On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Louis_Schmier wrote:
> Read an editorial in today's NY TIMES. Very instructive on this issue:
>
> [A] simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to
> amplify fear than it is to assuage it. Consider the shark attacks that
> have occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina this summer. The
> temptation is to call them not merely shark attacks but ["a spate of shark
> attacks" or "a wave of shark attacks," or even "a summer of shark
> attacks." The temptation is [also to say that they have "culminated" in
> the fatal attacks, separated by only two days, on David Peltier, a
> 10-year-old boy, in Virginia Beach and Sergei Zaloukaev, a 27-year-old
> graduate student, on the Outer Banks.
> These words imply that there is something more than coincidence at
> work, and it is that something more, as well as the sharks themselves,
> that we tend to worry about. What that language teaches us to fear is
> being [caught up in a trend of shark attacks rather than being the victim
> of an isolated incident. But with the exception of the attack on Mr.
> Zaloukaev's swimming companion, these have all been isolated incidents.
> They are grouped together only in time and by the fact — self-evident as
> it sounds — that every victim was in the water when the attack took place.
> It is the [dull duty of science to remind us of such banalities. Shark
> experts, statisticians and people who do not fear numbers have remarked
> that you cannot talk sensibly about the shark attacks this summer unless
> you talk first about the sheer number of humans who flock to the beaches
> in the summertime. Shark attacks will drop off precipitously now that
> Labor Day has come, because there will be less human flesh in the water to
> be bitten. This sounds callous, because it does not personalize the shark
> attacks that have already occurred. For the families and friends of David
> Peltier and Sergei Zaloukaev, of course, the attacks — and their grief —
> are extremely personal. Every one-in-a- million tragedy reminds us that
> statistics always look impersonal until you become a statistic. There is
> always a chance, perhaps obscured by the daunting fact of so many
> beachgoers, that some new pressure on sharks, like a decline in natural
> prey, is driving them inshore. But at present, the idea of an
> environmentally driven shark-attack trend is no more founded in fact than
> the hypothesis of one conservative commentator that the whole thing is the
> fault of Bill Clinton, or at least of tighter shark-fishing limits passed
> during his presidency.
> Twenty-eight children in the United States were killed by falling
> television sets between 1990 and 1997. As the Statistical Assessment
> Service, a nonprofit organization that analyzes the media's use of
> statistics, points out, that is four times as many people as were killed
> by great white shark attacks in the 20th century. Loosely speaking, this
> means that "watching `Jaws' on TV is more dangerous than swimming in the
> Pacific." Life is full of things that carry more risk than swimming in the
> ocean. Most of them are inevitably the byproducts of daily life, like
> falling televisions and car accidents, because daily life is where we
> spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral fears aroused by the
> unlikely threat of a shark attack, but it is also far more lethal.
>
>
>
>
> Make it a good day.
You forgot to mention that sharks go where there are plenty of bait fish.
Just as it is said "where Id is,there shall ego be."Similarly we can say
"Where bait is,there will sharkey be"
Michael Sylvester,PhD
Daytona Beach,Florida
