Why the Weather Channel's TOR:CON index is humbug

I live in the Central Time Zone of the United States where severe weather is relatively common. I have a NOAA weather radio because I do not want to be killed in my bed at night by a tornado. I am also an anxious person. Lately, the focus of my anxiety has been the weather. So I am part of the Weather Channel's key demographic: Persons Who Are Easily Terrified.

Today, there is a chance of severe thunderstorms from Northern Minnesota to Nebraska to Northern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Damaging winds, hail, and isolated tornadoes are the "primary risks" for persons living in this large portion of the lower 48. This no mere chance of severe weather: the Weather Channel describes it as a "Weekend Storm Threat." Chances of severe weather are often described as threats in order to make the consumer of Weather Channel products feel more threatened. Those feeling threatened are more likely to compulsively consume Weather Channel products so as to "track" and "stay on top of" any severe weather that may or may not develop.

One Weather Channel product designed for this purpose, I believe, is the TOR:CON, or the tornado condition index. According to the Weather Channel,

The TOR:CON values range from 0 to 10. A value of 4 means that there is about a 40% chance of a tornado within 50 miles of a location in the specified area of severe thunderstorm activity. This also means that there is a 60% chance that a tornado will NOT occur.

I have a habit of freaking out when the TOR:CON values for my area are high. But I've thought about it, and I believe that I have no good reason to, even when the TOR:CON value for my area is a whopping 10, or a 100% chance of a tornado within 50 miles of my location.

A TOR:CON value is really the probability that there will be a tornado within a circular area with a radius of 50 miles. The area of a circle is π multiplied by the radius squared. So such a circular area measures approximately 7,854 square miles. Now, consider a worst-case scenario: a mile-wide EF-5 tornado traversing this circular area through its center and thus on the ground for a hundred miles. The area flattened by this tornado would therefore measure 100 square miles. If we divide 100 by 7,854, we obtain .0127. Therefore, if we assume that the TOR:CON for the area in question is 10, there is a 1.27% chance that a person in the area in question will be in the path of such a tornado. Is this something that a rational person should worry about? I don't think so.

Now, if you tell someone, even someone like me, that there is a 1.27% chance that I will be in the path of a tornado, that person will not respond with the trepidation required to keep him or her glued to The Weather Channel for the very latest updates on a very dangerous severe weather threat that could destroy everything in its path. Why, it could happen tomorrow, you know!

I am neither a mathematician nor a meteorologist. My analysis is admittedly overly simplistic. So, for example, perhaps my line of reasoning erroneously assumes that if there is a tornado in the area in question, there will be only one. But we all know that tornadoes often occur in bunches. What I think my reasoning accurately shows, however, is that the TOR:CON is inherently and deceptively alarmist. In order to get sufficiently worrisome TOR:CON values, one must increase the size of the area in question from, say, the square mile in which my house is located to a 50 square mile area with my house at its center. I think people like me (i.e., mathematically unsophisticated and unusually anxious) make a fallacious inference: for example, we infer from the fact that the TOR:CON value is five that the chance that a tornado will affect our neighborhoods is somewhere around 50 percent. And it obviously isn't.

This is only one of the reasons why I hate The Weather Channel.

Todd Rundgren, "Day Job"

From the outstanding 1993 album No World Order.



Don't quit your day job

Corporate-crybaby
A bit wiser and a whole lot older, feelin' bolder
Suckin' up to the last stockholder with a
Golden parachute slung over your shoulder

Jacked-up-B-boy
Another fool got stuck in the whirlpool
Lookin' for a fast break, not enough cake to go 'round
Another brother goes down, and he's out of the gene pool

Media-pimp
Day after day, night after night if the money is right
The campaign goes on to make right seem wrong
With computer animation and a hip-hop song

Land of opportunity, this is the
Stop
Don't quit your day job

Cowboy-politician
Suckin' up to the aristocracy
Not even sure if you like democracy
Tryin' to establish an american royalty, a personal dynasty

Priests-of-the-airwaves
Let the buyer beware, it's a jungle out there
So buy my advice and don't think twice
Then me and your money will go someplace sunny

Celebrity-stud-monkey
Kiss and tell, got a book to sell
'Cause you don't excel or do anything well
Since you slipped past thirty, better keep the sex dirty

Mo' money, mo' money, mo' money

(http://trconnection.com/lyrics/Song.21.4)

At least we don't need to worry about wicked ice giants.

Songs for lesli_hannah on her move to California

Here are some random songs about California for your listening pleasure.

