[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
> Mirco Romanato wrote:
>>
>> We are, not You are, here all excited about a tragedy in developing,
>> feed by TV, web and others. The 10.000 dead for the earthquake and the
>> tsunami are completely forgotten. The actual damage of the earthquake
>> and of the tsunami is not considered.
>
> The tsunami and its impact are NOT forgotten.  I have friends in Japan.
>  One of them, I have no idea if she is alive or dead.
>
>> Statistically solar kill 11 times more than nuclear. But it is people
>> falling from floor. They can die in droves, as radiation is not involved.
>
> I have seen this meaningless statistic repeated frequently in recent days.
>  It has no significance whatsoever:  the same type of reasoning could be
> used to prove that the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. were of no importance.  I
> could take the trouble to explain the maximum potential for damage, the
> aftereffects, damage to environment, the link between personal action and
> damage..... but all this really should be within the capacity of the people
> who are citing these numbers, so I feel it would be waste of my time.

But statistically 9/11 IS just as meaningless. But the things that
really get the big numbers, heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer's,
diabetes, just aren't interesting day after day. They don't sell
papers.

You should know more than most Richard that we are pattern recognition
machines. People die of a heart attack, it is a tragedy for a second,
but it isn't "interesting". Radiation is far more interesting than
falling off your roof scraping snow off of your solar panels. A
collapsing coal mine is more interesting than someone dying in a
typical industrial accident.

Part of the overall problem with society is that WE ALL generally have
a poor ability to account properly for risk.

Our recent discussion of rogue asteroids is a great example. We have
about a 1 in 3 chance of dying of heart disease, a 1:20,000 chance of
dying of an asteroid, but we spend lots more money on the 1:50,000
things like airplane crashes and the like because they are
"interesting" to our brains.

-Kelly