Bird’s-Eye: From terrorizing anarchists to kiddie-stealing pervs, we overestimate the dangers of life. Part of the reason is the media (“If it bleeds, it leads”), but part lies inside us, and it narrows our possibility of joy. We look at why it’s safer to live dangerously, why you should let your kids play outside, unsupervised, most of all why you shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes.

* Live Dangerously: It’s Safer London Times

Cycling without a helmet to work is actually safer than driving in a car, he asserts, in the face of British Medical Association figures that show that a cyclist is 11 times more likely to die on the roads than a person travelling by car. How? Because though cyclists are more likely to die in road accidents than motorists, road accidents account for only 1.4 per cent of all deaths. Whereas heart and lung disease account for more than half of all deaths with heart disease killing a third of us. People who cycle 25 miles a week halve their risk of heart disease so more cyclists lives are extended by exercise than ended by accidents. Actuarial data reveals that for every year of life lost through cycling accidents, 20 are gained.

Editor’s Note: We bid a sad farewell to longtime source The London Times, which this week instituted a paywall for its pieces.

* Why Does ‘Go Play Outside’ Sound Crazy? Lenore Skenazy Guardian

“Why would you want to put children in harm’s way?” That, put simply (and minus a lot of the yelling), is what I have been asked on 10 TV shows, 31 radio interviews, and an avalanche of blogs for about a week now – ever since I declared last Saturday “Take our children to the park … and leave them there” day…. It almost seems that, the safer our society becomes, the more we feel compelled to ramp up the fears about unlikely dangers. Which brings us to the one that made “Park” day so controversial. Parents are worried their children will be kidnapped the moment they turn their backs. That’s understandable, because it’s a crime we see every day on TV – often the same crime, shown over and over, because it is ratings gold.

But how common is it really? Warwick Cairns, author of How to Live Dangerously, crunched the numbers, and now asks: If, for some strange reason, you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would we have to leave him outside, unattended, in England, for that to be statistically likely to happen? (Take a guess before you click!)

* This American Life‘s Ira Glass on Being Wrong Slate Magazine

I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It’s not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.