For Your Further Enlightenment XIX

• Mother Jones: "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science"
• Salon: "A patriot's guide to still hating Obama for killing Osama: How dare this president take credit for the tireless work of George Bush and the power of torture?"
• Inside Higher Ed: "The Shirley Sherrod's of Academe?"
• Jane Mayer, The New Yorker: "Bin Laden Dead, Torture Debate Lives On"
• TechCrunch: "Here’s the guy who unwittingly live-tweeted the raid on Bin Laden"
• Paul Krugman, "Hume Day"
• The Daily Beast: "Why Osama bin Laden was not taken alive"
• Andrew Sullivan: "Sitting Is Deadly?"
• NPR: "Is the End Nigh? We'll Know Soon Enough" (What our contempt for critical thinking has wrought, Exhibit A)
• The Daily Beast: "The Right-Wing Talk-Radio Flameout"
• The Ticket: "McCain Ladies Feud with Glenn Beck" (As if you needed any further proof that Beck is a complete asshole. Hey, Glenn: you know what's ridiculous about your "fake vomiting session?" The fact that you are an ugly son of a bitch, that's what. The recession is ending and your fifteen minutes are up, Glenn. Now go fuck yourself.)

The Cowardly Generation

On May 13, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The Allies suddenly found themselves saddled with nearly three hundred thousand prisoners of war, including the bulk of General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Unable to feed or house their share, the British asked their American comrades to relieve them of the burden. And so, by the tens of thousands, German soldiers were loaded aboard Liberty Ships, which had carried American troops across the Atlantic. Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.

The “war on terror” is a very different kind of war, and the prisoners thereof are very different, too. It’s not just that a higher proportion of them appear to have been truly dedicated to the ideology in whose name they were fighting, or that they were unaffiliated with a government. It’s also that their numbers are small—a hamlet compared to the city-size P.O.W. population of 1945. In the nine years since the creation of the purpose-built prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a grand total of seven hundred and seventy-nine men (and boys—the youngest was fifteen years old when he was captured) have been sent there. It currently holds a hundred and seventy-two. Yet this relative handful of shackled, isolated prisoners has somehow been permitted to engender a miasma of popular fear and political cowardice that contrasts shamefully with the matter-of-fact courage of an earlier and simpler time.

—Hendrik Hertzberg, "Prisoners," The New Yorker, 18 April 2011

My First lesli_hannah Post

If you read lesli_hannah's blog, you know that she loves a good quotation and often posts them. I saw this one today on the profile of a Facebook friend and I had to post it here. And besides, I'm just too freaking busy to write the half dozen or so posts I've thought of the in the past few weeks. 

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."  

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974 

For Your Further Enlightenment XVIII

• Ezra Klein: "The Worst Idea in Washington"
• Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair: "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%"
• Marketplace: "Report: GE will pay taxes after all" (see XVII)
• Dahlia Lithwick, Slate: "Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong: The Obama administration's appalling decision to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a military trial" (My sentiments exactly.)
• Think Progress: "REPORT: Everything You Need To Know About The Koch Brothers"
• David Frum: "TARP Profit Proves It Was the Right Call"
• Talking Points Memo: "CBO: GOP Budget Would Increase Debt, Then Stick It To Medicare Patients"
• Fareed Zakaria, Time: "Are America's Best Days Behind Us?"
• Think Progress: "Pence Lets Truth Slip On Uncompromising Stance: ‘We’re Trying To Score A Victory For The Republican People’"
• John Cole, Balloon Juice: "I'd Add A Couple of Things"

For Your Further Enlightenment XVII

• Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast: "What's Killing NPR"
• Reuters: "Peanut allergy issue stirs controversy at Florida school" (This is a story about how small we can be.)
• Grist: "Bingaman tells the truth about gas prices, is lonely in doing so" (Related link: Jeff Bingaman, "Bingaman on Gasoline, Oil Prices," U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee)
• CNN: "South Dakota requires 3-day wait before abortion" (wherein we are introduced to condescending nanny-stater Dennis Daugaard, Governor of South Dakota, who said, "I think everyone agrees with the goal of reducing abortion by encouraging consideration of other alternatives. I hope that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices.")
• Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet: "Christian Intruders: New Law Will Force Women to Listen to Religious Lectures Before Getting an Abortion"
• Bruce Bartlett, Capital Gains and Games: "GOP Is Blowing It by Pandering to Tea Party"
• Ezra Klein: "Counterintuitive thoughts on how to be happy" 
• Ezra Klein: "GE paid no taxes in 2010" 
• Think Progress: "Despite Paying No Income Taxes, GE CEO Lauded His Company’s Patriotism In 2009 West Point Speech"
• Andrew Sullivan: "The Obama Effect" 
• Ezra Klein: "Republican Policies Don't Care about Poor People" 
• Think Progress: "In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27% While Worker Pay Went Up 2%"
• Andrew Sullivan, "Yglesias Award Nominee" (Sen. Scott Brown) 

A Dude from Barcelona that likes to draw stuff

A Facebook friend made me aware of Alex Noriega's blog, Stuff No One Told Me. Noriega is "a dude from Barcelona that likes to draw stuff." I'm following him now, and so should you. Here's a sampler of his work.