Math is weird

When I was in the Navy studying electronics in order to become a fixit man on the world’s biggest ship, I had to recall all the stuff I had “learned” in high school regarding logarithms and related mathematical mysteries. A logarithmic scale is useful when you are trying to compress events to a manageable size, a chart for instance that can fit on a piece of paper that doesn’t require the devastation of an entire forest in order to manufacture it. For example, the magnitudes of earthquakes are described on a logarithmic scale that goes from near zero, a wrist-slap, to ten (ten has not been experienced by humans so far, but just you wait till the US Congress passes its healthcare bill!). The asteroid that hit the Yucatán Peninsula a while ago and wiped out the dinosaurs probably registered at 13.0, but that happens so rarely as to not even rate a mention on the ordinarily used Richter scale.

The reason I am bringing this up is that I heard a report that the recent 8.8 quake in Chile was 500 times more powerful than the 7.0 quake in Haiti. That seems at first glance to be erroneous, but I did the math. Fifteen-point-eight gigatons of TNT was the equivalent power released in Chile. Haiti came in at a mere 31.6 megatons. Do the math. It came out five hundred times bigger for Chile.

For regular folks without advanced mathematical training, the Modified Mercalli Scale is more useful for describing earthquakes. This scale uses terms like “many frightened and run outdoors,” “dishes and glassware broken,” “rails bent greatly.” It starts at Roman numeral I and rises to XII. At the bottom, “I” is usually only detectible by instruments or “favorably deployed persons.” A III equates to a passing truck. Whether that truck is carrying goose down pillows or granite boulders isn’t specified. A VII might break furniture, or cause damage to poorly designed structures. A XII, Catastrophic, means everything is destroyed, presumably even the ability to assign a XII.

But ending at XII is shortsighted. I propose expanding the scale to XIII: Since everything is destroyed, we humans should at least be rewarded with (1) complete intuitive understanding of logarithms, and (2) amnesty from not declaring local sales tax liability for all the stuff we bought on the Internet.

Graphic from Wikipedia