This post was published in March 2011, so the information in the post or about me in the sidebar may no longer be correct.

“Screw luck”

Via @kyleve, a great post on the Japanese earthquake:

Far and away the worst thing that happened in the earthquake was that a lot of people drowned. Your thoughts and prayers for them and their families are appreciated. This is terrible, and we’ll learn ways to better avoid it in the future, but considering the magnitude of the disaster we got off relatively lightly. (An earlier draft of this post said “lucky.” I have since reworded because, honestly, screw luck. Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. Decades of good engineering, planning, and following the bloody checklist are why this was a serious disaster and not a nation-ending catastrophe like it would have been in many, many other places.)

This is one to read: Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake


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