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jkozera
Joined: 09 Jan 2015
Posts: 90
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nicenicegaijin
Joined: 27 Feb 2015
Posts: 157
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 Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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Is it a silly concept? I don't think it is. Do you think avoiding smoking cigarettes to avoid lung cancer is a silly idea?
Or avoiding too much red meat and fatty food to avoid getting a heart attack?
I am a risk averse person. I also have a large SUV so that if I have a crash I survive. It is just called making risk averse and intelligent decisions.
I think what you can't understand is that I have the luxury to be able to avoid Tokyo and decide to do that as I do not like the odds of getting stuck there if there is a quake. I remember after 3/11 what a pain it was to get home as the roads were blocked and a 10 minute drive from my uni to the house became a 2 hour affair.
The Portland quake is supposed to be overdue, but has not been predicted with 70% certainty within the next year. However, if I was a Portland resident I would probably move due to this prediction and find somewhere less precarious to live.
Did you know they are actually building a huge Tsunami wall in Japan at the cost of trillions of dollars, I wonder why that is?
http://rt.com/news/243045-japan-sea-wall-critics/ |
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jkozera
Joined: 09 Jan 2015
Posts: 90
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| Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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| but giving up a job offer or avoiding it all together is in fact silly. smoking DOES cause cancer so yeah avoiding cigaretts makes sense. but they MAY be a quake. Should I avoid driving since i MAY get into a car accident? no. Sould I avoid jumping off a cliff since i WILL die? yes. your analogy doesn't work |
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Maitoshi
Joined: 04 May 2014
Posts: 718
Location: 何処でも
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| Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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| But smoking doesn't cause cancer in everyone! Some die of heart disease. Some smokers live to a ripe old age. |
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jkozera
Joined: 09 Jan 2015
Posts: 90
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| Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 9:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Maitoshi wrote: |
| But smoking doesn't cause cancer in everyone! Some die of heart disease. Some smokers live to a ripe old age. |
That argument doesn't work for me. I could go on my own little soap box about smoking but the point is mute here. The point I was agreeing with is avoiding a city because there may or may not be an earth quake is silly. If you look at any geological survey, you would buy the first ticket to the international space station since you can't avoid the fact that any area on the planet is prone to natural disasters. |
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Maitoshi
Joined: 04 May 2014
Posts: 718
Location: 何処でも
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| Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 10:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Yes, I understood the point with which you were arguing, but is the point really moot? You were saying NNG's reasoning was silly. I disagree. The whole conversation is a bit silly, but within the parameters of the discussion, I think it is reasonable to take precautions about where one works. |
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Pitarou
Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan
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| Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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Maitoshi: Thanks for trying to inject a little common-sense. If only everyone was as patient and good-humoured as you.
jkozera: I'd give up now, if I were you. Come back when you have a firmer grasp of the concept of stochastic risk. (And a point is "moot", not "mute".)
nicenicegaijin: Please stop quoting "70% by the end of 2016" as a current fact. I've already explained that this figure no longer applies. The odds must have fallen considerably by now. |
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water rat
Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:19 am Post subject: |
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Pitarou, if you're going to scold people on Dave's for being asshats your work will never be done. So you give it up, why don't you.
nicegaijin, who won't admit he's really the banned user, Mateacher, operates under the delusion that people who have doctorates are smarter than the rest of us. This may be so in even the majority of cases, but not his.
Consider how he refuses to respond to your very sensible argument that this 70% chance of an earthquake in Tokyo is three years old or more, and so of course the level of probability has changed.
(Then consider that he cannot even use quotation marks properly, or can figure out the quotation function here.)
Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. It's a huge city. Can they not say where precisely the quake will strike? Because if they can narrow it down to Tokyo, they ought to be able to give us a general idea which part of Tokyo they mean.
And why are they not concerned with all those happy Japanese places that are not Tokyo? Why don't they help them out with a few warnings?
It is true that I am a B.A. holding high school teacher in a Chinese backwater. What nicenice is wrong about is that anyone here listens to me. 
However, I am no more and no less what I claim to be while 'certain parties' are likely in all actuality to be Walmart staff in Sandusky, OH pretending to be gaijin professors with SUVs and PhDs.
Returning to the point of all this though, I suspect what's really going on is that the Japanese public is saying, "Hey! We got all these egghead geologists sitting on their duffs at prestigious U of T, teaching kids about rocks, and writing papers, if anyone knows when the next big earthquake will be, it's them, desho? So why don't they just tell us already?"
And so the great men hem and haw because like any backwater English teacher in the Gobi desert knows - you cannot predict earthquakes with any greater accuracy than a quarter of a million years over maybe a 10,000 sqkm stretch. Yet they make their meaningless prediction because it's expected of them. They understand that if they are wrong, well, who won't be pleased that Tokyo wasn't suddenly destroyed at the preordained hour? And they can go on TV again and make some new vague prediction for four years in the future, and return to sitting on their duffs, teaching kids about rocks and writing papers.
