Leo Laporte invited me to join him, Jason Calacanis, and Robert Scoble and his son Patrick for This Week in Tech yesterday, for a jovial and meandering discussion of news stories including the launch of a new Apple product that rhymes with EYE-SHMAD.
While we were rolling, the Los Angeles studio I was in literally started rolling. Earthquake. Hanging plants swayed violently, the walls wobbled like human flesh, and the "Love Waves" lasted a LONNNG time, rendering everyone in my building seasick and scared. No harm done, but it was intense, one of the longest shakers I can recall.
Leo, Scoble, and Jason didn't believe me at first, and went to Twitter to seek the truth! Was indeed a whopping 7.2, centered a couple hundred miles southeast in Mexico.
It is entirely possible that this moment inspired today's XKCD comic.
An interesting note about the type of seismic waves at work in the quake, from Wikipedia:
Love waves take a long time to dissipate due to the huge amount of energy that they contain. For this reason, they are most destructive within the immediate area of the focus or epicentre of an earthquake. They are what most people feel directly during an earthquake.
In the past, it was often thought that animals like cats and dogs could predict an earthquake before it happened. However, they are simply more sensitive to ground vibrations than humans and able to detect the subtler waves that precede Love waves, like the P-waves and the S-waves.
That might explain why animals in the room where I was were acting really squirrely right before the quake! I thought they were just annoyed by my Skype feedback.
TWIT #242 (select video or audio, as you prefer).
(Listen closely: right before the quake hits me, you can hear Leo whisper under his breath, "RELEASE THE KRAKENNNNNNN.")
