2025.07.30: Scale Problems

You do the math, you solve one problem,

then you solve the next one.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Get up!

Good!

Mortague!

Wherever you are, because it is Morning Somewhere!

For July 30th, 2025, my name is Bertie Burns, sitting right over there.

She's doing the math.

It's Ashley Burns.

Look, a lot of math to do today.

A A lot of math.

There's a lot of math.

We woke up to the news that there had been an earthquake off the coast of Russia.

And as a result, everyone anywhere near the Pacific needs to move to higher ground.

That is an insane warning radius of if you live near the Pacific Ocean, start paying attention.

Go up.

Yeah, it was, you know, and it's

interesting when you get an earthquake and the majority of the damage or the major concern for, I guess, most people, the earthquake is always of concern to some people.

But for like the majority of people, the concern isn't the earthquake.

It's the water that the earthquake just pushed.

What's the furthest south that you heard of a warning for that?

Because the furthest south I heard was Santa Barbara, Canada.

Ecuador?

Ecuador.

Wow, really?

Okay.

But not like Australia.

That would be insane.

No, no.

And in fact,

Malaysia, which has very famously suffered from a major tsunami in the past,

was talking about how they're okay.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they would have to tell people that.

Yeah, because that was

just over 20 years ago, 2004.

What is the so in your memory?

What is the biggest earthquake that you remember like as a kid or whatever?

Obviously, that one is huge.

I think that one was like 9.2.

Yeah, that was a really big one.

The Japan 2011

was a really big deal.

One that I dealt with the aftermath, I guess, was the San Francisco 1989 earthquake.

Not because I was anywhere near it.

I wasn't.

But when I moved to San Francisco in 2004, there were still parts of the city that were fenced off rubble that they were still clearing.

That was the one that hit during a World Series broadcast.

Damn.

Yeah, they were.

You can go look at it on YouTube.

They're on air and they're talking.

I think it's the pregame.

And all of a sudden, they start to freak out because the earthquake.

Yeah.

and that one I don't think was necessarily even a big earthquake.

I want to say that was a 6.3, something like that, which is the scale,

which is the scale of earthquake that I'm used to thinking about as being, you know, a fairly large earthquake, right?

We get in the sixth scale.

This one that hit off the coast of Russia overnight, 8.8 is what they're saying, which is, you know,

of a scale that is hard to comprehend as a force.

Absolutely.

So I think when you think about people, like we, we're very proud of ourselves, like we run this whole goddamn planet.

Do you know what I bench?

I was going to say, do you know what I benchlift?

I benchlift a 9.2.

We do think that we're, you know, have a huge effect on this planet, but I think things like volcanoes.

and earthquakes are a reminder, like on our global scale, of like just the enormous forces that exist in the cosmos.

Like even this is just a tiny fraction of like something on a cosmic scale.

Right.

This is a cosmic blip, and it is one of the most powerful forces ever recorded on Earth.

It's basically like two rocks just rubbing against each other, and it can destroy decades of progress instantaneously.

Like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, that has casualties, 225,000 people.

Oh, my God.

That is approaching all of the combat deaths from World War II for America, but in a day, in a morning, essentially.

Right.

With, with, at the time, probably like very little warning.

And it's like, how do they even measure this stuff?

Because I'm looking at this.

Like,

this earthquake, it's now been 21 years since this earthquake quake.

It'll be 21 years in December.

So 20 years ago, this hit.

To this day, it's listed according to Wikipedia with a magnitude of 9.2 to 9.3.

Once you get to these really high levels,

the scale is so big because every time you go up a whole number, it goes up 10x.

So like a five five going to a six, a six is 10 times the strength of a five.

So when you get up to that, like to even list it as 9.2 to 9.3, that margin of error is all of the eights, essentially, is what that is.

That's how big the margin of error goes up.

It's like when you get to that point, it's like, you know, we've measured it, but this margin of error includes all of the other earthquakes below it, essentially.

Wow.

And that's one of those things, too.

The Richter scale can't be designed for magnitudes of this force, right?

