When the news media go into absurd conniptions over some completely mundane thing, I generally don't pay much attention. That's what the news media do. There's nothing interesting to see there.
But generally don't expect Randall Munroe to be so easily excited and confused. I am referring, of course, to the placement of MH 370 in the upper-right corner of the graph, marking it as both highly weird and also very difficult to explain. I don't think it's the least bit of either.
I'm not going to spend any further time on the question of its weirdness, because that's so inherently subjective as to not be worth arguing about.
But I have a really hard time understanding why someone as creative and intelligent as the author of xkcd can find this difficult to explain. It's much easier to explain than most of the other stuff on the chart. It's so easy to come up with highly plausible explanations for this, I'm going to offer up three of them:
- human malice
- physical failure (of the aircraft)
- human idiocy
I could go on at length, but I think I should probably just stop here. All three of these explanations are so inherently plausible, it is difficult to even rank them in terms of likelihood. All three of them are so likely, their probability is mainly limited by the fact that they're competing with each other (although, it's easily possible that more than one of them occurred). They're all things that you can easily see happen all the time in everyday life, and they're all things that could very easily lead to the loss of an airplane in the middle of the ocean and are known to have done so on other occasions.
I don't get it. What's hard to explain here?