Comment on If only it was like that

• theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It’s well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don’t describe anything we care to describe with those scales.

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  • ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That negative number comes from taking a logarithm of a number less than one. Not from a negative scalar.

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