Lies, damned lies, statistics, and statistics that might actually be accurate and useful.

I learned from a Freakonomics Radio Podcast (Women are Not Men) that while women are catching up and even surpassing men educationally and economically, there are some things at which men still significantly outperform women . . . things such as drowning and getting struck by lightning (men overestimate their ability to swim and they are outside more than women and don't come in during storms) and barely twenty-four hours after I listened to these sobering statistics, I found myself swimming -- alone -- off the shore of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina as a storm rolled in . . . but I didn't come out of the water until it started raining so hard that it hurt my face, and once I got back into the Marth Wood Cottage, where I was spending the weekend with twenty other brilliant W&M men, we discussed what my cause of death would be if I was struck by lightning and drowned, and if we could pad the stats and attribute my death to both causes, but the important thing is that either way, it would have been a victory for Team Male.

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