Talk:Moment magnitude scale

message: Should the "Nuclear explosions" section be deleted?
While readers might be interested in the seismic equivalent of a nuclear explosion, the essence of the matter is, as stated: "" But as currently written the section gets there in rather round-about way, with a lot more detail than is necessary. Even worse, that section is effectively unsourced: the first note is from a Congressional report with no sources, and no attribution, and fails as a reliable source; the other two sources are 404 urls.
As this article has been written at technical level, it should have primary and secondary sources (perhaps textbooks), not blogs. And regardless of the level of the intended audience, it is probably sufficient to explain why the comparison is not meaningful, rather than work out a result only to throw it away.
I am inclined towards deletion. Comments? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:05, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I will ask colleagues in this sub-field of Seismology if they care about this section and can improve it. Ampuero (talk) 01:39, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite aside from poor structure and inadequate citation, I doubt that such a section is really germane. If someone wanted to know how a nuclear blast compares with an earthquake, perhaps that could be addressed at seismic moment. But I don't see it as being significant for moment magnitude scale. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:14, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Nuclear explosions"? 

message: In this article formulas are displayed using the <math> tag, which generates large and bolded LaTex output. For formulas on their own line this is standard and acceptable. However, the same markup has also been used in the text for the sole purpose of formatting the several magnitude scales. That is an undesirable use, as the large and bolded result (e.g.: M_w) is TOO LOUD, and rather intimidating. It is also unnecessary, as the  template is now available that provides a more reasonable result.  (And is easier to use, and provides other features including more consistent use across the encyclopedia.) I am therefore replacing in-line instances of M_w (and similar instances) with . ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:55, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formatting markup 

message: I propose removal of the Moment magnitude scale#Nuclear explosions section. I would argue that nuclear (or any other kind of) explosions and earthquakes are not directly comparable, and attempting to do so (without more explanation than is suitable here) is misleading. Distinguishing between explosions and quakes is certainly notable, but more for seismology generally; it has nothing to do with this scale. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:10, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I second your proposal. Ampuero (talk) 08:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

text: Agree that this should be done. Mikenorton (talk) 10:09, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Done! ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:09, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remove "Nuclear explosions" section? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: Best representations of Mw formula variants from different sources. These should be double-checked. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:50, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The bottom two are swapped (using this IASPEI source for equations 7a & 7b), but otherwise all checks out. Mikenorton (talk) 15:03, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, you're right. (That's why we check!) And I just unswitched them (SI gets the 9.1). Incidentally, what you cited is the 2013 Summary of the WG's recommendations, what I cited is the 2014 Information Sheet 3.3 ("The new IASPEI standards ..."). Which (except for the equation numbers) have identical wording. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:47, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table of Mw formula variants 

message: While trying to display the Hanks & Kanamori 1979 equation 7 (above) in <math> I have difficulty rendering their bold, non-italic "M". Perhaps someone could explain how to do that, but I got wondering (again): (a) Do we have to use <math>? (b) Is it really useful to display equations so BIG and BOLD? E.g., I am a lot less intimidated by math equations than the most readers, yet even I have often felt put off by Wikipedia pages with such powerful expositions of Math (rendered in <math>!). As an alternative, it seems to me that for most cases  is easier to use and displays just as well. Examples:
  
:(1)  M = {\frac{2}{3}}\log M_0 - 10.7
:(2)  
:(3) 
(1) is in standard <math> markup, with the incorrectly italicized M, and everything is bolded. (2) is in {math} markup, with a correct M, and a tad less bolding. This is also wrapped in  to make it the same size as (1). (3) is normal size {math} markup, and a lot less intimidating. And the most accurate representation of the original equation.
Wouldn't the less intimidating {math} format be better? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:03, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not something that bothers me too much personally, but I think that the {math} markup is probably better. Mikenorton (talk) 00:31, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to have been an issue years ago at MOS, though I have yet to dig through all that. As no one has objected, I have started replacing formulas here with {math} renditions, though I'll wrap them in  for now so there is less dissonance. For a while we will have both forms in this article, which might be useful for comparison. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:39, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  &lt;math> or {{tl|math}}? 

