Tag: images

Climbing Mt. Improbable

transforming iowa corn silos into ice climbing walls, temperatures permitting

Briggs spends most winter nights hosing down a quartet of grain silos on a friend’s farm – and relies on the Corn Belt’s frigid temperatures to transform the water into frozen walls of ice that tower 20m straight up. “By the time he’s done, the ice encasing the outside of the silos is 1m thick in spots – and ready for the onslaught of ice climbers drawn to this strange marriage of farming and extreme sports.”

Media Innumeracy

Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.

2013-08-25: Media reporting

2021-02-22: Vaccine effectiveness is a great example of media innumeracy:

It is imperative to dispel any ambiguity about how vaccine efficacy shown in trials translates into protecting individuals and populations. The mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were shown to have 94–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, calculated as 100 × (1 minus the attack rate with vaccine divided by the attack rate with placebo). It means that in a population such as the one enrolled in the trials, with a cumulated COVID-19 attack rate over a period of 3 months of ~1% without a vaccine, we would expect 0.05% of vaccinated people would get diseased.