I need to stop watching the Discovery Channel

Here's stuff that I learned this week:

Did you know that, as bad as Katrina was, the only case of a removal of an entire island by a hurricane was the 1893 disappearance of Hog Island, previously located just off of Long Island, NY? New York actually has quite a bad history of hurricanes. And, because of the nature of things such as the wind tunnels of NYC, the easily floodable subway system, the speed with which hurricanes can change directions to move up the coast and the difficulty (if not impossibility) of evacuating the island of Manhattan, NYC is second on the AIR list of "the top ten worst places for an extreme hurricane to strike"? (Miami is 1st and New Orleans is 5th.)

Volcanos are bad. Pompeii and Herculaneum were both completely devestated in one day by Mount Vesuvius...and a 'supervolcano' may have helped kill off the dinosaurs. There have been no eruptions of supervolcanos in any of human history, but they are fairly common in geologic time. And based on the evidence of past eruptions, the supervolcano that is under Yellowstone National Park has erupted about once every 700,000 years, give or take ~100,000, and the last eruption was 640,000 years ago. If it erupts again, vocanic ash would cover the entire United States, in many places being heavy enough to collapse roofs. It could also have devastating effects on the rest of the world as the ash in the air could block the sun enough to send temperatures plummeting us into the next ice age.

We all know the devastations of tsunamis now, right? Wrong. Even stronger than tsunamis cause directly by undersea earthquakes are ones caused by massive landslides (themselves usually caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions) dropping into the oceans. And while scientists don't think one is likely, certainly not in the short- or medium-term, the place they consider to be most unstable would send a wave across the Atlantic to the East Coast of the US, completly devastating everything for slightly over 12 miles inland (which includes all the coastal cities from NYC in the north to Miami in the south).

And tonight they had something called "Perfect Disaster: MegaFlood" about what could happen in London if conditions are 'just right' (or 'just wrong').

The Discovery Channel is good for stuff like "Mythbusters" which tests urban legends and "I Shouldn't Be Alive" which is an inspirational show about people fighting to survive against improbable odds. But I really need to stop watching the other shows.