All Thoughts Being Equal

The New Yorker piece on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, provocatively titled "The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle," sent tremors through the Internet recently. (Oh yes, I will make all the quake puns I want, thank you very much.) It also happens to be a pile of hot street trash doing irresponsible things with some actual facts, but this is the New Yorker and they spell cooperation as "coöperation" so they're obviously untrustworthy. Who does the New Yorker talk to? Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at OSU Kenneth Murphy, director of FEMA for the Oregon-Washington-Idaho-Alaska region Jay Wilson, chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission Ian Madin, director of Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries  Kevin Cupples, city planner for Seaside, OR  Doug Dougherty, superintendent of schools for Seaside That's six sources, two of whom are people whose freaking jobs involve planning for the absolute worst, one...

Source: Travis Walton / WikiMedia I used to really like UFO stories, pretty much ever since I watched E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind , but then especially after picking up a book called Alien Encyclopedia in a third-grade book sale. It was great because the author presented both "real-life" stories and fictional characters with pretty much equal weight, so I learned about paranormal stuff and lots of science fiction at the same time. For a kids' book, it affords a surprising level of literacy in close-encounter stories (that is, stories from either abductees or contactees )—everything from Grays to Project Blue Book to Reptilians. At least, I thought it was surprising. Then I learned that pseudoscience is actually kinda boring . I'm still interested in those stories—for example, I listen to Coast to Coast AM —but more because I'm fascinated by the social phenomenon of telling close-encounter stories than the stories themselves. For exampl...