Tragedy in Solana Beach

I was making the rounds at work today... We have a pretty good crop of avid lunch hour surfer regulars where I work in the golf biz, and the talk of the day was this tragic incident:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080425-1658-bn25shark7.html

As an occassional surfer (I'm not very good, BTW...), and since many of my friends and colleagues are surfers it really made me think a bit...

The crazy thing about the whole deal, was that I was listening to the book "Made to Stick"

http://www.madetostick.com/ on the drive in today.

The section I was listening to on the drive into work, "Credible", included a discussion of using statistics to help make your idea "stick". One example they used was in the form of a question:

"what causes more deaths per year - sharks or deer?"










Since all of you out there are way smarter than a caveman like me -> I'm sure you guessed correctly that it is actually deer that cause more fatalities per year.

As they said in the book - crazy to think that bambi kills more people every year than Jaws.

This example is a great example (discussed in the same section)- of the availability bias/error.

Nonetheless, my thoughts go out to the family of the swimmer who was lost today here in socal - it really was a terrible tragedy that put a damper on the folks here at work.