I have come to realise that effectively searching for information is actually a rare skill people have.

First off a lot of people don’t even bother taking it upon themselves to begin to search, they just copy/paste whatever other people are saying. And even when they do try and search for something, they barely know what to search for to find what they want. If it’s literally not the first ranked google result they just give up.

With social media there is absolutely no incentive to fact-check anything and you actually get rewarded for not doing so. Getting in early and spewing out an incorrect opinion often get you more engagement than taking your time and posting the often-boring truth.

Yea I’m with you there. I can understand if someone doesn’t realise that it’s a logarithmic scale, but people who do and then still get it wrong, blah.

Coming from a country which very routinely gets earthquakes, these numbers are very familiar to me, we learnt about them in school and often have “earthquake drills” similar to fire drills to practise what you are meant to do when one occurs.

You don’t add 10x for each magnitude step, you multiply it, so a 7 is 1000x more shaking than a 4 (not 30x). Also the energy released is 32x for each level on the scale, so the same gap (7 vs 4) represents a 32000x increase in energy

Yes, a lot of highways have a limit of 120 when you get away from the cities.