Sunday, February 28, 2010

Name That Heuristic!

Five years after a major and mediagenic tsunami, there's a tsunami warning along the west coast of North America as a result of the earthquake in Chile. If there's a heuristic besides "be really stupid" that describes this, I don't know what it is:

After I got back to the car [a reporter] came over and pointed out the apparent low tide. Woh! I had never seen anything like it. It looked lower than the lowest tide I had ever seen at La Jolla shores. After watching it for about 10 minutes, I did exactly what you are warned not to do during a suck out during a tsunami. Yeh, that’s right, I walked out there.

At least the people in Thailand could say they didn't know what the low tide meant, and didn't have an official warning. This person (and others like him) didn't have that excuse, and still went for a walk on the seabed. What would his friends have said if he'd been swept out? That he didn't realize the danger? I suppose that's true.

1 comment:

dbonfitto said...

It's a chiropractic blog. The interesting thing would have been if the fellow wasn't an idiot.