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Undersea Cables Damaged By Earthquake
ColoradoAuthor writes "The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, it was thought that the damage to the cables that connect Japan and Asia to each other and other parts of the world was limited, but new data shows the extent of the problems."
Try the dictionary next time.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/data
Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions: as a plural noun (like earnings), taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (as these, many, a few) but not cardinal numbers, and serving as a referent for plural pronouns (as they, them); and as an abstract mass noun (like information), taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (as this, much, little), and being referred to by a singular pronoun (it). Both constructions are standard.
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-12/world/japan.earthquake.tsunami.earth_1_tsunami-usgs-geophysicist-quake?_s=PM:WORLD
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You know there are two solstices each year, right? And that the quake hit two weeks ahead of the middle of the two? Stick with the perihelion theory, it works better in this case.
#badscience
From that wikipedia list: 12 of the largest quakes on record occurred between December and March, 4 in November, and only 8 were between May and October. So... What's so important about the winter months?
Nothing. You've offered a 4 month window out of 12 months, and showed us 12 of the largest quakes out of the top 24 landed in that period. You'd expect the mean to be eight, if quakes are completely random. I ran a t-test separating the quakes listed on your wikipedia page by 4-month groups, making your december-march one group, may-july another, and august-november the third one. Assuming the null hypothesis that quakes are completely random, the two-tailed P value for that sample was 0.5242. ie, Not statistically significant at all.