Security expert Bruce Schneier has a long and interesting paper on the various evolved cognitive biases that skew our thinking about risk and security, hampering our ability to make sane tradeoffs. This may help to explain why, when the city of Boston had an expensive panic attack in response to a bunch of LED cartoon characters, the media were (at least initially) willing to treat this as anything other than batshit crazy—indeed, to shower blame on the “hoaxers” who’d put up the LEDs.