Isn't it designed for like, you know, the sixes?

It says it's, it's more accurate between three and seven.

And it's not, because I just don't know, like, are we even capable of measuring this?

Or is it just at some point an estimation?

Obviously, we're not professional seismologists, you know, but it's just it's one of those things that really does evoke the definition of the word awesome.

Like this is something that is so just fills you with awe and fear.

It's so huge.

Reminds you that you're a tiny ant.

It does.

It reminds you just how big you are on this planet when these huge, like just like a little burp from a volcano or a little rumble or a shift, and it can do so much damage.

And they're like, what can you do about it?

Go higher.

Go higher.

Go higher.

Go higher, which is, which is what like everyone touching the Pacific has done.

And it's been interesting.

I think the waves have now hit California.

And they come in and they're about four feet.

But I have always had a problem with almost describing tsunami waves as waves because they say, like,

we got the tsunamis hit, it's four foot.

And you picture a four foot tall wave going splish on a beach, right?

And it's like, it's, the thing is with a tsunami, it's not wave-shaped.

The ocean just went up four feet is kind of more how that works, right?

It's a force coming at you.

It's not just like one little blip.

It's four extra feet of ocean.

It is more appropriate, I think, to refer to a tsunami as like a tide more so than a wave.

Yes.

Like it almost like people don't picture what's coming at them correctly.

Right.

Like you're getting a six-foot tide in the next hour is what you're getting.

And everything is going to be covered in water.

It's not just a wave.

Wave, it's like it's a totally different thing than a wave.

Even though it isn't.

It is a wave.

It is a wave, but it's like, it's a different sort of wave.

It's a scale thing again.

It's just like we're not equipped to discuss the scale of these things.

We're really not because we don't live in it most of the time.

Like I was just reading of the different magnitudes and the frequency of them and a nine happens.

This is according to the Wikipedia entry on the Richter scale.

An 8.0 to 8.9, they say they happen once per year on average.

And a 9.0 to 9.9 is 1 to 3 per century is when they happen.

And, you know, one has happened already once this century because of the 2004 Indian Ocean one.

Yeah.

In fact,

the top three recorded earthquakes in terms of magnitude, there was the Indian Ocean one that was recorded as a Sumatra.

That was, we're going to call it a 9.3.

Alaska in 1964 was a 9.2.

And Chile in 1960 was a 9.5.

9.5.

9.5.

So that's the number one.

That's the biggest recorded earthquake of all time.

I don't even know what, when was it?

In my little entry here, I can see when the Richter scale was created,

1935.

So that's when the Richter scale started to be widely used.

So we've already used up all

three of our allotted nine point something earthquakes since the Richter scale was invented.

Wow.

Insane.

And then just think about how big some of them were that we didn't even record, you know, that you can't even think about those.

So I kind of went down another rabbit hole myself because

When I saw that there was something off of the coast of Russia.

Obviously Russia would not do this off their own coast.

But one of the things I remember hearing when I first moved here and the invasion of Ukraine was beginning was somebody in a pub was talking about how the plan that Putin had for the UK in a war was to detonate a nuke off the coast and just cover the entire island in water.

Basically launch it, like make a tsunami.

They would cover the UK.

Can you do that?

That was horrifying to think about.

And so I went home and I was like, ah, the guy was just like shit talking to the pub.

It's like, I'd read a couple of things.

Obviously, no one's going to publish that.

Like, that's their actual plan.

But it's just insane to think that that would be possible.

I don't know.

I looked it up.

The largest detonation of a nuke ever was a Russian nuke called Sarbamba.

And let me see if I can pull this up here.

It was, uh, it measured about 5.3 on the Richter scale.

So

a nuke.

So I was looking this up also.

Israel in the conflict with Syria, they dropped a bomb that supposedly registered 3.0 on the Richter scale.

That's still a lot.

It's still a lot.

It's still a lot.

Yeah.

So would they be able to do that?

I don't know.

But it's one of those things sometimes, you know, when it comes to warfare, thinking somebody can do something is almost as powerful as them being able to do it.

