Saturday, February 27, 2010
Quake Up
I love waking up and tuning into the Red Sox in Fort Myers. But today I'm also watching the coverage of the Chile quake. It looks terrible. I think the Richter Scale needs to go the way of the Space Shuttle fleet. Update it so that people (who aren't seismologists) can understand how big an earthquake is without doing math. The average schmoe is gonna think a 7.0 is 7/8ths of an 8.0, if they can even figure that out. But no, then they tell you it's exponential, and an 8 is really 32 times bigger than a 7. Just turn it into a 1 to 100 scale. How about it, math?
Comments:
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Chile is a beautiful country, was there skiing this summer(their winter). Pretty sad shit. I have no idea what's the best way to measure an earthquake, I just know that anything over a 5 starts to get pretty bad, >7 is just terrible.
Also, I guess the term "Richter scale" isn't used, but the magnitude scale itself is still the same.
We spent a part of our honeymoon in Chile a few years ago, but in Patagonia, not this area. Really awful to hear. I was actually in downtown San Francisco when the earthquake hit there in 1989; that was only 7.1, but did quite a lot of damage. This must have been far more frightening.
Aw, you're telling me the Richter scale is a log-32? I thought it was a log-10! If that's the case, then I'm with you - let's move it to a 1 to 100 scale. Or 1 to 1000. Or something that makes sense.
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