“Send the angels to the disaster area to give their light, their frequency, their tone so that mother earth can come to balance as quick as possible”.

WOW.. I frequently get pissed off at her for being a credulous half wit spreading utter bullshit,  but this latest crap..  Is she’s deliberately trying to make me puke in my mouth!?

For years she has been spewing out moronic crap about the angels she can see (and for a hefty sum, she’ll teach you to contact your angles). She can also talk to the dead of course, and no crank would be complete without claiming to be able to do healing.

I’ve always despised monarchism, it’s archaic, useless and wastes huge piles of taxpayer money on those <censored>.. Suffice it to say, the Princess of woo does not improve that image one bit.

At least I’m delighted to see the facebook page for that asinine angel school of hers is getting flooded with trolling and negative comments which seems to come from 4chan and lots of Norwegian facebook users who think their actions are distasteful, maybe there is still hope for this country.

On behalf of Norwegians who are not severely delusional, we’re sorry (and embarrassed as hell), some people are just beyond help

To sum it up, in 10 days the moon will be closer to the earth than it has been in 19 years.
The newspaper then goes on to list a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit about several times when the moon has been at its closest to the earth, earthquakes/tsunamies/etc. occurred.

The moons orbit is not a perfect circle, so the distance from the moon to the earth varies between roughly 350’000 km and 400’000 km.

The moon’s effect on the tides is around 60-70% and the sun makes up 40-30%, so of course when the moon gets closer the tides get more extreme, and unless I made an error in the calculations below, the difference in gravitational force between the earth and the moon from when the moon is farthest away and closest should be 13.764%

= 13% difference

Update: It seems the formula I used above is the “shared” gravitational force between the earth and the moon, Phil plait comes up with a maximum 50% increase in the moons gravitational effect on the earth, which is a more useful number. Also he’s an astronomer, so I’d take his word over mine.. On anything but Star Trek trivia

When the moon is at it’s closest and at the same time line up with the sun, we get what’s called the Perigean spring time. In other words, a big ass tide

Earthquakes and statistics!

They also cited a professor in astronomy (they actually referred to him as professor in astrology, but later changed the article and deleted the comments pointing this out).

The paper suggests that earthquakes can be caused by the moon being to close to the earth (sounds like a 50′s sci-fi movie), but what I find quite surprising is the rather strange quote from the professor:
“I would be very surprised, if there was a really strong earthquake at this particular date”. and that while living in California, he witnessed an powerful earthquake on the day before a “supermoon”.

The USGS defines a strong earthquake as anything with a magnitude of 6.0 or above (Christchurch was 6.3). On average there 150 earthquake like this yearly.

So the chance for a strong earthquake to happen on march 19th, is 41%.

If we however include the day before and after, the chance increases to 79%.

If we where to include 2 days before and after, we’re up to 92%.

So it’s pretty certain that a big earthquake will take place on or around march 19th, and it’s pretty certain crazy doomsday nuts will say there is a connection between that statistically predicted earthquake and the evil moon. The chance of the quake hitting a densely populated area however is much smaller, so maybe the nuts won’t notice it

update 11.03.2011: As statistics predicted a large earthquake did occur. It did hit a densely populated area, and caused a huge tsunami that hit the northwestern coast of Japan causing massive damages and deaths

The newspaper actually takes this flawed thinking to a whole new level, posting a picture from a earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia, making the point that it “happened only 2 weeks before a supermoon” (oooouh spooky!!).

This is just moronic.. the chance of a strong earthquake being 2 weeks before or after a certain date is 99.999977369 %

Note: all my calculations are based upon dates of earthquakes being relatively evenly distributed through the year, as confirmed by USGS

Adding the tracking code in WordPress was very simple, but I had to rename all the files on the Aakretech site to .jsp, and include the footer on every page. I also added

I was pleasantly surprised by the analytics web interface, very nice looking, user friendly and has a wide range of statistics. the highlights where the nice map (supports zooming down to city level) and of course seeing both Firefox and Safari whoop IE’s sorry ass

Even a visitor from Kanagawa Japan, Totemo kansha shimasu

IE(orange) got nothing on the other browsers