Woodward and Bernstein: Often characterized as a “third-rate burglary,” history proved that [Watergate] was anything but.

“Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established. Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.” (The Washington Post).

JonahLehrer writes in the New Yorker on the work of Kahneman and others,showing that we are not nearly as rational as we would like to believe. Moreover, the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias.

“Geologists Thomas Fumal and Timothy Dawson dug trenches across the San Andreas Fault in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 5 miles (8 km) northwest of Watsonville and discovered traces of four large past earthquakes. Broken sediment revealed quakes occur more often than earlier estimated, and two historic earthquakes reached further south than found before. In the trenches, Dawson and Fumal found a clear record of the great San Francisco quake of 1906. The three additional earthquakes hit in 1522, 1686 and either 1748 or 1838, give or take a few decades, which means this segment of the San Andreas Fault averages a big shaker every 125 years. That’s twice as often as estimates calculated by the Working Group On California Earthquake Probabilities, the group responsible for official earthquake forecasts.”

Related articles

• San Andreas Fault tool listens for signs of quakes (sfgate.com)
• New observations on the San Andreas Fault in Santa Cruz Mountains, Seattle Fault Zone (eurekalert.org)
• A Megaquake becomes a Megapuzzle (seismo.berkeley.edu)
• Earthquakes in a Box (news.sciencemag.org)