Last edited by water rat on Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:32 am; edited 1 time in total |
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nightsintodreams
Joined: 18 May 2010
Posts: 558
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:55 am Post subject: |
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Where's the like button for Water Rat's post?
MAteacher. You've been outed, give up this charade. |
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Pitarou
Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 2:43 am Post subject: |
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| water rat wrote: |
| Pitarou, if you're going to scold people on Dave's for being asshats your work will never be done |
Fair point. As you were, then.
| Quote: |
| Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. |
Are you sure about that?
EDIT To expand on that: I haven't read the seismologists' report, but I would be very surprised if it didn't begin with a precise definition of what kind of events they're trying to forecast.
| Quote: |
| Yet they make their meaningless prediction because it's expected of them. They understand that if they are wrong, well, who won't be pleased that Tokyo wasn't suddenly destroyed at the preordained hour? |
I don't think it's entirely meaningless. Sure, the error bars on the figure of 70% must be large, but Tokyo is due another Big One, and the chances of it happening were / are greatly elevated in the period after the big quake of 2011.
And, more importantly, the headline figure served as a wake-up call to the complacent. |
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water rat
Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:25 am Post subject: |
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| Pitarou wrote: |
| water rat wrote: |
| Pitarou, if you're going to scold people on Dave's for being asshats your work will never be done |
Fair point. As you were, then.
| Quote: |
| Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. |
Are you sure about that?
EDIT To expand on that: I haven't read the seismologists' report, but I would be very surprised if it didn't begin with a precise definition of what kind of events they're trying to forecast.
| Quote: |
| Yet they make their meaningless prediction because it's expected of them. They understand that if they are wrong, well, who won't be pleased that Tokyo wasn't suddenly destroyed at the preordained hour? |
I don't think it's entirely meaningless. Sure, the error bars on the figure of 70% must be large, but Tokyo is due another Big One, and the chances of it happening were / are greatly elevated in the period after the big quake of 2011.
And, more importantly, the headline figure served as a wake-up call to the complacent. |
Ho hum. I appreciate your reply, but frankly I'm growing bored with this thread.
When I said
| Quote: |
| Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. |
I meant, no one here, i.e, our troubled and troubling troll of an OP. Never mind seismologists reports because this discussion is only about "what's often been on TV" and I can easily imagine they didn't go into seismological reports in short TV news segments.
I meant, can the predicting professors tell us the precise districts that will be most effected by The Big One? I think not. The bottom line is, as most have said, the OP is being overly cautious and foolish in avoiding Tokyo completely on the off chance of being one of the estimated 11,000 among 30 million who may die in a temblor that may never come in 2016. He belittles religious faith, and yet blindly swears by what some researchers say because they have PhDs and what they said has been on TV!
Having said all that, I should mention I did live in Tokyo for three years back in the 1980s, and I appreciate how geologically active it is. Hardly six weeks go by without some noticeable tremor, and more than once I've experienced episodes that move the beams of large buildings, make the women scream and the men blanch. I remember once I counted 45 days since there had been a quake. I thought that ominous, but then the very next day we had a good and proper shaking.
So does that make me as good a predictor as these PhDs?
Certainly not. Anyone who lives in Tokyo could estimate as much, and here's the point - this is what the PhDs are doing when they say there is a 70% chance of an extra large one with cheese and a side of fries coming in 2016. When I noticed a 45- day calm, it was in no way an indication that there was a 100% chance of earth-shaking within 24 hours, and that's how it is with the experts. No one knows the day or the hour," as The Good Book says.
Final word:
The OP wrote:
| Quote: |
| I think I already addressed your question about if the quake hit my place, which is won't since there hasn't been one predicted there as there aren't any fault lines it would not be so large and the ground is solid. I would make my way to the nearest airport and fly out as soon as they resumed flights or go as far west as possible and assess the situation and plan the next move. |
Can he really think that because no quake is predicted for his little bit of Japan there will not ever be a bad one? This is Japan we're talking about! The whole of Honshu and most of the rest of the country is poised over the Japan Trench, which as the name suggests, is where Japan is going to end up. Your University of Tokyo will tell you this too. This is not a prediction but an incontrovertible fact. Sure, it may be tens of millions of years from now, but while those of living in the center of Asia, or North America or even not so great Britain have no such worries, Japan is doomed. It's small-minded and provincial for the OP to imagine his little suburb of Tokyo is safe. He has no understanding of the scale of these things. There could be Marshall, Will and Holly's Land of the Lost 'Greatest Earthquake Ever Known' off the coast of Chile tomorrow, and the resulting tsunami could wipe Nicenice's safe suburban suburb a mere seven thousand miles across the sea from the face of the Earth. The geologists will tell you, if they are honest, that no one has any idea why some earthquakes cause tsunamis and others do not. The Greatest Earthquake Ever Known occurring near Chile could leave Tokyo untouched and utterly destroy a town quite nearby. One thing for sure, Northwest Gansu will be high and dry!  |
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nicenicegaijin
Joined: 27 Feb 2015
Posts: 157
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:48 am Post subject: |
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| water rat wrote: |
Pitarou, if you're going to scold people on Dave's for being asshats your work will never be done. So you give it up, why don't you.
