“God’s Lady Problem”

Posted by Greg Laden on March 8, 2011
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Jen McCreight writes the blog Blag Hag and became famous last year for attempting unsuccessfully to prove that if a large number of women wore low cut shirts there would be a major earthquake. (It turns out that there was a 7-point-something earthquake on “Boob Quake” day, which requires that the experiment be repeated.)

(It is interesting to note that most people seem to have not noticed that earthquake for some reason. And they call themselves Skeptics!)

Anyway, Jen will be a guest on Atheist Talk Radio this coming Sunday, March 13th.

I predict that if an atheist talks about how god does not cause disasters, on the 13th day of the month, there will be an earthquake of 7.0 or greater magnitude somewhere on the earth later that same day.

Details of the radio show here.

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Comments

  1. #1 Dave X
    March 8, 2011

    6-point-something: http://www.blaghag.com/2010/04/and-boobquake-results-are-in.html

    6-point-somethings have a return interval of about 2.5 days, while 7-point-somethings have a return interval of about 24 days.

  2. #2 oldebabe
    March 8, 2011

    No here mystery, and no surprises, either, i.e. there is an earthquake (or even several) every day somewhere on earth. That, apparently, already keeps a quake creator very busy spotting the multitude of exposed cleavage.

  3. #3 Greg Laden
    March 8, 2011

    Dave, unfortunately, that graph is a great example of how to not make a graph! An outlier drives all the other data into the corner. Adjsuting (logging, or something) the data and/or sampling around the outlier(s) would look very different.

    I think there just my be something to this boob-earthquake link.

  4. #4 Dave X
    March 8, 2011

    I’m afraid I ignored the graphs and read the 6.5 number directly from the text ant thought you should post 6-point something rather than 7-point-something.

    To get the return intervals, I read Jen’s link to http://web.ics.purdue.edu/%7Ebraile/new/EqStatistics.pdf and inverted the average numbers per year in “frequency of occurence” table, which he in turn copied from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqstats.php 365/15=24days and 365/134=2.7days (I made an error above), and the 5-point somethings have a return interval of 365*24/1319=6.6hrs.

    From magnitude 2 through 8, it looks like each log-scale Richter-scale point is worth about a factor of ten in frequency and return interval.

    In any case, the chance of repeating the 6.0 or greater thing that happened last boobquake would be about 1/3, while the 7.0+ prediction has about a 1/24 chance of happening.

  5. #5 Greg Laden
    March 8, 2011

    Dave: I’m sitting here reading your comment and thinking “What, he can’t read my post? What’s up?” then I realized that the post I wrote with the details about the earthquakes is scheduled for tomorrow. And yes, essentially.

    Which proves nothing, which is why they are going to have to do it again.

  6. #6 rash
    March 9, 2011

    Sorry, don’t agree to some of your points in Radio show.

  7. #7 Mike Haubrich
    March 9, 2011

    Rash, we accept phone calls and comments to the show if you wish to point out where you disagree.