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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: 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"