Should we be cowering in our vintage bomb shelters after the underwear bomber was foiled last week? Nate Silver, the fantastic statistics geek, pulled together the numbers in a great post at FiveThirtyEight.com called “The Odds of Airborne Terror”. To summarize: not all that great.

Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo, created this nice graphic of of Silver’s work:

I wish I could remember where I read this, but someone pointed out that if the odds of being on a plane with one bomb are so infinitesimal, the odds of being on any particular plane with two bombs must be unimaginable. It would stand to reason then, the most effective thing you could do to protect yourself from being on a flight with a bomb-carrying terrorist is to always carry a bomb yourself. (Just kidding, folks.)

FiveThirtyEight.com: The Odds of Airborne Terror

Gizmodo: The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart

Happy Holidays

So LBi, a company in the UK upgraded their phones and found a fantastic way to repurpose the old ones.

Here’s an video of the thing going up.

And to make it sweeter, there’s a way to send instructions to the Mobile Mobile using your keyboard. It’s sort of laggy so it’s probably better in the middle of their night (8 hours ahead of the West Coast.)

Different takes on holiday music, one loopy, the other astonishing and clever.

First up is a production of Nutcracker that Maurice Béjart made. A very odd evening with strange musical interpolations, there is one very charming moment…the Waltz of the Flowers with accordion obbligato.

(If you’d like to see the complete Béjart Nutcracker, it’s here.)

Second up is my favorite holiday album of recent years, Béla Fleck and and the Flecktones – Jingle All the Way. Fleck’s nouveau banjo playing is always worth a listen, but this album is delightful with its cleverness and beautiful playing.

One high point is their take on Jingle Bells, complete with Tuvan throat-singing. You can listen to it: Jingle Bells. Another Tuvan-tinged chestnut is: What Child is This – Dyngyldai.  (Hit the triangle symbol to play…won’t work in Firefox.)

I think you can listen to the entire album for free at Yahoo Music. If you have a subscription, you can grab it at Rhapsody. And if you want to buy it, head over to Amazon.

Happy Holidays!