Cerulean Cordillera

Archive for March 20th, 2009

Found this in the New York Times today.

Apparently some artist is becoming the defiant voice regarding unreleased data on deaths and casualties for the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. I read through the article, and I noticed this particular quote:

“I’m really tired of this bull,” Mr. Ai said Thursday in a telephone interview from Beijing, where he has a large studio. “I went there, and I saw the school building collapsed, and next to it is a building that is fine.”

This makes me remember the argument often used by global warming skeptics, that goes something like this:

“I’m really tired of this bull,” A global warming skeptic said Thursday in a whatever interview from wherever. “This year has been colder than last year and they’re telling us the globe is supposed to be warming.”

I think what we ought to be on the lookout for is these kinds of “common sense” analysis. Being in Engineering has taught me enough for me to know that when you get into the details of scientific principles, many things are nowhere near intuitive. This is an artist who comes up with clever ideas of visual presentation. I will not take his analysis on construction seriously. Now… if instead of him, it’s some renowned civil or structure engineer talking, then it might be worth more attention. But if he’s an artist, he could be right, or he could be wrong, but it’s nothing better than a guess.

For the record, I went to his blog and read quite a number of his posts. Being able to understand Mandarin helped me quite a bit. The real discussion-worthy posts were highly opinionated and most of them left no supporting evidence. On top of that, there seems to be at least eight straight pages of blogging posts where every single post is a carbon copy of an initial “5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake Student Deaths Research” project introduction. What was the point? To boost the apparent number of Wenchuan-related articles?

See, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be skeptical about many of the Chinese Government’s position on things. However, if NY Times is going to bring in someone like this, it’s going to sway a lot of people’s views emotionally, without reason. And that’s an example of the dangers of media.