Image of debris Tweeted by USAToday.
First, credit where credit is due — Bryan Caskey came up with the Rainman bit.
He said that this morning when I responded to this alert from the BBC:
A further 122 objects potentially from missing Malaysian flight identified by satellite, Malaysian minister says http://bbc.in/1duQCP9
By saying, “122? Exactly?”
Not 121. Not 123. One hundred and twenty-two pieces of wreckage, exactly. I mean, come on. Now even Rainman could fix the fragments in a debris field floating in the ocean that precisely. Toothpicks scattered on a diner floor, sure. But not pieces of pieces floating in the deep blue sea. How do you know, for instance, that two or three of them aren’t the above-water part of one piece that’s mostly submerged?
And it wasn’t just the BBC — everybody was dutifully reporting that exactly 122 objects were spotted. The thing that got me was that the Beeb said it was 122 further objects. Similarly, USAToday reported that they were 122 new objects — like you could tell these objects from others spotted before.
Yeah. OK…
One senses that these news organizations have been so starved for substantive, hard information about what happened to this flight and the people on it that they will lunge at anything that looks factual and precise.
No matter how absurd such precision seems, if you stop and think about it…
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