Odds Against Tomorrow

The way other people fantasize about surprise inheritances, firts-glance love, and endless white empyreal pastures, Mitchell dreamed of an erupting supervolcano that would bury North America under a foot of hot ash.

The message was: disorder always won in the end. The idea that man could order the world to his own design was the most pitiful fairy tale ever told.

There was no escaping math, after all. It was everywhere, especially in nature. You could go as far to say that math was nature. Pi describe the arc of a rainbow, the way ripples spread in a body of water, the dimensions of the moon and sun. Fractals could be observed in halved sections of red cabbage, the topography of deserts, the branching of lightning bolts. And take the old man glaring out from his shirt, Leonardo Fibonacci, who discovered that a basic number sequence predicted the arrangement of scales on a pinecone, the distribution of petals on flowers, the spiral of a snail shell, the furcation of veins in the human body, even the structure of DNA. When all the people were gone, the numbers would persist.

Awfulness can happen at any time. That's what's so awful.

If you devoted your life to the contemplation of disaster, then wasn't an incident-free existence an empty one?

In the United States there were 900,000 elevators, each serving an average of 20,000 people per year. That meant eighteen billion passenger trips per year. These trips resulted in twenty-seven deaths. The chance of dying in an elevator accident was therefore one in 10.44 (repeating) million—about equivalent to the odds of dying from a dog bite, according to the National Safety Council odds-of-death chart he kept in his wallet. This made him feel easier about entering the metal box every morning but he did find himself crossing the street whenever he saw a dog.

We've been calling your phone every second the last two days." "I'm OK, Dad." "We were worried. But then I thought to myself, you know what the Lion King says." "'I laugh in the face of danger.'" "That's my son!

He had no great advice to offer to his clients about this fact. He just wanted them to understand the likelihood that they would be incinerated shortly.

He could buy the Psycho Canoe with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.

We’ve had a number of applications but there was no one with the right mix of technical knowledge and personal despair.