What are the odds of that?

Ever wanted to know what the odds were of being struck by lightning? What about the odds of being injured by a waterspout or dust devil? There's a new website that's putting numbers to all those odds. It's called the Book of Odds, and you can search on just about anything— weather-related or otherwise. Each calculation comes backed up with some kind of source material and a statement of the site's confidence in the actual number.

Posted 8:58 p.m. Oct 14, 2009 — Updated 8:58 p.m. Oct 14, 2009

Nate Johnson

Ever wanted to know what the odds were of being struck by lightning?

What about the odds of being injured by a waterspout or dust devil?

There's a new website that's putting numbers to all those odds. It's called the Book of Odds, and you can search on just about anything — weather-related or otherwise. Each calculation comes backed up with some kind of source material and a statement of the site's confidence in the actual number.

For example, you are more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 835,000) than to be injured in a mudslide (1 in 79,830,000) in a given year. One neat — although admittedly potentially morbid — feature is comparing the odds of various things. For example, if you look up being "struck by lightning", you'll learn that your lightning-strike odds (1 in 835,500) are about the same as the odds of someone being killed by falling off a ladder (1 in 853,600).

What's the rarest weather event that's happened to you?

(H/T: Mashable)

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