See Ezra try to take food out of my (hypothetical) child’s mouth by downplaying the very real danger of the earthquake menace with his “Robots! Robots!” flimflam. In reality these things are not competitive, as the worst robots are brought by quake.
But really: setting most of the snark aside, unless you live or work in an unreinforced masonry building, you don’t have much to fear from earthquakes. Codes now require buildings to be able to dissipate a lot of kinetic energy (read: break) in the event of the Big One, and they definately probably won’t fall on your head most of the time. Of course seismic engineering is largely empirical so it suffers from all the usual problems of trying to extrapolate from a curve set to a small historical data set, meaning it’s predicitive value is something less than awesome.
There’s a reason they write a new building code after every major earthquake…
2 responses so far ↓
1 pshazz // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:38 am
maybe what spurred your earthquake comment, but apparently a big one is imminent:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn13680-giant-quake-will-trash-los-angeles-say-forecasters-.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
2 Quixote // Apr 16, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I’m inclined to say that they’re pulling the percentages out of their ass, but would certainly agree that, all things being equal, we’re certainly “due.”
Of course, all thing are not equal; the law of large numbers tells us that, among other things, probabilistic events still occur randomly; given an infinite number of flips, their will be streaks of any arbitrary length (1 million say) of all heads.
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