from Innumeracy:

A man who travels a lot was concerned about the possibility of a bomb on board his plane. He determined the probablity of this, found it to be low but not low enough for him, so now he always travels with a bomb in his suitcase. He reasons that the probability of two bombs being on board would be infinitesimal.

Some Wild Numbers:

it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass...Modern Homo sapiens is probably less than 10 trillion seconds old and the subsequent complete disappearance of the Neanderthal version of early Homo sapiens occurred only a trillion or so seconds ago. Agriculture's been here for approximately 300 billion seconds (ten thousand years), writing for about 150 billion seconds, and rock music has been around for only about two billion seconds.

damn. how's that for some mother-fucking perspective?