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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: 2) by Appalbarry on Saturday August 15 2015, @09:22PM
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?