Voodoo Science

I just read this interesting article about how terrorism risk varies across space and time, which talks about the risk of attacks when it comes to distance (space) and time. The article gives you that voodoo/law of nature kind of feeling, but at the same time the same kind of guess work, and assumptions went into models on Wall Street and we know how that turned out. Turns out the world is a pretty complex place. Anyway, just graphing The two major terrorist attacks in the US from 1989--2009 looks like this. Which is scary. But this of course doesn't take in to consideration many factors, for instance how does one graph attacks that were thwarted? Does that push the time line further? And obviously we've stepped up security much more after 2001 then after 1993, but we also got two wars going on in the middle east, so how does that throw things off? Anyway thought it was kinda interesting.