There are all sorts of dangerous numbers out there and not one of them has an Anti-Social Behaviour Order on it. Wherever you look, they're ready to jump out, trip up the unsuspecting then jump on the victim's head just for good measure. In Britain the agency responsible for breeding dangerous numbers is the HSE, (Health and Safety Executive). It examines perfectly normal events such as being a worker in a factory, then uses this as raw material to breed numbers and ratios like 1 in 50, the unlikely 1 in 650,000 and the ravenous 1 in 3. Some numbers recklessly released onto public streets include 311.6 per 100,000 workers were injured non-fatally in 2012 / 2013, in the workplace. Some people took to counting the accidents as they mounted up in the year following that, flatly refusing to go to work. This only led to numbers being bred in captivity by rival departments like The Department for Work and Pensions, which when released caused 5% more people to claim benefits from the state in the first quarter of 2013 while they waited for the non-fatal accident rate to get past 311.6. That way they could return to work in safety. It was no good, because in the following year new numbers escaped from their pens at the HSE number farm decreeing that 327.2 non-fatal accidents had to happen in the workplace from then on; a rise of 1,000,000.8572%. Wow! In the North East of England, where times have always been ridiculously bad, numbers caused 4.6% of workers in every 100,000 compared with just 2.9% in London to get injured simply because they went to work. Then scientists came along and created hi-tech, academic numbers that could reproduce themselves from year to year, or day to day. Called trends, they proved that over a 3-day absence the figures remained the same leading to 1.9% more people getting injured in the North East than anywhere else in Britain. Even though the North East had the lowest number of fatal injuries, just 2, compared with 22 in Scotland and the South East, the presence of dangerous numbers up there means it is a stupid idea to move to Newcastle. It's just not for softies.
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
