Three of the six winners of the Ashley Morris award for excellence in New Orleans blogging to date. These are phenomenal people.

Me: “Mom! Did you feel the earthquake?”
Mom: “You know, Maitri, I felt this couch shake and wondered what it was. But I didn’t want to say anything.”
Me: “Sweet! You felt the DC earthquake!”
Mom: “It was in Washington DC and I felt it in northeast Ohio? What magnitude?”
Me: “Good question. It was a 5.8, not very deep and those waves transmitted right through the Appalachian foreland basin and into the craton.”
Mom: “5.8 is big, right?”
Me: “Strong, shallow earthquake for that part of the world.”
Mom: “How do you know about the earthquake?”
Me: “Mom, I’m a geologist. And I’m on Twitter.”

Each family needs at least one plugged-in geologist to let the others know that they’re not crazy, they indeed experienced earthquake-related ground motion. Each family also needs a cool-as-hell parent who asks, “What magnitude?”

Callan Bentley has a great post up that includes all the details of the earthquake and is updated as more information and aftershocks come in. Not only is Callan a first-rate teacher of geology, he lives and works in the D.C. area and understands the geology of the Piedmont range and its fault system, one of which was probably reactivated causing this earthquake. He brings up an important question: “Are the aftershocks really foreshocks?” East Coast residents don’t need more anxiety what with Hurricane Irene bearing down on them, but it’s worth thinking about in terms of preparation.

This also gives me the opportunity to bring up my dislike of describing faults as discrete planes, when we should be talking about fault zones, or zones of crustal/lithospheric weakness. Before I wander off into the land of rheology and materials science, let it just suffice to say that the earth is not an isotropic, homogeneous thing at any scale and more a continuum of materials. In other words, not discrete materials in discrete layers that break or bend in ways that you would expect plastic or non-alloy metal to. To me, the North American plate is itself a collection of plates separated by zones of weakness along which land progressively sutured itself onto the craton, and where the zones of weakness themselves can span the width of the Piedmonts all the way to the whole Basin & Range. Almost the entire state of Nevada is a plate boundary in that sense.

Anyway, earthquake. And hurricane coming. Stay safe.

After boarding a couple dozen flights in the last few months, I am an old hand at the opt-out and full body pat down. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or a mind-reader to figure out why underpaid TSA hands “randomly” pick me for the millimeter-wave scanner. These workers are so used to passengers robotically (and tiredly) doing exactly what TSA tells them to do that it’s an opportunity to remind that there is such a thing as “a right to opt out.” There’s also a certain humor in the government running its latex-gloved finger around my jeans waistband before I board a domestic flight when I’ve paid for and used the United States Global Entry program, “a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” Government waste that’s a-ok with certain parties because it’s done in the name of national defense obviously. We are all safer from my pre-approved, low-risk behind being patted down for everyone to see when fake pilot IDs and uniforms are now enough to bypass airport security.

So, why the security theater?

A new study published by the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that despite the ton of taxpayer dollars spent on decision analysis and modeling the likelihood of terror events, it’s all for naught because the [voting] “public will largely neglect normative likelihood considerations when judging the actions of policy makers.” In other words, because “people have particular difficulty dealing with probabilistic information for small likelihood events, like those for terrorist attacks” and politicians are more interested in the votes of these people than preventing terror, actual threats with higher likelihood of occurrence go ignored.

Schneier himself brings this back to the TSA and their airport practises: “Are they doing their best to mitigate terrorism, or are they doing their best to ensure that if there’s a terrorist attack the public doesn’t blame the TSA for missing it?”

When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir? — Thomas Bayes, British mathematician and Presbyterian minister

The New York Times reviews Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.

Three topics I love to think about rolled into one: anything at all to do with Enigma, geophysical parameter estimation and the craziness behind not changing your mind given the increasing likelihood of evidence to the contrary.

336 pages long, so I kinda expect it to be a quick Winchester-esque romp through probability estimation, but any book that shows how much we use Bayes’s theorem in almost all fields of science and engineering and everyday is alright by me. In fact, Bayes is one of the first things taught in an oil and gas reservoir characterization class. Quantifying unknowns is tricky business and the subsurface is inherently unknown at best, so it is to every reservoir geophysicist’s advantage to use as many data sets as possible in parameter estimation and assign uncertainties to each input – seismic attribute volume, velocity model, core sample, log curve, etc. – as early and often as possible. (Paper: Bayesian reservoir characterization by Luiz Lucchesi Loures)

The reviewer states that “a serious problem arises, however, when you apply Bayes“s theorem to real life.” What exactly that is supposed to mean? As pointed out earlier, Bayes’s theorem is used in very real-life areas as nebulous as cryptography and the search for fossil fuels. Also, news flash: every undertaking has associated human agendas. So, why can Bayes not be implemented in studies of global climate change and autism? But on one thing we agree – the sad fact that there are many of us, scientists or not, who are “wedded to [our] priors.” So, and I guess this goes for everyone, absorb and digest as much information as possible, stop to think about or research the likelihood of what you learned and try not to let confirmation bias get in your way.

Good luck. (Get it? Good luck? Never mind.)