Are earthquakes increasing in strength or frequency?
Just found myself in a debate where the opposition claims earthquakes is on the rise (judgement day, wrath of god, etc..), being a skeptic I of course needed evidence, and where better to get it than to analyse it for myself from raw data?
How many earthquakes are there?
I went to the United States Geological Survey for the raw data, they have a pretty big list of “selected earthquakes of general historic interest” (6.0+) earthquakes recorded (ordered by magnitude, strongest quake first) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_mag_big.php
I then made a little computer program to parse the text, and output it in csv format:
java program: Test.java
data text file: quakes.txt (program input)
csv result file: quakes.csv (program output)
The output from the data was opened in a spreadsheet for further analysis. There are 722 quakes in the input data file. I used the data from the period 1900 to 2010 in the statistics below (660 of the 722 total data entries).
The data in table form
6+
7+
8+
1900
9
5
1
1905
14
12
5
1910
14
9
1
1915
9
6
0
1920
10
8
3
1925
15
10
0
1930
20
13
4
1935
12
7
2
1940
16
15
4
1945
21
18
5
1950
21
11
3
1955
20
18
3
1960
12
10
3
1965
34
18
3
1970
21
13
2
1975
18
12
0
1980
15
4
0
1985
17
6
1
1990
17
11
1
1995
31
21
1
2000
110
50
5
2005
194
67
8
The first column is the date of the quakes, the next 3 are number of earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 6, 7 and 8 respectively.
Data is grouped into 5 years.. so the first row with year 1900, is data from 1900 to 1904, followed by 1905 to 1909, etc..
Graph
Click for larger version
Conclusion This graph makes it look like earthquakes are running rampant, and you might have seen a very similar graph on the Internet (YouTube and other places), used by conspiracy cranks as an argument that earthquakes are increasing. But fortunately this graph is very misleading.
The data used to make it is complete rubbish, to quote the page they are collected from: “selected earthquakes of general historic interest”.. These quakes have been hand picked as the most interesting ones, and the data has a HUGE bias towards newer earthquakes, so you can’t make any meaningful statistics out of it (except if you are making statistics of which years the guy who compiled the data finds “interesting”).
Maybe we should try and remake the graphs using some good solid data..
== Real Data ==
A scientist at the USGS was kind enough to send me a datafile with all the 7.0+ earthquakes from 1900 to 2010 (all the registered quakes, not filtered in any way).
Making some graphs from those data yields results consistent with what the experts on earthquakes are saying.. They are totally random and unpredictable, and there has been no increase of earthquakes since we started recording them:
Frequency of earthquakes from 1900 to 2010. Click for bigger version:
Distribution of earthquakes by month:
Distribution of earthquakes by day of month, (day 31 omitted for obvious reasons):
Of course crazy people have been predicting judgement day for a long time, even the book of revelations starts with “things which must shortly come to pass”.
I feel particularly sorry for the Jehovahs Witness who predicted the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1994.. After all those miserable failures I think their current prediction is “any day now”.
Family Radio’s Harold Camping predicted 1994 to be judgement day, but now trying to weasel out of it by saying it was only probably.. Now however they are saying: “Today there is no longer any question, May 21, 2011 is the day in which Jesus Christ will return” –Family Radio
Personally I don’t care when people out of contact with reality think the world is going to end, but I find this amusing for one single reason.. I’ll get to make a prediction, and it will have a near 100% chance of coming true. So without further ado, here is my prediction for the ebiblefellowship.com prediction:
On May 21, nothing out of the ordinary will happen. There might be a big earthquake (about 41% chance) or other natural disaster. But the believers will definitely find something, no matter how insignificant that they will take as a sign that judgement day is starting.
Between May 21st and October 21 every fucking accident and natural disaster that happens in the world will be attributed to being a part of Armageddon.
On October 22 my bets are: a) 90% – They will claim to have misread the bible.. Armageddon is not actually until <Insert near future date>. b) 9.99% – They claim Armageddon happened, but most people failed to notice.. or that God changed his mind c) 0.00000001% – Armageddon actually happens d) 0.0000000001% – They admit they made it all up and were wrong.
