Spot-On SMBC Comic about Scientific "Findings"

The comic-strip author this one.

Mouseover text: "Somewhere, there's a scientist reading this, wonder[ing] why I made a comic with no hyperbole."

Some scientists get all the breaks pic.twitter.com/l327NT5vFd

— Adam J Calhoun (@neuroecology) June 14, 2019

Visualization of the Tsunami's Propagation (and a Few Thoughts)

Here is a very pretty vizualization of the tsunami that arose from the magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan. Somehow I tend to treat these things with a mixture of scientific fascination and more common human emotions.

One of the impressive things about the natural disaster is that the coast of Japan has apparently shifted by 8 feet. Also impressive is the fact that earth's axis has been shifted by almost 4 inches. The part that I think I find the scariest is the issue of nuclear meltdown. I'm more used to extreme situations like this in things like SimCity, where it doesn't actually count.

One of the reasons I find this scary is that I am from Los Angeles, so I automatically wonder whether something like this will happen there while I'm still around to witness it. I know it's all hands on deck at Caltech when earthquakes occur, but magnitude 8.9 is pretty damn scary.

(Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson for the visualization.)

Nature's Casino: Catastrophe Insurance and Heavy Tails

Courtesy David Richard, here is an interesting (but very long!) article on catastrophe insurance.

The part that was most interesting to me was the discussion of heavy-tailed phenomena like catastrophes and how one prices insurance for them as a result of that. (The mathematical problem is that the events are so rare that one does not have a large amount of data to get good results by itself. One of the things around this at which the article hints briefly is to use physical models to generate tons of data and then use that to help with the predictions, though that was tangential to the article's crux.)

Also, while the article is interesting, I do find it a bit creepy that there are basically gamblers betting on future Katrinas and that that has become an enormous business since that disaster struck. (The cynic in me isn't surprised, but I do feel somehow disappointed.)

Finally, the author of the article, Michael Lewis, also wrote Moneyball (which has a more baseball-oriented theme).