Comments on: “God’s Lady Problem”

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:12:52 +0000

Rash, we accept phone calls and comments to the show if you wish to point out where you disagree.

By: rash

rash — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:40:31 +0000

Sorry, don’t agree to some of your points in Radio show.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:16:59 +0000

Dave: I’m sitting here reading your comment and thinking “What, he can’t read my post? What’s up?” then I realized that the post I wrote with the details about the earthquakes is scheduled for tomorrow. And yes, essentially.

Which proves nothing, which is why they are going to have to do it again.

By: Dave X

Dave X — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:45:07 +0000

I’m afraid I ignored the graphs and read the 6.5 number directly from the text ant thought you should post 6-point something rather than 7-point-something.

To get the return intervals, I read Jen’s link to http://web.ics.purdue.edu/%7Ebraile/new/EqStatistics.pdf and inverted the average numbers per year in “frequency of occurence” table, which he in turn copied from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqstats.php 365/15=24days and 365/134=2.7days (I made an error above), and the 5-point somethings have a return interval of 365*24/1319=6.6hrs.

From magnitude 2 through 8, it looks like each log-scale Richter-scale point is worth about a factor of ten in frequency and return interval.

In any case, the chance of repeating the 6.0 or greater thing that happened last boobquake would be about 1/3, while the 7.0+ prediction has about a 1/24 chance of happening.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:02:28 +0000

Dave, unfortunately, that graph is a great example of how to not make a graph! An outlier drives all the other data into the corner. Adjsuting (logging, or something) the data and/or sampling around the outlier(s) would look very different.

I think there just my be something to this boob-earthquake link.

By: oldebabe

oldebabe — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:53:30 +0000

No here mystery, and no surprises, either, i.e. there is an earthquake (or even several) every day somewhere on earth. That, apparently, already keeps a quake creator very busy spotting the multitude of exposed cleavage.

By: Dave X

Dave X — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:14:56 +0000

6-point-something: http://www.blaghag.com/2010/04/and-boobquake-results-are-in.html

6-point-somethings have a return interval of about 2.5 days, while 7-point-somethings have a return interval of about 24 days.