So I’ll just add a link to this post in my calendar, and then I’ll be back to see if I won anything on October 22.. I think I’ll have myself some ice cream if the world is still alive and doing business as usual. Unfortunately the people who made the prediction will learn nothing and cognitive dissonance will just make them set a new date instead of realizing that what they’re doing is utter bullshit. Maybe when the world survives 2011, they can join forces with the retarded 2012 people, for an even greater failure
UPDATE (May 24. 2011): So, obviously no Judgment day (but now he claims it happened, but was a “Spiritual judgement day”, which fits with my prediction for option c”, and that the real end of he world will start on October 21. (which kinda fits with option a in my prediction). And this even before October 21, then they will try rationalize their retarded belief system again. All in all I’m much better than your average claimed psychic At least now I get a 5 month break in mocking Harold Camping.
I use two banks, one of them(Helgeland Sparebank) has a really retarded web interface, these are the icons you click to do stuff™ with your account:
If it isn’t obvious, the icons from left to right are:
“view last transfers”
“make payment”
“transfer money”
“view scheduled payments”
“view payment history”
“view account details”
The other bank (Skandiabanken) however had it’s web interface designed by which I can only assume was a team of Bruce Campbell, Data from Star Trek and John Carmack (It’s that awesome):
Icons that actually makes sense, AND text.. It makes the part of my brain which remembers something from user interface design classes back at university all warm and fuzzy.
Now, for a post dedicated to two of my favorite things… Angel and Statistics:
I’ve got all my DVDs registered on my computer, and each time I watch a movie or an episode I give it my personal rating on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being best).
So without further ado I give you the statistics for Joss Whedon’s Angel:
First, the average rating for each season. And as you can see Season 2 and 4 is awesome =)
Below is a chart of all episodes, click to enlarge:
I think I’m in a German TV commercial for Fedcon 2011, a Sci-fi convention I’m going to in a month (It’s going to be awesome)
Someone recognized me in the video and was kind enough to send me an email (Thanks to Dietrich, which I met at fedcon 2009, he makes all sorts of really cool replicas) I was almost tempted to steal his Grays sports almanac, but I’m no Biff Tannen so instead I got myself 2 magnets for my kitchen (“Main Fridge”, and “Deep Freeze 9″)
Last night a ferret just stood idly on the floor for about half a minute just staring blankly at us. It looked a bit like she was really concentrating, so the first hypothesis to explain this strange behavior was that she was trying to create a copy of herself through agamogenesis (asexual reproduction). This naturally led to the notion of a ferret able to replicate itself once every minute, and seeing that playing with exponential growth is always fun, this scenario deserves some illustrations:
0 minutes one ferret.
1 minute WOW!, did you see that? That ferret just duplicated!
3 minutes Sweet, 8 ferrets. This is awesome.
5 minutes Ehm, I love ferrets but 32 is a bit much.. how do you stop this thing?
18 minutes
Help! 268’000 ferrets just filled and breached the entire volume of our ~200 cubic meter apartment!
23 minutes Neighborhood overrun, time to evacuate.
35 minutes
The blue dot is me, speeding away from the 50 square kilometer sea of ferrets half a meter deep.
48 minutes Despite speeding like crazy I was just overtaken by a huge wave of ferrets, twice the area of Rhode Island and 30 meters tall.. By now there are 281 trillion ferrets in Norway.
1 hour The 1 billion billion ferrets now cover all of Scandinavia with a height of the Eiffel tower
1 hour 15 minutes
Ferrets now rule the earth. covering the entire surface of the planet, filling up all the oceans, in a huge ferret sea 5 times the height of mount everest.
the 37 sextillion ferrets weight about 1/3 of the moon.
1 hour 23 minutes
The ferrets now have the same mass as the earth.
1 hour 55 minutes*
The ferrets now weigh 13’000 times more than our sun, the speed at which they can expand is limited, so the pressure and heat is extreme, this makes the huge ball of ferrets shine more powerful that any star, while a black hole has formed at the center.
2 hours 23 minutes
Ferrets now weigh the same as our entire galaxy, have formed a supermassive black hole and things are starting to get nasty.
3 hours At 30 times the mass of the observable universe, outputting extreme amounts of energy through a geometrically challenged universe, the laws of physics are probably breaking down and fusing together again for the first time since the big bang.. It’s safe to say the ferrets have ruined reality as we know it.
Note: What happens after about 1 hour 30 minutes gets pretty speculative, it’s hard trying to apply the laws of physics to something that is physically impossible
