On Conan O’Brien’s TBS late-night show Conan, he has a segment where he invites his fans to submit videos (through YouTube) of errors they’ve found on the show. Periodically he’ll play one of these ‘Fan Correction’ videos on the show and hilariously refute the supposed error.
Well let’s see him refute this one!
I wrote in May 2010 about “The Boy Who Cried ‘Car Bomb’, pointing out that the constant barrage of terrorism false-alarms (and fire drills) has made us less capable of dealing properly with actual emergencies. It hearkens back to the age-old fable of the boy who cried ‘wolf,’ which serves as a cautionary tale about being honest, and about the natural human reaction to real or perceived dishonesty. The boy cries ‘wolf’ over and over when there is no wolf, tricking the villagers. Finally, when there is really a wolf attacking the sheep, the villagers ignore the boy’s cries, assuming that he is lying again.
Fire drills and spurious terror alerts aren’t ‘lies,’ per-se, but they have a similar effect on people. When somebody showed up at Arlington National Cemetery last week, claiming to have explosives in his backpack and saying that he had planted devices around the Pentagon, my gut instinct was to ignore it. I assumed, rightly in this case, that it was just another pointless false-alarm. But when there is really a bomb planted at a major landmark, after a decade of constant fear-mongering, people won’t evacuate quite as quickly as they would have if they hadn’t been needlessly evacuated twenty other times before. Likewise, the constant fire drills in most buildings (especially those with federal offices in them) have numbed us to the alarms and most of us just ignore them now. I doubt that will serve us well when the building is really on fire. I contend that unnecessary fire drills make us less safe, not more so.
What else has gotten so repetitious, so needlessly annoying, and so consistently incorrect that most people ignore it? Severe weather warnings. When it comes to tornado warnings, most National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices have a false-alarm ratio in the 80-90 percent range. I would venture a guess that their false alarm ratio for other severe weather events is similarly high. I get text messages whenever a severe weather warning is issued in my area, and it’s not uncommon for a single moderate storm cell to generate a string of five or ten warnings over an hour or two . . . all to warn me about an average, run-of-the-mill summer thunderstorm that comes and goes over ten or fifteen minutes without causing any damage. I have a weather radio that can be configured to provide an audio alert when there is severe weather in the area, and I’ve turned it off because the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio was almost all noise. Out of literally hundreds of times it sounded, it provided me with useful, important, actionable information maybe two or three times. The annoyance wasn’t worth it for the minimal benefit.
And, guess what! Like fire alarms and terror warnings, the overbearing and absurd overflow of weather warnings makes it less likely that people will have their weather radios on, or their cell phones subscribed to alert text messages, and less likely that they will know when real severe weather is bearing down on them. Thankfully, some people are beginning to notice this—like meteorologist James Spann at ABC 33/40 in Alabama. It is comforting to know that I am not completely alone on this.
So what’s the solution? Fire alarms should only sound when there is a fire. Terror alerts should only go out when authorities are reasonably certain something real is happening. Weather alerts should only go out when there is actual, dangerous weather happening (and alerts should only go out to people who might actually be affected by it). Don’t cry ‘wolf’ when there isn’t a wolf. Reserve the warnings for serious, urgent situations; if we do that, we make it much more likely that people will take them seriously.
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction, but many of my favorites in the genre did a poor job of actually predicting the future. The proof of that is that many of my beloved sci-fi events and stories, written to occur well in the future, have already ‘happened.’ If their writers had been right about what the late twentieth and early 21st centuries had in store, we would be living right now in a world of genetically engineered Ricardo Montalbáns, sentient HAL’s and Skynets, time travelling Scott Bakulas with holographic Dean Stockwells, mechanical Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and ape slave-drivers. Fun.
Anyway, here are a handful of science fiction events that, according to their own timelines, have already ‘happened’:
Why do we care so much about politicians who are unfaithful in their personal lives? We have spent so much time, money, effort, and valuable broadcast time on politicians’ infidelities that they are seared in our memories.
We all know the stories of President Bill Clinton (D) and Monica Lewinsky, Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA 6th) and Callista Bisek (now Gingrich), Representative Gary Condit (D-CA 15th) and Chandra Levy, Senator Larry Craig (R-IL) and his bathroom stall, Governor Jim McGreevey (D-NJ) and Golan Cipel, Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) and María Belén Chapur, Senator John Edwards (D-NC) and Rielle Hunter, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) and Patty Baena, and Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY 9th) and his Twittered . . . um . . . bulge. You will notice that this list is a bipartisan affair; this is not a proclivity unique to either Republicans or Democrats, or more prevalent on one side or the other.
There are occasional instances where these infidelities justified the attention they got, at least to a point.
Clinton, in lying about his affair under oath, committed a felony that would have sent any other American to prison, which is certainly a newsworthy matter (and certainly qualifies as an impeachable ‘high crime’). Sanford, in abandoning his post as Governor of South Carolina to play around with his Argentinian mistress without letting anybody know where he went, should have been impeached under the state’s impeachment clause (which allows for impeachment in cases of any ‘serious misconduct in office,’ even if it’s not strictly illegal). Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom, which is a crime (although, arguably, not a particularly serious one). Edwards has been accused of violating campaign finance laws in using campaign funds to cover up his affair with Hunter and, once again, the possible crime warrants some public attention . . . although, considering Edwards is not currently in or seeking elective office, I’m not sure of its national media relevance.
Over the years I have read quite a bit by and about Stephen Hawking. Hawking, a brilliant theoretical physicist and cosmologist, excels at communicating complex scientific concepts to laymen. His most well-known work, A Brief History of Time, was first published in 1988 and has sold well over ten million copies. It is among my favorite works on a scientific subject; after I finished reading it I actually understood the basic concepts behind the theory of relativity and a number of other heady cosmological subjects that had escaped my thorough comprehension previously.
Hawking’s book was more effective in broadening my understanding of the universe than twelve years of public-school science classes ever were. You can take that as a compliment for Hawking, an insult for the public schools, or some combination of both.
In 2010, Hawking and fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow released a new ‘popular’ scientific book called The Grand Design, tackling the subjects of quantum physics, M-theory, and the origins of the universe. I picked up a copy (for the Kindle) and it finally worked its way up to the top of my reading list last month. Like A Brief History of Time, The Grand Design is an easy read that manages to communicate very complex material to regular folks like you and me. You will not find yourself bogged down in formulas or minutia, but you will find yourself soaking up the key concepts.
In describing quantum physics, Hawking and Mlodinow are as effective in The Grand Design as Hawking was in A Brief History of Time describing general relativity. Having finished the book, quantum physics no longer seems to be completely beyond my comprehension. Oh, I am no quantum physicist—I never will be—but the basics of quarks and gluons, quantum probability, and how quantum theory relates to the theory of relativity are no longer foreign to me. At least at a basic level, I get it now. This is where Hawking has always excelled, and where he and Mlodinow continue to excel. They have taken something seemingly incomprehensible and made it make a lot of sense.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
