[Dave]

I know I am not the only one who enjoys some solid whackjob conspiracy...

You just gotta love the conspiracy theorists. The moon landing was a hoax (of course tens of thousands of people would have had to be in on it, including the Kremlin foregoing a major opportunity to embarrass the US), the World Trade Center collapsed due to planted explosives (those airplanes? Incidental, coincidence, or merely diversionary), the 9-11 strike on the Pentagon wasn't an airliner, it was a missile (ignore the aircraft debris, and the missing airliner). Whenever I hear one of these things, I think, "Clinton couldn't get oral sex in the Oval Office without the whole world finding out about it; do you really think something like this could be covered up?"

No doubt the folks in southern Indiana and Illinois thought the mushroom cloud was a thunderhead or a tornado or something, and everyone was asleep so no one saw the flash. It isn't like there would be any farmers awake at 4:30 in the morning.

[Roger Kaputnik]

About logarithmic scales: Each whole number increase is an increase by a factor of ten from the previous number. That means that the 5.0 is one hundred times a 3.0, not 1000x as reported above.

Regarding conspiracy theories, let's start a thread so we call ALL enjoy them!

[Dave]

About logarithmic scales: Each whole number increase is an increase by a factor of ten from the previous number. That means that the 5.0 is one hundred times a 3.0, not 1000x as reported above.

Regarding conspiracy theories, let's start a thread so we call ALL enjoy them!

Err, Roger, did you hit the Wiki link in my post?

The Richter magnitude scale, or more correctly local magnitude ML scale, assigns a single number to quantify the amount of seismic energy released by an earthquake. It is a base-10 logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the combined horizontal amplitude of the largest displacement from zero on a Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer output. The effective limit of measurement for local magnitude is about ML=6.8. The energy release of an earthquake scales with the 3/2 power of the shaking amplitude, and thus a difference in magnitude of 1.0 is equivalent to a factor of 31.6 in the energy released; a difference of magnitude of 2.0 is equivalent to a factor of 1000 in the energy released. So, for example, an earthquake that measures 5.0 on the Richter scale is 10 times larger than one that measures 4.0.

Actually, upon rereading, we're both right. 31.6 times the energy, 10 times the effect (I suspect the inverse square law applies here somewhere).

Edited to add: Good to see you back on the boards, Roger!

[Roger Kaputnik]

I admit I did not look at the article, but I will, at the usual risk of getting lost looking up stuff for the next coupl'a hours (Once I got to Ergative Languages; actually quite fascinating.).

The number on a logarithmic scale refers to the exponent on the base--yes, I know there is a more technical explanation, but this is the barebones sketch--which is base 10, in this case. So, log 1 would be 10, log 2 = 100, and so on. Each unit difference in the log number corresponds to a 1 x the base difference in the value. The difference from 3.0 to 5.0 is 2; so 10x 10 is 100.

I love math.

[Tim]

Crap - I thought this was about that Carole King song.

[Roger Kaputnik]

Have any of you encountered people that were affected by the quake in a modified-memory way? Like people who now say they were thrown out of bed, or that kind of thing?

[Dave]

Have any of you encountered people that were affected by the quake in a modified-memory way? Like people who now say they were thrown out of bed, or that kind of thing?

Not me. I think I may have been awake when it happened, but big trucks going by on Pine Street shake the house, too. The only thing I'm sure of is that I was unaware of it.