message: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Science and mathematics says that scientific terms like "local magnitude scale" are lowercase, unless they are derived from proper nouns. If the convention was to capitalize, it would be "Local Magnitude Scale", but "Local magnitude scale" is a weird combination of the two conventions. -- Beland (talk) 05:18, 23 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The MOS doesn't specifically mention any kind of "magnitude scale". It does mention Hermitian matrix and Lorentz transformation, which are parallel to this usage. And we do have cases of "G-R magnitude" (Gutenberg-Richter, ), "Nuttli magnitude" (), and "JMA magnitude" (). What makes "Local magnitude scale" odd is that the ordinary use of "Local" is not as proper noun. But a problem sometimes arises where "local" is used for a local (or regional) scale based on the modern  scale and calibrated with local parameters to have comparable results, or for a local scale that is similar but not so calibrated. The latter are sometimes distinguished with a lower-case letter "l": M. So we have we have a special case here, and I think an exception is warranted, so that readers will understand that "Local" is not a generic adjective, but refers to a specific scale.  ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:43, 12 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalization of "local magnitude scale" 

message: Greetings, J. Johnson! It seems two editors have now changed
:(a measure of the "work" done by the earthquake)
to
:(a measure of the work done by the earthquake)
This is not a quotation from any particular source, so quote marks aren't appropriate here. Yes, "work" is being used in a specific technical sense, but adding quote marks is not in general a way in English to indicate technical usage, and the presence of quote marks makes it sound like the article is weirdly skeptical about the concept of work. If it's necessary to explain to readers in what sense the word is meant beyond providing the link, it should be done explicitly. For example:
:(a measure of the work—force times distance—done by the earthquake)
-- Beland (talk) 01:17, 29 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not disputing that. What I disputed was removing the quotes from "Richter", as I explained in my edit summary. As you don't mention that, I presume we are okay on that point. If you think there should be some support for that in this article, sure, I can add a note, but it might be a bit before I can get to that. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:47, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, great. I only asked because you reverted the removal of quote marks from "work" twice, which might not have been intentional. I've removed them again; feel free to add an inline definition if you think it's warranted. -- Beland (talk) 19:47, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

text: I don't think there should be quote marks on "Richter" either; I was just taking issues one at a time. Richter magnitude scale is the name of the article on the ML scale, with no quote marks, and article titles are supposed to be the most common name used by general audiences. In general, quote marks are not used around the inventor of a thing that has been named after them, like we don't say: "Newtonian" physics. Apparently sometimes in less technical contexts the phrase "Richter scale" is applied to scales other than ML, possibly including this one. Adding quote marks does not disambiguate which scale is meant by a name which could be interpreted ambiguously; if this is a problem, using an unambiguous name or phrasing can clear it up. The current phrasing here actually doesn't make it clear that the Richter magnitude scale is the same as the  ML scale, and the phrase "in terms of" is rather confusing. I'll try a bit of a rewrite. -- Beland (talk) 19:47, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: (FTR, also discussed at Talk:Richter magnitude scale#Intro changes -- Beland (talk) 01:48, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quote marks for "work" and "Richter" 

message: I attempted to calculate the seismic magnitude from the released energy using the following Kanamori's definition  
: M_w = 2/3 \log E_s - 3.2 
Since there was no mention about the log base in the formula, I assumed that the it was e, or Euler's number.  
: M_w = 2/3 \log_{e}(E_s) - 3.2 
However, I found that my calculation results fell many orders of magnitude greater than what other online resources indicated.  
A post in socratic.org describes the relation between magnitude and energy. It claims that magnitude 8 equqals to 6.309573e+16 joules in energy. When I plug in this number in the formula above, I got 22.588952994535738 as the magnitude.  
I started to speculate that the base should have been 10 instead of e, and sure enough, when I swapped the base to 10, I got 7.999999979589213 as the final magnitude.  
: M_w = 2/3 \log_{10}(E_s) - 3.2 
Since the post on socratic.org doesn't cite anything, they could also be using a wrong formula, but either way, there should be a clarification on what the base is in all the formulae in the page.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Марсианский (talk • contribs) 07:59, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Logarithms in the formulae should include bases 

message: Please, can we pretend, that not all of us have skipped high school for good, and realise that logarithms of non-dimensionless quantities do not make sense? It is just stupid to write "log(E) = ... (in Joules)", a logarithm of an energy is undefined, basically this amounts to writing nonsense, and adding in brackets an instruction for how to deal with the nonsense. I realise this notation is often used in practice, but slang language is also used in practice yet is avoided on Wikipedia. The proper way would be to make the logarithm argument dimensionless by including the reference quantity there. The given example could be "log(E/1J) = ...". WikiPidi (talk) 14:02, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Logarithm of non-dimensionless quantities