Adele - ECHIDNE of the snakes

I have do to the decision that it is no more useful than the old system.We don't let a world service source with one set of properly verified news and information, a position we could all turn to to get the latest info and advice.

Instead, we get hundreds, thousands of different news-makers, all scraping the same minimal information for insights and text.

s I followed the intelligence on Japan over the weekend, it was incredibly hard not to get upset over how many reactor buildings had exploded, how many were at peril of partial core meltdown, and what all this might mean.

Part of the job in this typeface is the appointment of the reactors.Explosions at reactor Number 3 get upset with "the third reactor exploding."But generally this is caused by the demand to put something out there all the time, even though no new evidence has appeared.Thus, for a point of some 8 hours, I say that yet another reactor building had exploded when it was still really the same second building.

This wouldn't perhaps be as confusing if I stuck to just one seed of news.But I kept surfing while trying to see something more reliable on the several types of meltdowns and their probabilities and consequences, until I realised that nobody knows what will happen, given the rare timbre of these events.All the assertions the experts make are subjective probabilities, not objective probabilities, because we don't make the latter.This is untested ground.The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl catastrophieswere not the sami as this one and the info they can offer to us is but partial.

A much less worrisome but still annoying aspect of the 24/7 news cycle is the motivation to juxtapose human interest stories with horrible numbers near the dead.To have empathy is important, and human interest stories trigger it more easily.But when news keep coming every few minutes, the human interest stories about how the furniture moved or someone got stranded on a train simply don't fit together with the following information of a thousand bodies found on a beach.The former trivializes the latter.

I'm not blaming those who put together the live blogs or save the articles.But if we want 24/7 coverage of catastrophies, we are passing to get raw coverage, clips put together with minimal explanations.

My thoughts are with the mass of Japan.