Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Wet, from a water standpoint

My not-yet-scientific impression is that it's (ahem) unusual for Fox News to quote the dear leader verbatim when he, you know, starts to ramble a little bit:

Later Tuesday, he tweeted another video, thanking the "incredible men and women who have done such a great job in helping with Florence."

"This is a tough hurricane. One of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water," Trump said in the video. "Rarely have we had an experience like it. And it certainly is not good."

For some reason, a quote from the Thacker-Packer era has stuck with me all these decades. The reference is to Glenn Sudhop, then playing center for N.C. State: "Without Sudhop, State's the shortest team in the conference, from a height standpoint."



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Saturday, March 29, 2014

Today in making stuff up

For you fans of how the public understanding of natural disasters is created, here's the upper-left ear from the Drudge Report (still leading with Friday's Los Angeles earthquake as of this writing*). It's standard Drudge, meaning "links allegedly related to the top story, with ellipses," and we're especially interested in the third and fifth ones, which (ahem) appear to link to the (kaff) same story.

The first of those is true-ish, in that it pretty closely resembles something that a not-quite-accurately identified person said:

Jones said Friday’s quake was 10 times larger than the March 17 magnitude-4.4 quake near Encino. She added that every quake has a chance of leading to something bigger.

“Every earthquake has a 5 percent chance of being followed by something larger. The fact that this had a foreshock doesn’t particularly increase that probability,” she said.
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