Lost in Translation?
Kerry Sieh and Siman LeVay have written a widely (and justly) praised book on earthquakes and volcanoes called The Earth in Turmoil. It's a fine book and I recommend it highly, but I found this little oddity on pages 82 and 83:
My best guess is that the original computations were done in meters, and that something was lost in translation in the round off in one unit system or both.
How many ruptures of the fault did it take to produce the 420 foot offset? If every rupture produced an offset of 30 feet, as the 1857 rupture did, then it would take a total of about 13 ruptures.Well, Kerry Sieh is the Robert P. Sharp Professor of Geology at Caltech, and I would think that some at that institution might find the math a bit funky. I suppose that it's true that 420/30 is "about" 13, since it's exactly 14, but what's going on here?
My best guess is that the original computations were done in meters, and that something was lost in translation in the round off in one unit system or both.
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