nicegaijin, who won't admit he's really the banned user, Mateacher, operates under the delusion that people who have doctorates are smarter than the rest of us. This may be so in even the majority of cases, but not his.
Consider how he refuses to respond to your very sensible argument that this 70% chance of an earthquake in Tokyo is three years old or more, and so of course the level of probability has changed.
(Then consider that he cannot even use quotation marks properly, or can figure out the quotation function here.)
Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. It's a huge city. Can they not say where precisely the quake will strike? Because if they can narrow it down to Tokyo, they ought to be able to give us a general idea which part of Tokyo they mean.
And why are they not concerned with all those happy Japanese places that are not Tokyo? Why don't they help them out with a few warnings?
It is true that I am a B.A. holding high school teacher in a Chinese backwater. What nicenice is wrong about is that anyone here listens to me.
However, I am no more and no less what I claim to be while 'certain parties' are likely in all actuality to be Walmart staff in Sandusky, OH pretending to be gaijin professors with SUVs and PhDs.
Returning to the point of all this though, I suspect what's really going on is that the Japanese public is saying, "Hey! We got all these egghead geologists sitting on their duffs at prestigious U of T, teaching kids about rocks, and writing papers, if anyone knows when the next big earthquake will be, it's them, desho? So why don't they just tell us already?"
And so the great men hem and haw because like any backwater English teacher in the Gobi desert knows - you cannot predict earthquakes with any greater accuracy than a quarter of a million years over maybe a 10,000 sqkm stretch. Yet they make their meaningless prediction because it's expected of them. They understand that if they are wrong, well, who won't be pleased that Tokyo wasn't suddenly destroyed at the preordained hour? And they can go on TV again and make some new vague prediction for four years in the future, and return to sitting on their duffs, teaching kids about rocks and writing papers. |
First of all I am not Mateacher. Second, it seems that you have an academic chip on your shoulder and have a dislike toward anyone who has decided to go and become educated to PhD level. The way you talk about the researchers is just plain rude. I already linked to their research profiles, which I am sure you didn't bother reading, but you with you BA in something and as a high school teacher knows better. Do you see how faulty your reasoning is, unrelated degree, unrelated industry experience yet you know so much about earthquake prediction to belittle the whole Todai research team.
The issue of the revision of the stats was already covered and discussed on a previous post. |
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nicenicegaijin
Joined: 27 Feb 2015
Posts: 157
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:55 am Post subject: |
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| water rat wrote: |
| Pitarou wrote: |
| water rat wrote: |
| Pitarou, if you're going to scold people on Dave's for being asshats your work will never be done |
Fair point. As you were, then.
| Quote: |
| Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. |
Are you sure about that?
EDIT To expand on that: I haven't read the seismologists' report, but I would be very surprised if it didn't begin with a precise definition of what kind of events they're trying to forecast.
| Quote: |
| Yet they make their meaningless prediction because it's expected of them. They understand that if they are wrong, well, who won't be pleased that Tokyo wasn't suddenly destroyed at the preordained hour? |
I don't think it's entirely meaningless. Sure, the error bars on the figure of 70% must be large, but Tokyo is due another Big One, and the chances of it happening were / are greatly elevated in the period after the big quake of 2011.
And, more importantly, the headline figure served as a wake-up call to the complacent. |
Ho hum. I appreciate your reply, but frankly I'm growing bored with this thread.
When I said
| Quote: |
| Also, no one has asked that these quake predicting PhDs define Tokyo. |
I meant, no one here, i.e, our troubled and troubling troll of an OP. Never mind seismologists reports because this discussion is only about "what's often been on TV" and I can easily imagine they didn't go into seismological reports in short TV news segments.
I meant, can the predicting professors tell us the precise districts that will be most effected by The Big One? I think not. The bottom line is, as most have said, the OP is being overly cautious and foolish in avoiding Tokyo completely on the off chance of being one of the estimated 11,000 among 30 million who may die in a temblor that may never come in 2016. He belittles religious faith, and yet blindly swears by what some researchers say because they have PhDs and what they said has been on TV!
