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posted by janrinok on Friday August 14 2015, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the shake,-rattle-and-roll dept.

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 ...


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Friday August 14 2015, @07:58PM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Friday August 14 2015, @07:58PM (#222981) Journal

    All measurement systems are arbitrary. Feet, furlongs, angstroms, buckets. metres - none of these have any meaning outside of someone's choice of how to measure stuff.

    As regards earthquakes, the needs of earthquake scientists and similar professionals are one thing. What Joe Public needs is entirely different.

    The current magnitude measurements are just fine, particularly since they're reported after the fact anyhow.

    The average person doesn't need or want to know exactly what a Magnitude 4.6 earthquake means, just that it's worse than the 3.9 'quake they remember from last year, but not as bad as the 7.4 quake they saw in the news last week.

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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by Gravis on Friday August 14 2015, @08:18PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Friday August 14 2015, @08:18PM (#222989)

    seems like you know exactly jack shit about SI base units. perhaps you should read up before demonstrating your ignorance again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 14 2015, @10:20PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 14 2015, @10:20PM (#223033) Journal
      Aside from being an example of an arbitrary measurement system, what was the point of that?
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:17AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:17AM (#223115)

        There is a strong vocal minority here who hail metric units with unquestionable praise. These units were not created by Man, they were a gift bestowed upon Mankind by the French. They are not arbitrary, they are French! If you dare question them you get replies such as "I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

        Forgive them for they are simple-minded folk. If you spend your days on the farm filling bushels full of apples, it is apparently easier to talk of how many liters (sorry, litres) you filled that day, instead of just counting the number of bushels you filled. And forget about how many cups of water you drink, or how many pints you drink, counting them is too hard. You're supposed to change your lifestyle and now consume in units of half litres, because the hallmark of a decent unit system is that you change the way you live to match your units, not establish units that make sense in the way you live your life.

        So go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you.

      • (Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Saturday August 15 2015, @09:22PM

        by Appalbarry (66) on Saturday August 15 2015, @09:22PM (#223363) Journal

        What? You're suggesting that ""The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 ⁄ 299792458 of a second." is arbitrary?

        Or ""The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram."?

        Then again who the hell decreed that the ""(a) definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K."

        Why not 725 k.? What's so damned special about zero? And who decided that zero was there, and not somewhere else on the temperature scale?