I could not agree more with your piece in today's paper asking that reasonable people stand up to the far-right publicity machine. It is time to go further than stand up, we should be fighting back with some of the same. Like asking when, exactly, the Ku Klux Klan renamed itself The Tea Party? Their policies seem virtually identical, as do the intelligence and attitudes of their membership. Like asking why so many vigorously anti-gay right-wing commentators are caught with their trousers around their ankles while in the presence of other men? Surely there are limits to research?
Yes, standing up is fine, but far better to fight back.
Drunkenness Risks – Walking vs Driving: Oops?
Please forgive me writing to you unannounced, but I have just started reading Superfreakonomics and read the early section which analyses the differing risks between drunks walking and driving. You concluded that on a per-mile basis, walkers were eight times more likely to die than drivers.
This seems to me to be an incorrect conclusion because the likelihood of death is a function of time, not distance travelled – the longer you are exposed to a danger the more you are likely to be a victim of it. Walkers travel at around 3 miles per hour, drunken walkers perhaps manage 2. Drunken drivers average (let say) around 40 miles per hour.
So on a per-mile basis, drunken walkers are "out there" and at risk for twenty times longer than drunken drivers.
Combining the two, we have to conclude that on a per-minute basis, drunken drivers are around two and a half times more likely to die than drunken walkers.