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"The odds a golfer will be injured while playing golf in a year are 1 in 644. The odds a householder with an income of $100,000 or more will spend money on men's coats, jackets, blazers, or vests in a year are 1 in 1.56. The odds of you being eaten by a shark...well, that depends on where you live, how old you are, and what you do for a living. But a new website called Book of Odds can tell you that. \nThe site launched today (we've been playing with the closed beta for a couple of days), and it's a very interesting project, described by the authors as a \"reference on the odds of everyday life.\" It's a very comprehensive knowledge base that is equally similar to Wikipedia and Boing Boing: you can use it for serious research (the odds statements on the site adhere to standards of quality and always have a source; for more on that, read about their methodology), but it can also be a cool resource for odd facts. \nThe Book of Odds took three years to create, and it shows. The site is loaded with features; you can search it through regular or advanced search, browse it through categories (such as Accidents &amp; Death), or use a cool visual browser to navigate through the data. Statements in the Book contain - besides the textual part - a confidence index, a graphical representation of the odds, sources, comments and tags, as well as a list of other occurrences with similar odds. You can also create your own personalized Book of Odds and compare it to other users, and you can suggest new odds to be added to the Book. On top of all that the entire site is smooth, polished, and easy to navigate. \nAs far as the content goes, the creators of the site tried very hard to sprinkle bits of interesting info here and there, even if you haven't specifically been looking at it. But the amount of data on the site can be overwhelming. For example, if you type \"computer\" in the search, you'll get a long list of very similar statements (such as \"The odds an employed person 16 or older is a computer programmer are 1 in 342.9\") which might be tedious to browse through. We can't say if this is good or bad; depending on whether you're on the site to do research or to have fun, it could be either. \nOne thing is certain; in a world where you have some amazing sources of knowledge such as Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, the Book of Odds manages to create another great resource, offering you tons of data you won't easily find anywhere else. \n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/10/14/book-of-odds/>