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THIS WEEKEND, A 3.3-magnitude earthquake rattled San Francisco ever so slightly. The small quake, like so many before it, passed, and San Franciscans went back to conveniently ignoring their seismic reality. Magnitude 3.3 earthquakes are clearly no big deal, and the city survived a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in 1989 mostly fine—how how much bigger will the Big One, at 8.0, be than 1989?
Ten times! As smarty-pants among you who understand logarithms may be thinking. But...that's wrong. On the current logarithmic earthquake scale, a whole number increase, like from 7.0 to 8.0, actually means a 32-fold increase in earthquake energy. Even if you can mentally do that math—and feel smug doing it—the logarithmic scale for earthquakes is terrible for intuitively communicating risk. "It's arbitrary," says Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey. "I've never particularly liked it."
[Suggested New Earthquake Scale]: Seismological Review Letters
Maybe SN could suggest a better way to measure earthquakes ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 14 2015, @06:24PM
Because the precision of measurement goes down as the scale of the earthquake goes up. A logarithmic scale keeps error bars in the same neighborhood for all earthquakes.
It's not great for lay understanding of the phenomenon, but that's really better understood in terms of damage and deaths anyways. An 8.0 in Emptyland, Alaska is going to be less noteworthy than a 5.0 in LA.
So let the scientists have their measures, that are useful for calculation and categorization, and don't make it the focus for the public.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @06:50PM
The reason we have units in the first place is to rescale what we're interested in into a range that we can relate to, which as the opinion author points out, are small numbers on the order of 10. Human brains comprehend that well. The scale the author is proposing is a linear scale. That is nice to get the point across that one quake was 1000 times "bigger" than another, but the problem it runs into is that we can't relate to it. This turns into "one, two, three, . . ., infinity!" It is like the Scoville scale for hot peppers. What does it mean that a bell pepper is 0, a peperonicini is 250, a jalapeno is 5000, and a ghost pepper is 1000000. You can't relate to that scale (probably because I would bet that we experience chili heat logarithmicly). You don't say "Wow, this ghost pepper is, like, 200 times hotter than that jalapeno!"
(Score: 3, Funny) by quacking duck on Friday August 14 2015, @07:03PM
In other words... there's no point changing to a base 10 measurement, since Americans refuse to switch to anything remotely "metric" anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:28PM
I dont see how you managed to get those words out of that thought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:52AM
You can't fix stupid.
Besides, it is almost the opposite of what was said. Metric Nazis want to force a one-size-fits-all unit on people, regardless of whether it makes sense. Don't you know, when you go into a pub, you are supposed to ask the publican for 568.26 ml of beer. If you ask for a pint, you are showing your ignorance. Or, you could ask for 0.568 l of beer, that would be acceptable too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:13AM
When the recepticle manufacturer catches on it will be 500ml.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:29AM
Good point...here in the US most beer and ale is sold in 12 ounce bottles or cans. So asking for a six pack of .354882 liter beer does seem a bit awkward.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Sunday August 16 2015, @11:18AM
Do you currently ask for a six pack of 12 ounce bottles, or just a six pack? I don't think I've ever specified volume except in edge cases (like trying to buy a bunch of sapporo 650ml cans)
Usually you don't have to ask anything. You grab the beer, take it to the front of the store, and pay. As long as you know what you want there's no problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by captain normal on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:14AM
Just because you have to use your fingers and toes to count with doesn't mean we all have to. :-))
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Friday August 14 2015, @06:52PM
It's not great for lay understanding of the phenomenon, but that's really better understood in terms of damage and deaths anyways.
Exactly! It's not meant to be easily understood by non-scientists because it doesn't need to be. What exactly is your average person supposed to do with the knowledge of how "big" an earthquake was? The only reason people want to know is so they can talk about it the next day at work and compare it to other earthquakes. You and I can't do anything useful with that knowledge, so why try to change something that doesn't matter?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @07:37PM
I don't think you read the article. One of the main complaints of "The Scale" is that it is meaningless from a science perspective, this is because science likes units and "The Scale" does not have them. so it is useless from a science perspective, useless from a news perspective (they don't understand it), and useless from a Joe Schmoe perspective (logwhat???). So why the hell use it?
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Friday August 14 2015, @08:02PM
Actually it sounds like the scale does have units. They just choose to use a very odd base for the logarithm.
There is nothing wrong - in fact, everything right - about using a log scale. However, they should have used either base 10 or the natural log with base e.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:59PM
Indeed, with a direct base 10, it would mean that increasing the magnitude by 1 would mean increasing the energy by one order of magnitude.
However, in the end the scale is based on decimal values: A difference of 2 in the magnitude corresponds to a factor of 1000.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by kryptonianjorel on Saturday August 15 2015, @07:10AM
If the scale doesn't have units, what the hell are we measuring? "Well that felt like a big one. Lets call it a 6.3"