On 13/01/14 12:55, son_of_flubber wrote:
(Title intended to add a bit of levity to serious post.)

Soaring can kill you, but how do we put that risk into perspective?

A statistics based Mortality Calculator helped me do that. I answered a few questions about my medical profile and age and it told me that statistically I have a 19% chance of dieing in the next ten years from natural causes or from an accident of any kind. Say a 1 in 5 chance. (Sucks of course.) The calculator does not properly weight the fact that I'm a glider pilot, so how do I adjust for that?

It's obvious to me that my chances of dying in a glider are much much better than 1 in 5. So it is much much more likely that I will die of some other cause before I live long enough to die in a glider. Worrying about a glider accident is completely irrational (until I disregard the inherent dangers and start flying like an idiot.) Sure it could happen, but it is much more likely to die from something else. And as I get older, the odds of dying in a glider continue to drop.

An article about the mortality calculator. http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-on-death.html

The calculator http://eprognosis.ucsf.edu/

A good way of measuring mortality is in terms of "micromorts",
a 1 in a million chance of dying.

For example, each hang-glider trip has a risk of 8 micromorts.
Living in the UK has risk of around 40 micromorts/day including
natural causes, or 1 micromort/day without.

FFI, see
http://understandinguncertainty.org/microlives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort