<![CDATA[From the journal Nature, as they like to say on NPR….
California residents may soon have something else to ponder along with the weather forecast in their morning news. Starting this Wednesday, seismologists are providing them with earthquake forecasts too.
The quake forecasts, which are produced by adding together some of the best models of earthquake activity, aim to tell residents the probability that an earthquake big enough to smash their windows will strike in the next 24 hours. A map of these probabilities will be posted daily at http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/step.
A few weeks back, I said in a public venue that I think people worry too much and should just get over it. If you live in a home built to withstand earthquakes, if your office is safe—and these are things a reasonable person would check if they lived in an earthquake zone—why the hell would they want to get an earthquake report every day? “I can’t come in today, there’s a chance the ground is going to shake….”]]>
One reply on “Not a forecast I really want to get….”
Unfortunately, despite taking the usual necessary precautions, people are still extremely paranoid to the point that they need all the possible infomation in order to be prepared and assured that they’re in fact ready for the “impending doom.”
I’m not sure it this is human nature or just true for a specific group of people, but I know plenty of family and friends that are like that, who fret endlessly until they see some sort of concrete proof or information. And then something else comes up, and they start fretting again.
On the one hand, it doesn’t hurt to know what to expect down the road. On the other, why waste your life worrying, when you can be doing something worthwhile? And if sh!t happens, can’t we just learn and move on?