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Bouncing UK Children Cause Earthquake
Xibalba writes: "This is kinda cool. One million children in the UK jumped up and down simultaneously in an attempt to see what would seismically happen." This cries out to become an annual (and international) all-ages event. Bounce! Bounce! Gain weight! Bounce! Repeat.
Just let Steve Ballmer jump around a little again.
Enuf said...
See, the children were in elementary school, which is a higher education than the journalist had.
Early estimates suggested 75,000 tons of energy had been released during the minute of jumping.
But drop that in one spot and it would have caused quite a big hole in the ground
They aren't actually suggesting that all of Britain's children be dropped in one spot to see how big a hole they'll make, are they?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It will create a 3600 Richter earthquake!
Yeah, except the Richter scale is logaritmic. So a Richter 4 is 10 times as strong as a Richter 3. So to cause a Richter 10, 10^7 * 1M people would need to be bouncing up and down.
nope, you just don't understand the richter scale
2 &lastnode_id=141724
an earthquake of 10 is not just 1 notch above an earthquake of 9. It's 10 times more powerful.
From http://www.everything2.org/index.pl?node_id=51531
Listing is: Richter Scale # - Amount great than Richter Scale of 1 - info
1 1 no noticeable effects...detected only by seismographs
2 10 only slightly noticeable even if close to epicenter
3 100
4 1,000 slight damage near the epicenter
5 10,000
6 100,000 moderate destruction
7 1,000,000 severe destruction
8 10,000,000 one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded
Casual Games/Downloads
Whew, thank God. When I read "Bouncing UK children" I thought they had been thrown out of the window or something!
I saw some of this on tv. The kids didn't actually jump simultaneously. That is, they weren't in synch as they jumped up and down. They did all start and stop at about the same time though, which is what they mean by simultaneous, I guess.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_155.html
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
(here) except that this actually worked.
And think about it, how cool would it be to be 6 years old, and tell your parents "You can't punish me, or I'll earthquake your room."
I'd like to think you're joking, but since I'm not sure I'm going to reply anyway.
They were expecting the jumping to be equivalent to about a magnitude 3 earthquake on the Richter scale which is a common seismic event that shows up on seismographs but which people can't even detect. A significant quake will be more like a 5 or higher on the Richter scale. This scale is logarithmic so a 4 is actually 10 times more powerful than a 3, and a 5 is 10 times a 4.
Thus the scientists would have to have been mistaken about the impact of all that jumping by a factor of 100 to actually rattle people. Any scientist worth his salt ought to be able to estimate the effect of what he's doing more precisely than 2 orders of magnitude, especially if it might be dangerous for him to be wrong.
Note: The 10 times factor applies to wave amplitude, energy content scales by about 10*Sqrt(10) or 31 times from one level to the next.
We're British scientists. We don't need reasons to do things, just cool things to do.
-
The Lameness filter can filter this.
While, everyone has already pointed out that the scale doesn't work that way, I want to add something. Would you really want to use this as a weapon (even if you could)? After all the jumpers and their country would be right at the epicenter of the thing.
Okay everyone, let's destroy our homeland in order to break some windows belonging to those no good foreign devils.
For those /.'ers who sneer at reading linked articles the kids just went out and jumped about for a minute. No attempt at synchronization beyond a wall clock and some teacher calling out "OK Luvvies - jump about now!" There wasn't even an attempt to get the kids on a beat (apparently BBC1 couldn't be persuaded to play Queen's "We Will Rock You" at the right time ;-)
However as directly useless as this may be to science it's doubtless opened the eye's of Britians youth to what promises to be only the first of the many pointless exercises they will be required to go through in their lives, always a lesson worth learning.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
When I was a child, I often thought of what would occur if a huge number of people jumped simultaneously, but I never really thought it would happen. Apparently, though, if you have a PhD in Physics and a little notebook of all your kiddy schemes, then you can have them carried out as "research". Can't wait to see what will be in the news next. Im guessing something where we see what will happen if everyone in the world flushes their toilets simultaneously. Will this cause the polar caps melt, or the oceans to drain? Find out on yahoo! (or slashdot)
Everyone now, ready, set, go!
Reminds me of:
1) the effect when thousands of soldiers crossing a bridge intentionally fall out of step to avoid setting up sympathetic vibrations in the bridge, thus collapsing it (which used to be a real problem before they figured out the cause!)
2) for the Chinese scanario: instead of having them all jump off a chair in their homes, line them up on the shoreline and have them dive in to the surf simultaneously - possibly setting up a tseunami heading eastward.
