To celebrate #PiDay, my housemate and I created thoroughly scientific ratings of different pie emojis on Emojipedia. 🥧 Here we go:
Apple: This Apple pie had better be an apple pie, and everyone likes apple pie. Seems basic, but a solid foundation. The subtle steam is a nice touch. 8/10.
Google: Pumpkin is a rather divisive choice, and #PiDay isn't even during pumpkin spice season. The crust looks a little cardboard-y, but the whipped cream looks delicious. 6/10.
Microsoft: A hot mess. The steam looks like spaghetti and the holes look the tears of the people who have to eat this. Fitting that it's shrouded in a halo of darkness. 1/10.
WhatsApp: Delicious. Jam-packed with plump cherries, and with an intricate lattice top. Made us realize that all of the other ones don't have plates. 10/10.
Samsung: Very similar to Apple's. A basic and acceptable pie, but weirdly tall and lacking the touch of steam that Apple's had. Ambiguous flavor. 6/10.
Twitter: Looks like someone described a pie to the creators of Hot Pockets, which makes me concerned that it's pepperoni instead of cherry. The top is vaguely reminiscent of lasagna noodles, or maybe a wicker chair. 2/10.
Facebook: A thoroughly okay pie, but Facebook owns WhatsApp, so why aren't they using WhatsApp's clearly superior pie? At least the edging on the crust is nice. 5/10.
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Today in astounding coincidences: Mexico had a nationwide earthquake safety drill today to mark the anniversary of the Sept 19, 2017 M 7.1 quake and the Sept 19, 1985 M 8.0 quake.
Note: "astounding" in a human perspective doesn't mean anything geophysically strange is up! Mexico is no stranger to large quakes (especially on the subduction zone), and the probability of date coincidences can be surprising, as in the Birthday Problem: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_…
To have 50% odds on a triply-shared birthday (or quakeday) among randomly-distributed birthdays, you need a group of 87. For a group of 30 (~# of M>7 quakes on the Cocos subduction zone since the 1985 quake), the odds of a triply-shared date is ~3%. Higher than you might think!
People occasionally DM me the earthquake "prediction" charlatans they stumble upon on social media, and I've seen enough to do a little write-up.
Here it is: my Taxonomy of Quake Quacks!
🧵
Before we get started with the categories, a reminder: no one can meaningfully predict earthquakes before they happen. Everyone (scientists especially!) would love if useful, better-than-random prediction existed, but nothing yet has stood up to scientific scrutiny.
Here are my categories. They may not be completely exhaustive, and they can overlap in one individual, but I think they cover most of what I've seen:
How do earthquake “prediction” con artists make it LOOK like they have a good track record, even though they’re totally unscientific hoaxters?
Let a seismologist fill you in.
Thread:
First, to be abundantly clear: no one can usefully predict earthquakes before they happen. Not you, not your pet, not some guy on the internet. We’d all love if good predictions were possible (seismologists included!), but nothing yet has stood up to scientific rigor.
Why talk about this? With the recent swarm on the Brawley Seismic Zone, we (again) saw prediction charlatans try to prey on anxieties and peddle misinformation. That sucks, of course, but it’s also actually dangerous, because it can muddle important information from real experts.
It’s here: the lockdown seismology paper is out in @ScienceMagazine! Here’s a thread sharing how this paper came to be, an intro to what we found, and a note on why it’s interesting. science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…
Back in March, @seismotom posted this figure to @Seismologie_be of ambient seismic noise on a seismometer in Belgium, showing a decrease in noise power when their local lockdown went into effect:
Lots of seismologists (myself included) were intrigued when we saw it, so we each started processing data from our local areas, posting the results to Twitter, and discussing it all in the replies. It was social distancing seismic noise, and social media seismology!
Required reading for geoscientists in the U.S. (and recommended reading for anyone who loves the outdoors) relevant to recent events: "Black Faces, White Spaces" by Dr. Carolyn Finney, about the relationships between Black Americans, the outdoors, and environmental organizations.
The book discusses the history of Black relationships with the environment, the way that this history informs modern collective memory, Black representation in outdoors-focused media and organizations, and Black action for and exclusion from environmental causes.
One major point of the book is that many outdoors and environmental spaces have been and still are unfriendly and unsafe for Black people, as demonstrated by recent cases like Christian Cooper, leading to a disconnect in Black participation in and perception of the outdoors.