Ubiquitous Tornadoes?

By -
I was having lunch at a pub where the TV is tuned to the Weather Channel all day. I glanced up, and they were showing a graphic about how remarkably quiet this tornado season has been. In fact, "Throughout much of 2015, tornado activity has been near record low..."

Not five minutes later, I overheard two guys talking at the bar. One of them said, "And I can't believe how many tornadoes we're having: it seems like we get one every day!" The other fellow heartily agreed that we have been seeing an extraordinarily high number of tornadoes. (In fact, the U.S. gets far more than one tornado a day at this time of year, even in an especially quiet season.)

On matters that do not concern their immediate work or personal relationships, people will believe whatever they are predisposed to believe. Facts play no role in forming most such beliefs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more