mountains out of molehills

Posted by Jen
Saturday, February 05, 2011

It was supposed to snow in Houston yesterday. Winter storm. Absolutely. Seemed like that’s all the local news was covering (or, that’s what I can imagine. We DID lose cable for 3 days). Everything basically shut down in preparation for the storm. No school. Basketball game cancelled (no matter that the grandparents came down from Arkansas just to see the grandson play in that game). Everything cancelled. It didn’t. Snow. We woke up. No snow. All the talk of building a snowman was for not. Our poor boys hardly ever get to see snow (we are SO looking forward to Utah next month!). We were sad to have no snow.

Ever think we get too much information? Information about events that don’t come to fruition? Like: “It’s going to SNOW (ok, winter storm)! Let’s shut everything down!!” Such a small, localized example I’m using of media hype. But, check out the graphic below for more intense examples. If you visit Information is Beautiful, you’ll find this real time timeline of global media scare stories.

Image via NOTCOT.ORG via Information is Beautiful


Pretty graphic, right? (Not so pretty content.) By the way, see the tall pink bar on the graph? Guess what that represents? Swine Flu. The light blue? Killer wifi. Killer wifi?

Craving something lighter? How about Time travel in popular film and TV? The Information is Beautiful website offers visualizations of several different ideas, issues, knowledge and data. It’s quite entertaining. Something to do when you are ‘un-snowed’ in…

P.S. Although it didn’t snow yesterday as was predicted, we did have a few instances of inconveniences: rolling black outs, took the husband 2 hours to get to work due to closed roads and icy bridges, and no cable for 3 days (I actually enjoyed that one). That was yesterday. Today? Sunny and Beautiful. Love it!


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