Spacers

Lookout - Boobquake!

Monday, April 26th 2010. Today is Boobquake day! Participating women around the world will be wearing something revealing of the, erm, 'upper' private regions of the female form.

So, now Spacers is a smut site?
No such luck! It's just a bit of fun aimed at making a very valid scientific point - women wearing revealing clothing does not cause earthquakes. Spacers is a blog about space, so I'm not going to go into too much of the religious details, but essentially an Iranian cleric attributed what was mistakenly seen as an increase in recent earthquake activity to a deity being angry about the amount of cleavage shown by women in public. Renowned internet blogger and skeptic, Blag Hag, picked up on the story and declared today as Boobquake day - a day in which women would attempt to either prove or disprove the angry deity theory by increasing the amount of exposed female flesh and see what happens.


So, there's some serious stuff too, right?
Of course there is. Spacers has reported before on how the frequency of earthquakes around the world is under-reported. Understandably the earthquakes that make the news are the big ones, the death and destruction causing monster quakes that devastate entire cities and communities. These are very serious incidents that are worthy of the reporting they get, and indeed of the attention and disaster relief that those communities receive afterward. The science of earthquakes is very well understood and the instances are readily available - just add the earthquake layer to Google Earth - under the "Places of Interest" layer folder there is a folder called "Geographic Features" and under that layer is an "Earthquake" layer.

There are sometimes hundreds of earthquakes every day, most of them are minor, but on occasion there is a major devastating quake. There is nothing to be gained from claiming that a deity is in some way responsible for an increase in earthquakes, it's simply untrue. The tectonic plates are constantly shifting, very slowly around the globe, driven by the heated molten core of the planet. As the plates slowly collide pressure is built up, and when that pressure is inevitably released we get an earthquake at the point where it happened. It's as simple as that.


Around the world we see patterns of earthquakes. The Pacific rim itself is an area of activity that has been coined the "Ring Of Fire" due to the clearly visible circular pattern of volcanic and seismic activity. There are also areas of land that are virtually isolated from such activity and almost never see an earthquake. We can't predict the exact moment or location of a quake, but we can monitor the buildup of pressure at known active areas and warn of potential occurrences.

What we can't do is use the amount of exposed female breast flesh as a guide to how angry a deity is and guess where that deity will send the next earthquake. Even if there is a deity it would be a futile exercise to express your anger in such a way. How would we know for sure that boobs are the reason? Well, Boobquake, of course!

Support Boobquake today by revealing as much cleavage as you dare - and there is no reason the men can't participate too.

SpaceHead