How old is Sarbamba?

I think that was in the 60s.

They did that one.

And that was the last time they had one of these major detonations.

Here, let me look this up.

So Sarbamba was

the largest nuclear explosion ever recorded.

It was tested by by the Soviet Union in 1961.

It yielded between 50 to 58 megatons of TNT and registered between 5.0 and 5.25 on the Richter scale.

So theoretically, you could tsunami the UK.

I mean, I don't know what it takes to make a tsunami, but once again, placement and everything else, because that would be up much higher.

It's not down deep in the earth, right?

Where it's taking place.

So I don't know.

Hey, here's how about this.

I don't want to find out.

Let's do our best not to find out.

But imagine, though, something the size of this earthquake, and you have to alert everyone who lives in that hemisphere off the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

Well, it's something that I worry about, actually, with the tsunami that everyone just got the warning for, right?

So the waves hit California, and they see this four-foot tsunami wave, and they're like, oh, that actually, that wasn't that bad.

I mean,

the ocean going up four feet,

you go, whoa, that's kind of crazy.

But four feet feels pretty manageable.

Right.

And the only thing I worry about is that one wasn't that bad.

And it's a normal human thing to compare

stuff to what you've experienced in the past.

I thought that's what you were going to say.

Yeah, I worry.

Right.

We get another one of these, you know, and who knows?

Maybe you get a 9.0 somewhere in the Pacific.

And people will go, oh, yeah, but remember last time,

you know, they, we had the tsunami warning and we had to do all this stuff and move to higher ground and there was four feet and it was like nothing burger.

You know, we, you just, I worry about how easy it would be to not pay attention when you go, it was all the way over in Russia.

We're going to be fine.

And it's like, we deal with that in the U.S.

because in the U.S., we have a thing called Amber Alerts, which can drill past all of your settings on your phone, including silent and all that, and do like a blast alert when there's a kid that's gone missing.

They've expanded it to stuff like silver alerts for when a senior citizen goes missing and a blue alert when there's some incident with a police officer somewhere.

The number of people I know though that have turned those off, like if you tell people what it is, oh, it's an alert so we can help find a missing kid, everyone's like, oh, of course I want to help out with that.

But they blasted them sometimes like twice a week, you know, we would get some of these things.

It's, it shows a huge problem in the U.S.

And then it would be an issue where people would get fatigued from that and they would just like end up turning it off in their settings.

Can I tell you a secret?

Is it a secret?

I'm one of those people.

I am because it drills past every setting you have,

and the vast majority of the time, they're not even amber alerts.

They are like a blue alert.

Oh, there's a police officer who's been involved in an incident, or

like you know, grandpa ran off with the car and we don't know where he is.

Like, there's so many of those, and individually, they're very important events.

But when you are getting like one of those per day and you can't do anything to silence them, if you're in, say, you know, a movie theater or somewhere where you're not supposed to have any noisy electronics,

it's just, it's too much.

And I did, I turned them off.

We had that in

when I was in the U.S.

this last trip.

We were at a baseball game and everyone's phones started going off.

And it was a blue alert.

Like someone had been in a shootout with a police officer, and it was in northeast Dallas.

It was about 250 miles away, you know, and it was like, what, what can I possibly do?

It's just too much, right?

It's like that when the range is that far and they're coming like that frequently, you feel like they're just

they're like someone was like, well, we need to just throw one of these out there to feel like they're doing something, but they're not doing anything targeted or effective.

And we'll link it.

It was actually in the Austin subreddit.

People were like, blue alert?

Like people, and some of them go off at two in in the morning and things like that it's like i'm i'm in my house at two in the morning i understand why people get fatigue is what i'm saying is that i understand why they turn it off and it's one of those things if you have this alert system

you've got to understand when it can be used and when it can't do you remember years ago god what was it um i want to say it was hawaii where someone was testing uh in a test environment the uh nuclear alert for missiles are on their way in hawaii but they weren't in the test environment they accidentally sent it out to everyone in hawaii I do remember that.

Yeah, that was 2018.

Here we go.

