Siderney_Mello_Pops Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 So, I was reading one of my favorite online news papers, News of the Weird, and I thought that this deserved a blog! There was recently a 6.6 earthquake in California right next to an egg farm. The egg farm produced about one million eggs daily. The total damage of the egg farm was only one cracked egg! Cool, right?
OrganoEnergy Posted February 12, 2011 Posted February 12, 2011 Very cool actually! =D Thanks for sharing, did not hear about that in Canada! Cheers!
Blauwefox Posted March 1, 2011 Posted March 1, 2011 Egg-shaped architecture for quake-proofing residence? 1
cutiekate Posted March 3, 2011 Posted March 3, 2011 It may be in the packaging process, then again i get a broken egg once in a while when i go to the grocery store. But then again, those truck rides that eggs go through can't be all that smooth. 1
jadef7 Posted March 3, 2011 Posted March 3, 2011 lol well are the eggs packaged or something, how did this happpen
Siderney_Mello_Pops Posted March 3, 2011 Author Posted March 3, 2011 lol well are the eggs packaged or something, how did this happpen I have no clue, but it's amazing that only one egg was cracked
PhDwannabe Posted March 3, 2011 Posted March 3, 2011 (edited) So, I was reading one of my favorite online news papers, News of the Weird, and I thought that this deserved a blog! There was recently a 6.6 earthquake in California right next to an egg farm. The egg farm produced about one million eggs daily. The total damage of the egg farm was only one cracked egg! Cool, right? Here's the actual story, easily Googled: The epicenter of California's January (1994) "Northridge" earthquake was five miles from the United States's then-largest egg farm, where hens had produced their usual 1 million eggs in the hours before the quake hit. The damage to the farm was a snapped water line, toppled empty egg pallets and a total of one broken egg. Said manager Robert Wagner to his employees, "We had a 6.6 earthquake that broke less eggs than you guys do when we're working." http://clatl.com/atl...ent?oid=2771961 OK, this is one of those claims that demand a little bit of scientific thinking and a little bit less, um, knee-jerk credulity. You don't really have to be an egg farmer to consider this reasonably. Just think to yourself: How would they even go about collecting this data?! So you're an egg farm. You put out a million eggs a day (or more than that--from the story, it's not clear how long the period is in which a million eggs are produced). Some percentage of those are going to be cracked eggs just because--they fall wrong, they're malformed, etc. Even if it's only one egg in a thousand, that's still a thousand cracked eggs a day. Of course, that's just a mean. There's going to be a lot of variance around that mean. Just because. Today it's 986. Tomorrow, 1055. (Oh, and whether or not machines or humans are doing the quality control, this thing called "cracked" isn't even a unitary construct--there's a more or less intact egg with a defined cracked seam running down it, and there's an egg broken in half with albumen falling out. Both of those are likely going to get tossed. So there's a range of egg appearances which would result in them getting tossed; they're not just "cracked/non-cracked" as if they were blue/red or something.) So on the day of the supposed earthquake, what do they do? Do they do some sort of count of all cracked eggs? So, suppose it's 1001. So what? That single egg is going to be well, well within the expected deviance from the mean. Not near enough, statistically, to claim that the earthquake had an effect. If you had a carton of eggs on your counter of known integrity, went through an earthquake, and saw one of them was cracked, you'd be in a pretty good space to make a reasonable inference about the earthquake cracking one of your eggs. But if you're putting out a million eggs. Continuously. The making of an inference about the earthquake cracking one egg, given the variances we can very charitably assume in a situation like this, is essentially impossible. So, guess what? It didn't happen. It's made up. Or it's sort of a joke. Or both. It is a fact that, nomologically, is unbelievably close to impossible to observe. A little bit of reason shows that very quickly. This is actually a really good example of how you can evaluate claims just by thinking about how they might be studied--I plan on using it with students! Edited March 3, 2011 by PhDwannabe 1
jadef7 Posted March 5, 2011 Posted March 5, 2011 i think thats just a headline so someone would read the article lol. man egss break all the time... you buy them already broken. im pretty sure with all the machines and proccess's the eggs go through, atleast one out of every 10,000 would break or something. nothings perfect llloll. and props to the above post ^^
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