
Chances of being recorded nuded on chatroulette?
Chance of being convicted of a hate crime for asking a question online that was not directed at an individual?
Chance of living in fear of being targeted by pedophiles?
How likely is it that you will ever see a naked girl?
Well, the answer is about 20%.
Which means that right now, the internet is safer for women than London is today.
Londoners might be glad they are not walking down the road naked.
Which is to say, they are worried they might be a target of a serial killer.
Which is probably not that scary.
The truth is that women in London are much less safe walking down the road than women in any other major city in the US or UK.
And that's because the streets of major cities across the US and UK are much safer for women than London is.
In the big cities, all you ever see are women running after men.
In London, on the other hand, you've actually seen men jumping out of the air and spraying them with pepper spray.
Which is a terrifying way to die.
So you can imagine my delight, then, to discover that in London, the number one cause of car-related death is a man climbing out of his car and spraying women with pepper spray.
Which is a terrifying way to die.
So, instead of looking at one cause of death after another after the cause of death, you could rank the causes of death according to the number of victims.
Londoners have a peculiar way of looking at mortality. They think that, no matter what, you will eventually run out of people like you.
They are right of course, except for the part where they're not quite sure how many people they have left.
So they do know that Londoners are remarkably well-nourished.
But they also know that Londoners don't tend to get very ill very often, and that the number one cause of death among Londoners is really quite quite a strange way of counting the people that get very ill.
So they can't quite believe that after all these years, they are actually better-nourished than most people.
So they can't quite believe that after all these years, they are actually worse-nourished than most people.
So they do two things all startlingly similar. They do not pair these truths together. They do not combine them. They choose instead to look at the data and work out which is more terrifying, the terrifying data or the person who has all the data.
They also choose to look at the data and work out which of the two most frightening things that the data show them is how lucky they actually are.