Wow, those are some powerful Jalepenos!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
But in the years since, the seismograph has fallen to the budget axe, and Tiger Stadium has been expanded to hold over 90,000. So if a "squeaker" of a game like that ever was to happen again, the resulting earthquake may topple the Louisiana state capitol building and ring bells in Alabama, but no one on campus will know how strong it was...
Fear is for lesser scientists. Next week we're bussing the kids to a local bridge and having them jump in synch.
How long could a jump earthquake last? Once it go really going it would be centered on the jumpers themselves.
Careful what you wish for pudgy english children.
For our next big event, on signal, lets all simultaneously:
1) flush toilets
2) pick up a telephone handset
3) switch on a large electrical appliance
4) call for Chinese take out delivery
5) withdraw funds from the bank
6) visit the same web site
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Some of the kids in my old highschool organized the following:
All toilets were flushed on the final note of the national anthum.
Didn't actually make anything explode as hoped, but it did back up the plumbing for about half a day.
-Fantastic Lad
Well, I haven't checked the calculations, but even if this de-orbits Earth, it will return to its orbit when the people come down again. There's something called conservation of momentum to ensure this.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Lord Richter: "Do not be so proud of these children you've instructed; the power of one million bouncing children is insignificant next to the power of the Force..."
Commander of Child-Powered Earthquake Machine: "You don't frighten us with your scientist's ways, Lord Richter. Your sad devotion to that ancient profession has not helped you conjure up new fault lines, or given you clairvoyance enough to--urk! Ack! Ick! Urg!"
Prime Minister Tarkin: "Enough of this! Richter, stop jumping up and down on him!"
Lord Richter: "As you wish..."
This story reminded me of Tesla's Earthquake machine which, if you believe the stories, demonstrates just how much damage you can inflict when you hit the resonant frequency with a modest amount of power.
Damn, why do I never have modpoints when I REALLY want em? This is funny...
("You left the keys in the car?"
("Ummm, yeah, see, 'cause I was only going in for a minute...")
As improbable as it seems, this would seem to me to be a classic Ummm situation:
"You destroyed half of San Francisco for a laugh!?"
"Ummm, well, yeah, but we didn't think it would ever really work...!"
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
They can only mean 75,000 tonnes of pure energy. You know, the star trek kind.
I think nuclear bombs are more powerful than all the world's people jumping. And a meteor is far more powerful than that.
Also, the world would have to move tens of billions of miles for appreciable climate change. The earth already moves over a billion towards and away from the sun in its yearly irregular orbit. In fact, the northern hemisphere's winter takes place when the earth is one billion miles closer.
Elsewhere around the world, the Weekly World News is still reporting that the chineese are going to drive their cars all in the same direction at the same time in order to change the rotation of the earth. Apparently the Russians are planning on flushing their toilets all at the same time in hopes that the rotation of the water in the toilets will send the earth plumetting into the cosmos.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
bingo, been over year sinec I did geology a-level
"tall girls can flirt and other queer things can do"
bit like "cockney old sod did contract penis tumors juggling cold testicles quickly"
(cambrian, ordovician, sillurian, devonian, carbiniferous, p-something, tirassic, jurrasic, creatceous, tertiary, quaternary)
Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, there was a "prediction" that there would be a great earthquake to hit the Mississippi River valley. (I think it was predicted for an intercontinental plate line running near St. Louis.)
Anyhow, during the week or so of hyped-up media coverage (slow news week?), there were several "Fat is Beautiful"-type groups (and maybe a few weight-loss groups, too, I don't remember) that all decided to stand on the fault line and jump in unison, to get the big earthquake started. The earthquake never happened, but...
-mrv
Or for the pendantic...
What would that be? The people who dangle?
</pedantic>
If you timed everyone's jump well enough you could make it so that the small vibrations from each individual jump would propagate out of China and all arrive at an outside target at the same time, without any destructive effect inside China.
Think of it this way: if you had 1000 people drop drops of water into a swimming pool at the same time, and all the drops were on the edge of a circle, you could create a large disturbance in the center of the circle that would be bigger than the disturbance at the drops themselves.
Now pulling this off would require a fairly advanced model of wave propagation through the earth, as the wave velocity varies through different layers of the crust. You'd probably only be able to concentrate a fraction of the available energy that way. Actually you're guaranteed low efficiency by the laws of thermodynamics. But in principle, concentrating seismic waves is certainly doable. in fact I'm sure there has been some military research into concentrating the seismic waves from precisely timed explosions.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
That's impressive considering the average radius of Earch's orbit is 96 MILLion miles.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
They aren't actually suggesting that all of Britain's children be dropped in one spot to see how big a hole they'll make, are they?
Of course not, but some Mr. Swift has a plan for Irish children...
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu