if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
A Boy Chased by Sharky Sharkies
by Hal_10000
Oh my God! Call the press! Shark attacks have quadrupled:
Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida’s Atlantic coast have left beachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes.
In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
‘The one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,’ said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. ‘As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites.’
Some experts suggest that an abundance of seals has attracted high numbers of sharks, while others believe that overfishing has hit their food chain. ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s a convenient excuse,’ Burgess said. Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. ‘You’ll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn’t in the past with some regularity,’ he said.
I have a theory that the media deliberately seek out “experts” whose mathematical training got no further than multiplication. Sharks attacks are very rare and the number of deaths will fluctuate massively (relatively speaking) from year to year. We had one death in 2007. We had four each in 2005 and 2006. We had eleven back in 2000, when the media freaked out. Four deaths in four months is nothing to write home about.
But it’s sharks. And it can be linked to global warming. So ... everybody panic!
Comments
Oooo! Well placed Izzard quote!
Not sexy sexy
If you want to get a good statistical analysis of shark attacks you have to normalize it. I’d break it up several ways; over longer periods of time (per decade would work), by total number of hours you have people in the water, by types of circumstances (swimming, wading, surfing), weather, type of shark, fatality vs non-fatality, and ocean conditions would seem like good places to start.
There are other ways to chart and measure that quantify what is really “normal” or not (based on a casual examination of the numbers I’ve seen over the last few decades, the current number of shark attacks is well within range of what can be expected for any given year).
I absolutely agree, SO. There are ways to study this scientifically. But the “four attacks in four months! Oh my!” sells more papers
If the sharks scare us out of the water then the sharks win! But I guess that’s what the liberal media wants!
Remember a few years ago when they had the video of the huge groups of sharks off of Florida? Fox News had a professor from a Florida university (I don’t remember which one) who was talking about it. The report went something like this:
Reporter: How do you explain these huge groups of sharks?
Professor: Well, the only logical explanation is that we have overfished their food supply, and now they are coming to get their revenge on humans.
Reported (shocked): Well...surely you mean that they are just searching for food..not trying to get revenge?
Professor: For God’s sake..this happens every year. This is just the first year you have video of it.
It was hysterical..you could tell the reporter was PISSED.
Professor: For God’s sake..this happens every year. This is just the first year you have video of it
Damn!! I just coughed milk through my nose.
Yunno, I’m sure there’s a way to connect this to the evolution debate we just had…
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Would it kill these “reporter” fuckers to maybe turn on the discovery channel once in a while?