Hawaii experienced a false ballistic missile alert due to human error.

Fucking hell, dude.

What a thing to get on your phone, man.

Just like.

The missiles are on the way.

Yeah, like, go, like, the nukes are coming.

There's another thing like that, too, where

President Ronald Reagan had like a weekly radio show.

They did?

They said, President Reagan, would you please test your mic?

And he got on mic and it was was live.

And he goes, you don't need to worry about those pesky Russians.

The nukes are on their way.

Whoa, no.

That's what he said.

Like, imagine that happening today.

Like, that would be insane.

Didn't they?

I want to say it was, this was, oh, God, one of those things in the 30s or something, they did a radio play of War of the Worlds.

And people didn't realize that it was a radio play, and they thought this was a news broadcast that was happening, and the aliens had invaded.

Yeah, they went to the hills.

Like they, there were people who evacuated and left because of War of the Worlds.

Yeah, run for the hills, real thing.

You know who that was?

Who?

Who was the director behind that?

Uh, no.

Orson Welles.

Really?

Yeah, they, uh, so they just went to the hills, and they could have been like one of those, you know, you hear about years later, like some Japanese soldier who doesn't know the war ended and he's still fighting the war.

Right, he's been living on an island for 40 years somewhere.

And yeah, it's some, who knows?

Maybe there's still a pocket of civilization somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains of people who are worried about the aliens

at any point in time.

Well, speaking of worrying about the aliens showing up, Bernie, are you, what's your interest level in the Alien Earth TV series that's coming out?

Ooh.

That's a good question.

I know you like the franchise, but do you have interest in the TV show?

The alien franchise is so interesting to me because they, every time they make a new one, they seem seems like now they retcon everything before it almost everything, except for maybe the first alien.

So and this one is getting criticism for that.

But at this point in the franchise, it's kind of like, hey, that's what they do.

Aliens seems like a framework for a show, like more of a mechanic of you know what the xenomorph is and what it does.

And here's a story that could be told in that world.

I'm totally okay with that.

And I'm really looking forward to Alien Earth.

I want to check it out.

I mean, it seems like it's getting fairly positive reviews overall.

I mean, you know, maybe it's doing some franchise retconning, but overall, fairly positive.

I

just read one thing that made me more interested than anything else I've read about this series has.

And that's that Timothy Oliphant is in it.

No, no, I get it.

I get it.

No shame in your name.

I get it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's dreamy.

He is.

He's got, there's something about him, though.

He's got a quality that's like beyond.

charisma.

Yeah.

Right.

Like there's just, there's something about him.

He's chill.

He seems like just a chill dude.

He seems like he managed to like, he got it all figured out.

Right.

He's got, he's got a really good career.

He's done movies.

He's done a bunch of TV shows.

He's, he's a solid, like working actor.

He's recognizable.

He can star in stuff.

But he doesn't seem like he has to worry about paparazzi watching him grocery shopping.

Right.

Like he's got it figured out.

He's managed to have a career, but.

skip the bullshit.

Also, he's dreamy.

There seems to be, like this is the Richter scale for people.

There's a magnitude of difference between people who tell you they don't give a fuck and people who actually don't give a fuck.

And he seems like a dude who doesn't give a fuck.

No, he's no, he's as opposed to the dude who's always like, I'm so punk rock, man.

I don't care about this.

I don't care about that.

And they constantly tell you about it.

They don't know how much they don't care about that.

They don't care about this or they don't care about that.

And they talk about it all the time.

It's like, yeah, then it seems like you kind of care about that stuff.

But he genuinely just seems like, you know, I'm going to give a fuck.

I'll do whatever the fuck I want.

I don't care.

You know, it doesn't matter.

Like, I feel like this guy can single-handedly single-handedly retcon any universe he wants, and I'm going to be on board.

What is your favorite Timothy Oliphant

role slash appearance?

Okay.

The girl next door.

The girl next door where you played the boyfriend, the abusive boyfriend?

What choice?

Look, I watched it when I was younger, and I was like, I could fix him.

Oh, did you?

