“The coming storm” is a very short audible book I listened to from Michael Lewis. It is included in my audible plan and I just can’t resist the freebie. It’s a habit I have tried to get rid of for years, but… What I try to achieve have never be matched by what I actually achieve.
The book is about weather prediction, how accurate it has become, how companies sell the weather data which is in itself public and free. It is an interesting read when I am doing my chores. It also tells stories of two people, Kathy Sullivan, the first woman in space, who contributed to the weather data collection and analysis and D.J. Patil, who almost failed high school, but eventually became a mathematician and political advisor. Actually I am very interested in these two people who seem to have a lot of interesting things to say about themselves, but the book is too short to dwell on these characters.
The book mentioned an interesting phenomenon–the reason people don’t want to go to shelters when hearing the tornado warning is that people don’t think the tornado would hit their house. That’s true, isn’t it? Tornado is not like tsunami or hurricane, in which every house in the area would be affected. Tornado only has a narrow path of destruction and the surrounding houses are spared of the ill fate. This made people think that their chance of not getting hit is pretty high–people really count on their luck and their power of pray.
I still haven’t finished his book “The Big Shot”. It has been several years and it is still perched on my kindle library marked with 5% read. I watched the movie in a packed movie theater where I sat in the front row–the only row available–and my neck ached for hours afterwards. Movie watching kills the curiosity for the book.
I am still listening to the book “The Premonition” and it is quite interesting. I am at 10% right now and so far the pandemic is still not mentioned yet. It is talking about the Santa Barbara hepatitis C epidemic–a very small one–in which a very dirty clinic caused the infection of its clients. It is quite unbelievable, isn’t it? In Santa Barbara, such a snobby posh place full of celebrities, such a clinic could exist, but it did exist and the doctor had been there for decades, running a clinic with his relatives without qualification and making injections without changing the syringe between patients.
Haoyan Do 
It’s scary that this happened in Santa Barbara. I always get a bit paranoid about needles because of stories I’ve heard about people getting sick due to doctors using used syringes.
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Yes, it is said in smaller clinic, some really try to save money that way. It is so scary. I know this actually happen in the surrounding communities. It gets so scary that one or two of my acquaintance insist that the doctors (who own small offices and are suspected of saving money as much as possible) or nurses to open their package of needles and syringes in front of them. LOL.
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I saw this episode by John Oliver where he talks about The Next Pandemic. It’s super informative!
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Wow, I haven’t watched his show for a while. I used to watched it every week. Now you said it, I will go to watch it.
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Cool!
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The coming storm sounds interesting.
Relating to the last book…I read a novel titled “the germ” back in high school, it’s about Ebola, a biological weapon. I highly recommend.
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Wow, that’s a scary book and it is probably a premonition kind of book.
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Germ by Robert Liparulo
Best you find out 🙂
Won’t disappoint 😊
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👍👍👍
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I’m scared enough of needles as it is, and people who inject them without sanitizing them makes my fear even worse.
It reminds of an HIV epidemic in a small city in China because the blood banks didn’t bother cleaning the needles properly or testing its blood supplies.
Ewww.
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When I lived in Kansas, the tornado alarms went off quite a bit during tornado season and there were tests of the equipment at a regular weekly time if weather was clear. People got casual about taking cover not because they did not think they could be hit by one; most warning alarms sounded out of an abundance of caution and were not followed by a tornado. After any big tornado actually hit, we would take the alarms more seriously for awhile until the “false” alarms would again lull us into an unwise sense of security. The tornadoes themselves did not move anywhere near as fast as the swirling wind inside them so we usually had time to react to actual news reports when one was sighted moving in our general direction.
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Wow, that’s soooo true. When you hear too many “crying wolfs”–for a good cause–you can be fatigued. Hopefully the crazy weather will calm down a bit, but it is said it’s only going to get worse. We can only pray.
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