Journalism is Fun!

I admit that the Idaho State Journal isn't exactly the pinnacle of journalism. I doubt it's the pinnacle of anything.

But they still had a sentence that hopefully doesn't even meet their not-so-lofty standards. The article discusses a local weatherman who quit is weathermanning job to pursue his theories. Theories that hurriane Katrina (and, one is left to assume, Rita, and all of the duds L through P since there is no Q for some reason) formed, and I quote from the article here because of my incredible journalistic integrity, not to mention the incredible humor value of quoting this directly, when "Yakuza Mafia used a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima."

Fair enough. He quit his job because he's a lunatic. But then the authors of the story throw in this little gem. "Although the theories espoused by Stevens - scalar weapons, global dimming - are definitely on the scientific fringe today, there are thousands of Web sites that mention such phenomena."

I love it. I plan to quit my job to become a reporter so I can write stupid stories about stupid people and use that wonderful journalism contruct.

"Bob Smith thinks George Bush is an alien. Although the theories espoused by Smith- presidential robots, motorized hydraulic lips - are definitely on the scientific fringe today, there are hundreds of Web sites that mention such phenomena."

Hey, this is fun!

Hurricanes

It's pretty obvious that we're not very good at predictng the path of hurricanes. Ophelia even did a cute little loop just to throw everyine off her scent.

But it turns out that we are really, really bad at predicting the path of hurricanes. Here's a cool series of images showing the predicted path of Ophelia by the 5 "best" models (as well as the NHS forecast, which I think is just a consensus model based onthe other 5), and a black line showing where she actually went. (Wait a couple of seconds for it to update.)



This came from wunderground.com. You can also see the forecast vs. actual for Katrina.

Some of the data points look pretty good. But most look really bad.

Katrina

I try to keep the blog fairly light, so you'll have to excuse this serious post.

The Internet is becoming a place to get at incredible amounts of information, at all levels of "filtration". Suppose you're looking for information about areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. You can get accurate but very filtered information at any number of sites (msnbc, nytimes, etc.) You can get somewhat filtered data from somewhere like news.google.com, which compile lots of data from lots of sources, most of which are reputable but some of which are sketchy.

Then there is the unfiltered data. Stuff that could be totally wrong, and can easily give you a skewed impression of what's going on. That you can find at the nola.com weblog. That link will give you the latest postings, or click here for an archive of the postings I saw when I wrote this.

Quite simply, these postings are sickening. 5 people stranded here. 80 there. 100 here. All posted in the last hour.

I'll save any political commentary about how rescue operations should have been done faster. And I recognize that some of these posts might not be genuine. ("Hey, I'll post that there are 100 people trapped even though there is only 1 so they'll come and get me faster!") But I do think that this may be a case where the filtered headlines like "Convoys bring relief to New Orleans" might be somewhat misleading.