s real information too, and a large part of the problem is cutting through to the good stuff and making it intelligible.
    Say that Norm’s dad is cooking sausages for the boy’s tea when his ears prick up to a headline on the TV news that says eating an extra sausage – or is it a sausage every day? – something about a sausage anyway – increases our risk of cancer by 20 per cent. He pauses. Norm plays. The sausages sizzle. †
    What does it mean, this percentage – 20 per cent more risky than what? Then he hears it referred to on the radio as a probability (and is that the same as a percentage?), and maybe later he’ll read in the newspaper about the ‘absolute risk’ and a ‘relative risk’, and by now he’s struggling, and who can blame him? But then there’s another thing they talk about, called a ‘risk ratio’, and it all seems mathematical and maybe even rigorous – who knows? – and so some say ‘you mean 20 per cent of people die from sausages?’ and others ‘you mean extra sausages cause 20 per cent of cancers?’ or perhaps ‘you mean 20 per cent of people have a 100 per cent chance of cancer if they eat, er, 20 per cent more sausages?’ And some, who love sausages, say that it’s all lies and statistics, but perhaps a few say, ‘Oh my God, it’s a sausage, stay away!’ and they hardly believe it, but maybe they should believe it, and some people tell them they’re just stupid, but they don’t feel stupid they feel fed up, and still they haven’t much idea what it really means, and in the end they say ‘Oh, sod it, let’s have another sausage.’
    Forget all this. We can do better. Norm faces a life full of such fears, often conveyed with about as much clarity. Can we ever calculate his precise fate? No. Obviously. No one knows the future. But as Norm grows up he can learn about the recent past – as with the body count for heart disease – and then extrapolate the average risk into the future and use this as a guide for his own life. This sounds imperfect but reasonable. In practice, risk in the telling is often a mess. Yet so far as the basic body count goes and what it means to our everyday lives, it could be easier. That, at least, is one hope for this book, and for