Having said all that, I should mention I did live in Tokyo for three years back in the 1980s, and I appreciate how geologically active it is. Hardly six weeks go by without some noticeable tremor, and more than once I've experienced episodes that move the beams of large buildings, make the women scream and the men blanch. I remember once I counted 45 days since there had been a quake. I thought that ominous, but then the very next day we had a good and proper shaking.
So does that make me as good a predictor as these PhDs?
Certainly not. Anyone who lives in Tokyo could estimate as much, and here's the point - this is what the PhDs are doing when they say there is a 70% chance of an extra large one with cheese and a side of fries coming in 2016. When I noticed a 45- day calm, it was in no way an indication that there was a 100% chance of earth-shaking within 24 hours, and that's how it is with the experts. No one knows the day or the hour," as The Good Book says.
Final word:
The OP wrote:
| Quote: |
| I think I already addressed your question about if the quake hit my place, which is won't since there hasn't been one predicted there as there aren't any fault lines it would not be so large and the ground is solid. I would make my way to the nearest airport and fly out as soon as they resumed flights or go as far west as possible and assess the situation and plan the next move. |
Can he really think that because no quake is predicted for his little bit of Japan there will not ever be a bad one? This is Japan we're talking about! The whole of Honshu and most of the rest of the country is poised over the Japan Trench, which as the name suggests, is where Japan is going to end up. Your University of Tokyo will tell you this too. This is not a prediction but an incontrovertible fact. Sure, it may be tens of millions of years from now, but while those of living in the center of Asia, or North America or even not so great Britain have no such worries, Japan is doomed. It's small-minded and provincial for the OP to imagine his little suburb of Tokyo is safe. He has no understanding of the scale of these things. There could be Marshall, Will and Holly's Land of the Lost 'Greatest Earthquake Ever Known' off the coast of Chile tomorrow, and the resulting tsunami could wipe Nicenice's safe suburban suburb a mere seven thousand miles across the sea from the face of the Earth. The geologists will tell you, if they are honest, that no one has any idea why some earthquakes cause tsunamis and others do not. The Greatest Earthquake Ever Known occurring near Chile could leave Tokyo untouched and utterly destroy a town quite nearby. One thing for sure, Northwest Gansu will be high and dry! |
Yes, you are right I do belittle religious faith, most intelligent people do.
How can you possibly believe the noahs ark story or that woman was made from some man's rib. How can people believe in creationism it is just ludicrous in 2015 people believe the following :
And when he was 600, he and his three 100-year-old sons built a boat onto which in one day, they loaded over 3 million animals, all of which were apparently indigenous to within 5 miles of the boat.
I am sorry but it is not possible to have rational discussions with people who believe this. Yet they will belittle all the research done by the earthquake research PhD holders in Todai. |
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water rat
Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 7:35 am Post subject: |
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Nicenice your statement
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| The issue of the revision of the stats was already covered and discussed on a previous post. |
is not true. You never do discuss this, unless you think referring to Portland, Oregon and a tsunami wall are an explanation.
This is typical of your side of the discussion thus far. You cannot back up what you say so you make ad hominem attacks, make stupid accusations and raise side issues that have little to do with the topic at hand.
What could my being a high school teacher who was only asking about an unsolicited job off have to do with whether there will be a major quake in Tokyo next year? What could the Noah's Ark story possibly have to do with it? Why would you even bring that up? What could my alleged having a chip on my shoulder for those with a higher education have to do with it?
If you must know, no such chip exist. If anything the opposite is true. You seem to respect no one but those who can boast a PhD, and think that the rest of us cannot possibly know anything. (I did read your research profiles, so you're wrong about that too).
The only questions here are whether there will be a major quake in Tokyo next year, and if it is not completely stupid to avoid that city from now until (when? January 1st, 2017) on the off chance of bodily harm, or even death.
For me the issue is how could that august body at Todai have ever allowed themselves to be pinned with such a ridiculous pronouncement, and how could you be so naive as to believe earthquake prediction is such an exact science?
I could be a kindergarten dropout who takes every word in the Bible literally and be serial killing PhDs, but that would in no way change the fact that no one can say "This city between these two dates; 7.0 magnitude earthquake." It can't be done! And the phrase "or higher" just proves how ignorant a statement it is. Do you have any idea how the Richter scale works? It's as if I said I think I have good evidence based on the high-falutin' medical knowledge of my team of doctors that I will live to be 100, or perhaps 1,500.
Is any of this getting through to you? |
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Pitarou
Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan
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| Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:13 am Post subject: |
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| water rat wrote: |
| no one can say "This city between these two dates; 7.0 magnitude earthquake." It can't be done! |
Put away your straw man. Nobody is saying it can.
There's a world of difference between saying "there will be an earthquake" and "there might be an earthquake", and I don't think it's going too far to quantify that "might" with an estimate of probability. |
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