Given the timing and the magnitude the first estimates of casualties seem surprisingly low, I really hope that they are right but there are some major cities right in the middle of this. Ugh.
On the flip side, I’ve often found that ‘missing person’ reports can overcount the number of casualties. Again, when infrastructure is destroyed or when there’s a locally-devastating disaster it’s hard to get an actual account of who was actually in the area when disaster struck.
The situation is apparently quite grim with the broad scale of devastation. I hope technology can help guide and focus resources and rescuers as quickly as possible.
What an awful event.
What kind of infrastructure is in place that would survive to allow network connectivity for people to access socials to ask for help?
Infrastructure is fine.
At least enough of it is. I had no trouble calling people in the area minutes after it happened.
This one. On the previous large quake in the country, the networks collapsed and there was a huge public uproar because the network operators were claiming disaster readiness in their ads, even showing drone swarms flying to the disaster area to provide network services.
Maybe they actually hardened their networks but in general, the internet connectivity seems more resilient as the regular phone calling was restored much later than the internet connectivity last time.
This time there are many tweets and instagram stories of people posting text, selfies and videos from under the rubble, together with their address, their condition and the number of people in the house.
Here are a few examples:
https://twitter.com/lilalayd/status/1622604576019849216
https://twitter.com/Erhan_Dogan23/status/1622477226754064389
Just a couple of years ago, there was "amnesty" for buildings. My father in-law was bragging how his building, which did not have any inspection or permits during the construction, has gotten amnesty for a small fee and he could sell flats to others now..
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17465696/highrises-san-franc...
Lucky or good?
A real prediction should include exact time period, magnitude, and geographic area. And every prediction made must be documented. This lets you do two things: first it lets you clearly decide which predictions came true. Second, we can look at historic probabilities for the predicted quake and evaluate the chances of blind guessing being correct for that exact set of predictions.
In this particular instance, if you look at the predictions made on his twitter stream you'll find that he's clearly a quack who predicts stuff constantly. Not super surprising he got one right. EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.
Quacks like a duck.
> EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.
He is probably more knowledgeable than the average person and has access to latest data on earthquakes.
The person in question's area of "expertise" is claiming that when planets line up to form geometric shapes (e.g. when earth, uranus, and neptune form approximately an equilateral triangle) that this somehow affects seismic activity on our planet. The claim isn't that it's closeness of celestial objects causing this effect, mind you, it's the fact that the planets, however distant, happen to be in a configuration that resembles a geometric primitive.
It sets off a lot of my woo detectors. Here's their website: https://ssgeos.org/
The way to do this is to make the same prediction every day, and then delete the tweet when the prediction ends up not coming true. That way, when someone goes and looks at your profile, you'll have a 100% track record. (Or probably better, just a prediction mixed in with random pictures from your dog walks.)
It's the 10 %, 20 %, 50 % confidence level predictions you have to be a bit more sparing with!
And I forgot to mention this isn't my idea at all. This framing of what is a prediction was invented at USGS. Mea Culpa.
Also if you click through to to the organization he works for (not linking; no google juice for them), they're clearly quacks: they seem to believe that geometric shapes made by various planets in the solar system can be used to predict earthquakes. Note that they aren't even talking about gravitational effects (which are near zero, anyway), just the specific shapes. Complete nonsense.
I would bet that he got extremely lucky with his timing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7954673/
There are also studies suggesting that lunar cycles causes behaviour changes in humans, which could explain that. This doesn't seem that unreasonable given that the lunar cycle has been shown to affect the behaviour of animals and insects:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/do-full-moons-an...
I think this is another case of a blind squirrel finding a nut. It's bound to happen once in a while.
He's fishing for attention from the general public.
(Note that I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of person who makes tons of predictions on Twitter, and then deletes the tweets when they turn out to be incorrect, leaving only the correct ones.)
The sun completely dominates all other bodies in the solar system when it comes to gravitational effects on Earth (even the moon has less of an effect than the sun, despite its proximity). The Earth doesn't even notice this comet's existence, gravitationally speaking.
Register every day post a tweet about an earthquake tomorrow. If you're wrong, delete it. When you're right, you seem prophetic.
Then go to videos tab.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=tr&tl=en&text=deprem&op=tra...
It's completely and utterly headwrecking! Every time one happens you don't know whether it's going to build into a big one.
My heart goes out to them.
Why would Russian invade Ukraine for gas and oil, when all the gas and oil is already in Ukraine.
My spellchecker needs to be updated because it doesn’t want me writing “Turkiye.”
Some people in the government renamed the english spelling of my city into an unreadable alphabet soup. Not only they strongly insist the whole world to spell it this way, they also deem everyone who doesn't like it a traitor.
So, spelling matters. A lot. Unfortunately.
It's silly to think things don't change and rude to call people names they don't want to be called
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
And even then all major US publications use Turkey:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/powerful-earthquake-strikes-tur...
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/02/05/world/turkey-earthqu...
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/turkey-earthquake-l...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/people-dead-turkey-syria-after...
So no, even in the US, "Türkiye" is not used. Please don't try to dictate to Americans and other first language speakers how our language is used.
The only authority on the English language is popular usage.
Now, you or anyone else can certainly spell it "Türkiye" instead of "Turkey", but a) you risk confusing people (which you may or may not care about), and b) typing "ü" is awkward on many (most? all?) English-layout keyboards. I suppose you could also spell it "Turkiye", which I suppose is closer to what the Turkish government wants, but is still "incorrect".
At any rate, I personally see little reason to change unless popular usage overwhelmingly changes. At least in the US, popular usage (which influences dictionaries) dictates English spelling, not governments.
The title on HN actually gets it "wrong" by the way, as it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye.
Things can have more than one spelling or name, and the "best" one depends on context and personal preference. You can argue from Constantinople to Istanbul about this; but it all seems rather pointless. I wish people would just accept that other people have different preferences. This fits in the "color vs. colour" or "courgette vs. zucchini" category.
Whether Türkiye or Turkiye catches on and becomes the more common spelling? We'll see. I guess it will eventually, but it may take a while.
And why aren't they making the same demands of other languages anyway? How about Chinese? How exactly would their new name fit into Chinese, a language that doesn't use Latin characters at all? Not to mention all the other European languages that do?
Sorry, no, not outside a country, when dealing with foreign languages. Every language has different names for other countries, and they're frequently quite different from each other. Countries have no way of forcing foreign languages to adopt any particular name in those languages.
Anyway, back to your comment: this is a different issue. The pronoun thing is dealing with how people want themselves referred to in their own language, by people they know usually. The Turkey thing is about a government that wants its country called by a different name in a foreign language that it doesn't use.
The good thing is that Türkiye is pronounced almost like Turkey, so you're saying it almost right ;)
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_MLd6EsvwM [video][33 mins]
