Well, sure, your staff needs to be familiar with the various emergency plans and whatnot. The "This is your Captain speaking," announcements before each of the major events at Interaction were how we packaged up a requirement from the convention center that we include evacuation briefings, for instance. We included the part they required, packaged around the stuff about loss of artificial gravity, etc.
In 2002 in San Jose, we had to seriously consider what to do in case of "rolling blackouts" because of the (at that time) semi-crisis in the electricity-distribution system. And naturally, we can't forget about earthquakes when you hold a convention in California. But we don't let the fact that a disaster could happen make us put our heads between our legs and kiss our a**es goodbye on account of We're All Doomed.
Everything in life has a certain risk involved with it. Humans seem to have a really bad risk-assessment system built in to us. We set way too high a priority on things that are low risk.
In the case before the bar: It is not beyond the realm of possibility that I might have gone to the UK a month early to spend a month touring around the country before going up to Glasgow. (I spent three weeks in Japan in 2007, after all.) And had I been in London, I might well have been in the Russell Square tube station (or on a particular train in that station) at the wrong time on July 7, 2005. (And it's a higher-than-random chance, because when I was in London post-Interaction, that's exactly the area in which I traveled several times.) But the terrorists wouldn't have been trying to kill me personally because I was Chairman of the only permanent body of the World Science Fiction Society, and suggesting that it might be so would be absurd.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-03-28 08:56 pm (UTC)In 2002 in San Jose, we had to seriously consider what to do in case of "rolling blackouts" because of the (at that time) semi-crisis in the electricity-distribution system. And naturally, we can't forget about earthquakes when you hold a convention in California. But we don't let the fact that a disaster could happen make us put our heads between our legs and kiss our a**es goodbye on account of We're All Doomed.
Everything in life has a certain risk involved with it. Humans seem to have a really bad risk-assessment system built in to us. We set way too high a priority on things that are low risk.
In the case before the bar: It is not beyond the realm of possibility that I might have gone to the UK a month early to spend a month touring around the country before going up to Glasgow. (I spent three weeks in Japan in 2007, after all.) And had I been in London, I might well have been in the Russell Square tube station (or on a particular train in that station) at the wrong time on July 7, 2005. (And it's a higher-than-random chance, because when I was in London post-Interaction, that's exactly the area in which I traveled several times.) But the terrorists wouldn't have been trying to kill me personally because I was Chairman of the only permanent body of the World Science Fiction Society, and suggesting that it might be so would be absurd.