It was, there's, there's, it's, it's.

Actually, I'm going to call your credit card payment provider and complain about you.

The thing is, there's not even, it's not even the whole movie.

There's like one specific thing where he looks sideways and he points at the kid and it's like really intense and he's like i'm gonna you up and i was like oh my god you like that i was like just tell me what you want me to do i will never understand

ever i will never fucking figure it out as long as i live

if i may though you know he's he's great in everything i he was also fantastic in mandalorian once upon a time in hollywood for me although those are very similar eras and very similar roles i guess so yeah and I just thought he was just like, he's like playing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.

And it's just like, to me, he just chewed it up.

I love it.

Look,

there's something specifically too about his cheekbones and jaw.

All right, let's, come on.

Take it back.

Can we take it from a 9.2 to an 8.0, please?

Can we please drop it down a little bit?

What do you know about the Alien Art series?

It's a prequel, right?

I don't know Jack shit about it, honestly.

I know the aliens go to Earth, and that's pretty much all I know.

And I think some people who have been involved with the franchise previously have said meh about it.

You know what I mean?

Here we go.

It's a prequel set two years before the events of the 1979 film Alien, when the space vessel Maginaut crash lands on Earth, a young woman and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a discovery that puts them face to face with the planet's biggest threat.

I feel like there's a fork in the aliens franchise, and it was it was an early one.

Is it like a Bernstein's fork?

It's like, yeah, right.

It's a Mandela effect or whatever.

No, it's Alien and Aliens.

Or to be accurate, Alien and Alien 2, essentially.

Aliens.

Okay.

Aliens, James Cameron, was so different than Alien, Ridley Scott.

It just established it's like, yeah,

not everyone likes this franchise for the same reasons.

You know what I mean?

And this feels more like an Aliens,

an Alien 2

movie or a series.

It feels more in that vein.

Like, we're going to get some like shootouts and like, we're fighting aliens and we're going to, we got to win.

All right.

So so what's more important to you?

Um, that it that it be loyal to the source material or that it tell a good story.

What's the source material?

Uh alien?

I guess alien.

Okay.

The original one?

Because it, because it is, that's the one that it's working off if it's a prequel, right?

Is it's theoretically then leading toward alien.

Listen, this is pulled in the road.

This, this episode of this podcast, the theme is scale.

So it's either you got one alien and oh shit, you are in a ton of trouble because there's one here.

Or you got an infestation of aliens and it's like, let's blast a bunch of aliens, right?

It is weird that like a group of people can handle thousands of aliens, but like another group of people can't handle one of these goddamn things, right?

So I don't know.

I like either one.

I like either one.

I like the idea that, oh shit, an alien got on our ship.

We are completely fucked.

And I also like the let's stand in the middle of a field and go, but

yeah, I guess it's like you can have different types of zombie movies, right?

You can have running zombies and that's a different type of story than like the slow inexorable zombie yeah but it's still big groups of zombies either way right yeah it's like uh it's more like a zombie to a vampire like a one vampire you got a problem right you usually don't have like a well unless it's small town america and they're hot and then you've got all right well take it easy we're gonna spoilers yeah i guess vampires are starting to move more in the zombie direction right but you historically it was like one vampire what you got sexy zombies big fucking problem big fucking problem

that's your alien and then you got zombies.

That's your aliens.

Okay.

I like either.

I'll take my vampire alien or my zombie aliens.

All right.

And this seems like zombie aliens.

I'm all in on the zombie aliens.

Let's do it.

All right.

What about with zombie vampire aliens?

Zombie vampire.

That's the queen.

That's the queen.

And then you get your queen.

All right.

Then you get the big bad alien.

Yeah.

Got to get the guy get to the lead one, right?

And then you get the lead one.

You've solved the entire problem.

All right.

Starring in our brand new zombie alien vampire franchise, Dan Fedinishin and Jason Cummins.

thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

Good luck to you both.

I hope you're both in aliens and not an alien.

That seems like a way harder world to live in.

All right, well, that does it for us today, July 30th, 2025.

We will be back to talk tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.