Was that an earthquake in Chicago ...

... or just the Shuffling Crew playing shuffleboard?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11chicago.html

No Oprah jokes, please.

 

My family slept through it.

 

I felt it. I'm not sure if it woke me up or if I was in between sleep, but I felt it; thought it felt like an earthquake; didn't think it was an earthquake; went back to bed.

To be honest, I kind of forgot about it until I woke up and saw the headlines.

BTW, is the Richter Scale the worst system of measurement ever? They've revised the magnitude of today's quake to 3.8. The linked article says that the 7.0 that struck Haiti was 1,600 times stronger than this morning's.

To any normal person, that makes no sense.

 

I'm far from normal, but it makes perfect sense to me. Each number indicates a magnitude 10 times stronger than the last. 5 is 10 times more powerful than 4, which is 10 times more powerful than 3. So 5 is 100 times more powerful than 3.

It's relatively simple exponential math.

 

I get that & I remember reading it before. I guess I just have to remember it each time.

And I suppose that the scale would have to go from 1 to a million if it weren't exponential, but I'll bet you that 90% of people would assume that a 7.0 is twice as strong as a 3.5. (The other 10% would think that, but would fuck up the math.)

 

A 7.0 earthquake could hit any American city and would do minimal damage.

 

Possibly the dumbest thing ever posted here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake

If you don't feel like reading, that was 6.9.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake

Oh, and this one was 6.7.

The fail is strong in this one.

 

Today wasn't much at all, but I would imagine that one 1,600 times stronger would do some damage.

 

According to CNN, the scale most often used now is 'moment magnitude', which measures the amount of energy released. In that frame of reference, each whole number increase represents 32 times more energy released.

 

Yes, but it doesn't really do justice to the difference between quakes. It'd be like rating Michael Jordan a 7.0 basketball player and a burning sack of green Jell-O and ostrich turds a 3.6.

 

If the sack of Jell-O and turds is wearing a Knicks uniform, the league will WANT it to succeed.