In Case You Can't Tell, I'm Being Sarcastic

Haven't been posting because (1) I'm tired of the snark and the attitude (including and perhaps especially my own) bred by blogging and its ilk such as newspaper columns, and (B) I haven't had the energy for the thoughtful commentary for which snark and, rarely, wit is so often substituted.

So here's an experimental alternative style.

Post about Unethical Corporations: 5 companies that will destroy civilization. An interesting-enough hyperbole.

#1 (Artifical Disaster) is a company that does a lot of fracking. Fracking can and does cause seismic movement. "The largest 'Cuadrilla quake' measured 2.3 on the Richter scale. Japan's devastating Tohoku quake last April rocked the scale at 9.0 – about 67 times the amplitude." It is true that  9.0 - 2.3 = 6.7, and that 67 = 6.7 x 10. So I understand the mechanics of author Ross Bonander's determination of the number 67, and the arithmetic is computationally correct, but it is based on incorrect assumptions. Seismographic amplitude is indeed measured linearly so seismogram with a peak amplitude of 9.0 has 9.0 / 2.3 = 3.9 times the amplitude of one peaking at 2.3, not 67 or even 6.7.

But it takes energy to move the pen, and although amplitude is measured linearly, the energy it represents is logarithmic: it takes increasing energy-per-unit-amplitude to move the pen further, wherever the pen is. So each whole-number increase in amplitude represents a 30-fold increase in energy. Thus, a mag. 9.0 earthquake is 7.9 billion times more energetic than a mag. 2.3 earthquake ( 30 ^ 6.7 = 7.883 billion and change).

The thing is, "67 times" makes his argument seem plausible in a way that '7.9 billion times' wouldn't. He wrote, "...if the company is careless enough to set off 50 small ones, might it be careless enough to go even bigger next time?" 2.3; 50 of them; 9.0 is 67 times larger: there are only two orders of magnitude difference in the absolute value of those four numbers; the conceptual distance between them is not great, and it makes widespread devastation appear to be within the reasonable scope of a company that has, so far, caused earthquakes that show up on seismographs but are not generally felt. And, heck, I'll even go with his statement on its face, that fracking might cause a quake with a magnitude greater than 2.3.

Not 9.0, though. Not now, not ever. It takes nukes to get into mag. 5.0 territory; the largest conventional explosion ever was mag. 4.4 max, and the Nevada rocket-fuel factory explosion was mag. 3.5. Damage prediction for mag. 4 quakes is "Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely". And fracking doesn't even use explosives anyway. It does have the potential for significant environmental degradation, but it's not going to bring our cities tumbling down on our heads.

I started this post with only #4 in mind (I was just skimming the article to see who the 5 unethical companies are) and just happened to notice that #1's error was too egregious to ignore, and it took so long to write the above that I'm skipping #2, 3, & 5.

#4 (Artificial Evolution) is a dam-building company. There are two problems with this part of the article: the premiss and the example. The premiss, that artificial evolution is going to help destroy civilization, is not inherently true. It is how we got corn, rice, dogs, and livestock. And the example, a dam-building company, is plausible but not as used in the article. As far as I can tell, the criticism is that the company has destroyed lots of pleasant and useful places by flooding them. Fair enough; but that is not evolution. At all. Then, only a small fraction of the world is even susceptible to flooding by dams. And of course dam builders don't go around building dams on their own; they do it upon request by elements of civilization.

Curiously, #2 (Artificial Selection) is a better example of what "Artificial Evolution" should mean (I have no idea what Mr. Bonander thinks it means) and of a company that could bring down civilization thereby: but it was already used as #2.

So, anyway, most of what I've read of the article is scary-sounding but wrong. Then I noticed the category the article was put into.