It's all in the title - Play it safe or eat a bacon sandwich?

It's pretty obvious that I stumble across a lot of weird, funky, messed up....quirky?...stuff. Everything you see me post here, doesn't even add up to 1% of what I see. Along the way, there's a lot of stuff I surely miss, too, because it just doesn't grab my attention immediately, even if what's inside that next link, video, or site could be fabulous.

I'll admit, a lot of times I judge a book/site/picture/video intro/whatever by its cover or I require something attention-grabbing in order to waste even 20 seconds of my time. Other times, though, I find things when I'm least expecting them.

In this case, I followed a link to Flowing Data, and while there's plenty of interesting stuff on the site and it's worthy of being followed, it's also an insanely boring layout. Standard white theme with boxes of content and thumbnail images. I glanced over it, saw nothing that jumped out, and moved on. After all, it was just tons of text with most of the images being graphs of some sort (just the sort of thing I'd expect from Flowing Data really).



(Image Source - Cheesy bacon oatmeal from Live Well 360)

But at the last split second as the page shifted to another site, my eye caught a glimpse of "safe or bacon" among the "data visualization," heat maps, and engineers' guides.

Of course, the real title actually said "Understanding risk - play it safe or eat a bacon sandwich?" I went back to read the full title immediately and then clicked the link because, come on, why wouldn't I? Who makes a comparison like that??

David Spiegelhalter does, that's who. And in the video at the link, he explains "we have a risky side (the part of you that says it's okay to eat a pound of bacon every day) and a cautious side (the part that says to eat some oatmeal in place of bacon)." The video itself isn't anything insanely weird and is actually quite logical, but the examples he uses are great and his sense of humor shines through at some unexpected times.

Thanks Professor Risk!