Thursday, September 1, 2011

Animated earthquake Tweet map



Well of course I'm going to post an animated map of the earthquake. But this one is different in that it shows when and where Tweets that mentioned the earthquake popped up.

And of course that speaks directly to this post, where XKCD's Randall Munroe depicted the concept of how the spread of information about an earthquake event can out-pace the speed of the event itself.  Mr. Munroe actually blogged about that cartoon and this earthquake and tells this great story:
I once heard a story (originally told by Kevin Young) about Gerson Goldhaber, who was a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He was talking on the phone with another physicist at SLAC near Stanford University near the end of the day on Tuesday, October 17, 1989. The SLAC physicist suddenly interrupted with, “Gerson, I have to go! There’s a very big earthquake happening!” and then hung up. So Gerson stepped out into a group of people in the hall, made a big show of yawning and checking his watch, then said, “Aren’t we about due for an earthquake?” Before anyone could respond, the Loma Prieta earthquake reached Berkeley, and he became a legend.

And, for your convenience, there's the post with the interactive map of the Christchurch New Zealand earthquake...
...and the post with the animated map of the Japan earthquake & tsunami.

By the way, I got the above Tweet earthquake animation from this article on Boing Boing.

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