There was a tornado in NYC today

[conuly]

This is unusual, but hardly unprecedented - there is a tornado in NYC about once every five to ten years. The last one, which twisted off our gutter from the roof and destroyed half the trees on our block, was apparently six years ago, so that's about right.

So why is it that every time there is a tornado, right on schedule, the news acts like it's a flabbergastingly unprecedented "Wow, you may've scoffed at the silly tornado warning, but aaaaah turns out it wasn't misdirected!" freak occurrence instead of a totally predictable event, made even more predictable by meteorology?

Once every five to ten years. That means two or three times between starting kindy and graduating college. Surprising and unusual, but actually not that unexpected. The guy running our sim has kindly turned off "Godzilla attack", but accidentally left "tornado" activated on the natural disasters tab. (Also, he forgot to use the cheat codes, which is why we don't have cold fusion yet.)

Comments

[redbird]

I slept through a lot of very small quakes when I was living in New York, and definitely noticed the one centered under Virginia that shook the whole Northeast. So yes, we have quakes, but I don't worry about that the way I did in Seattle, where I paid much less attention than previously to the hurricane season forecasts.