As he approached passersby Saturday, Patrick Corcoran said "Is there anything you'd like to know about tsunamis?" In many cases, the answer was yes. Thus began a series of impromptu lectures on big waves, subduction zones and the real tsunami danger in the Pacific Northwest's not far-off quakes, but close-up ones.Via KGW.
Also too, Chris at Good Schist has a post pointing out some of the execrable "reporting" that took place yesterday about the tsunami. He's requesting other examples of either cringe-inducing MSM reports, or geobloggy posts castigating, clarifying or correcting such stories. I left a link to my post yesterday on Rick Sanchez's request for a translation of 9 meters to "English," and to a post earlier today at Phreatic Ramblings tearing apart the same broadcast. I read the transcript at the latter link, and was utterly appalled. Sanchez, if you shut your goddamned yap long enough for the guy to finish a sentence, it might give you an opportunity to learn something. So if you've seen a news report that made you queasy, or a blog post that took such a report down, drop Chris a comment.
I think it would be a really good thing to start building a geoblogospheric portfolio of this sort of asshattery on the media's part with respect to geology-related news particularly, and science news broadly. There are quite a number of us that howl about our science-illiterate press on a regular basis, but it might be good to have a key post for each major event like Haiti and Chile. I nominate Chris' post as the one for Chile.
