Article from the New York Times: Snow Fall
It's really a new-to-me kind of article. Like it changes the way articles will be written, and people will read in the future. In a way a little like the Magic School Bus books, with lots of things to read in the margins - but I think this might break thru that kind of writing.
The content was new to me, and worked very well I think in this kind of presentation.
I felt like I was witnessing a new kind of communication, something that would really change the way things are done and taught in colleges.
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Added 12-24
"Skiing aside, Branch’s story is a meticulous investigation into the hazards of group decision-making: the insidious role that peer pressure, deferral to (imagined) authority, and presumption of expertise can play in undermining intelligence and experience. In this respect it is a worthy case study even for non-participants, much as, say, “The Perfect Storm” or “Black Hawk Down” or “Into Thin Air” were. Avalanche accidents, as it happens, make for excellent exercises in human error. Branch, in his Q. & A., mentions a 2002 paper titled “Evidence of Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents,” by Ian McCammon, an avalanche forecaster and mechanical engineer. The upshot of it, as McCammon writes in the first sentence of his abstract, is, “Even though people are capable of making decisions in a thorough and methodical way, it appears that most of the time they don’t.” You don’t have to be a pack of powder hounds to be guilty of this. You could be a group of generals, a district attorney’s office, or even, say, the United States Congress, contemplating big air off the fiscal cliff."
Very sobering.
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